Pop sensation, Britney Spears, is well known for her music, but perhaps not as well known for her ability to ward off Somali Pirates. According to a navy officer stationed off the coast of Somali, Spears’s songs are played to send pirates fleeing in the other direction. Piracy is a major concern for tankers
Read morePiracy (and more recently terrorism) remains a thorn in the side of modern shipping. With incidents in the Indian Ocean dwindling to almost nothing, focus has shifted during the past 12 months back on to West Africa, where there has been an increase in hijackings and, in particular, in Extended Duration Robberies (“EDR”) involving
Read moreShippers, traders and researchers monitoring global vessel traffic in the past six months might have seen an imaginary U.S. ferry sail to North Korea, a tugboat go from the Mississippi River to a Dallas lake in two minutes and the path of a fake Italian yacht spelling out PWNED — hacker slang for “defeated.”
Read moreBEIRUT: The bodies of 33 Lebanese who drowned off the Indonesian coast in a tragic boat accident last month will be returned to Lebanon Thursday, a source at Beirut’s Airport told The Daily Star Tuesday. The bodies will arrive at Rafik Hariri’s International Airport at 12:30 p.m., the source said. The National News Agency
Read moreThe biennial Regional Conference of the Global Initiative for West, Central and Southern Africa (GI WACAF Project) will be held from the 4 to 8 November, in Swakopmund, Namibia, and will be jointly organized by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), IPIECA (the global oil and gas industry association for environmental and social issues), and
Read moreSouth Korean forces conduct a military drill on disputed islands at the heart of a row with Japan. This outcrop may be small but it’s been the cause of a long-running bitter dispute between the two nations, that has seriously damaged ties. Both countries lay claims to the islands known as Dokdo in Korean
Read moreAn action packed scene from Sony Pictures’ latest epic ‘Captain Phillips’, starring Tom Hanks. SOMALI pirates are in the news again. Kidnappings, ship hijacks, a run-in with the Australian navy and a Tom Hanks movie have put them back in the spotlight. But, despite several high profile incidents off the Horn of Africa, the
Read more