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Somali pirates have captured a freighter, a bulk carrier and a chemical tanker - despite a large foreign warship presence in the Gulf of Aden. Andrew Mwangura, from the East Africa Seafarers Assistance Programme, said the tanker was seized en route from Spain to Thailand but had been commandeered near the northern Somali coast. He said the vessel's last safe port of call was Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and that the crew included seamen from Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Philippines, Poland, Georgia, India and Turkey. 'No regulation' On Monday, Somali pirates captured a Greek-flagged bulk carrier transporting fertiliser, Mwangura said. The 52,000-tonne Navios Apollon was hijacked "en route from Tampa, Florida, USA, to Rozy, India," with a crew consisting of a Greek captain and 18 Filipinos. The ship was boarded by 10 men on speedboats in the Indian Ocean northeast of the Seychelles archipelago, the Greek coastguard said.
"The only realistic way that piracy can be stopped at sea ... is for those vessels to be pratically prepared to prevent piracy occurring, preventing them getting on board and preventing them from getting close to the vessel ... the navies cannot be there all the time. "You haven't got a blanket requirement by all shipping companies travelling through these dangerous regions or a regulation that requires them to adhere to security requirements." Earlier, pirates seized a Yemeni freighter and 15 crew members. The Al-Mahmoudia2 left the port of Aden, in Yemen, on December 18, the Yemeni authorities said on Monday, without revealing the nature of its cargo or destination. The Yemeni freighter and the UK-flagged chemical tanker were intercepted by pirates in the Gulf of Aden, key maritime bottleneck near the entrance to the Red Sea. Huge ransoms The two attacks in the Gulf were the first since August and came as international naval missions were trumpeting the results of a year-long effort to secure the area. Since the end of the summer monsoon season allowed pirate attacks to resume three months ago, Somali pirates had abandoned the Gulf of Aden for the wide open seas of the Indian Ocean, venturing as far as the Seychelles and beyond. Despite the increased international presence off Somalia's coastline - the longest in Africa - pirates raked in huge ransoms. On Sunday, pirates said they collected $3.5m for the release of the Chinese bulk carrier Dexinhai. The Singapore-flagged MV Kota Wajar was also released nearly 10 weeks after being hijacked, the European Union naval task force said on Monday. The amount of the ransom is not yet known. In captivity The latest captures and releases bring to at least 11 the number of ships currently held by pirates, together with close to 250 seamen, according to Ecoterra International, an environmentalist NGO monitoring maritime activity in the region. Among those in captivity are a British couple captured on October 22 while sailing their yacht to Tanzania.
The pair were briefly held on board the recently released MV Kota Wajar. Alongside the EU, the US, Nato and other national navies also deployed warships off the Somali coast in December 2008 to protect vessels and secure maritime routes in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Thanks to state-of-the-art technology, huge budgets and ever-improving co-ordination, the foreign armada has thwarted many attacks. They have also captured dozens of pirates, generally equipped with rudimentary skiffs, ladders and grapnels. But one out of four ships sailing through the danger zone still does not comply with international recommendations for safe passage, the navies say. | |||||||||||||||||||
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Thursday, 31 December 2009
Somali pirates hijack three ships
Israel 'approves W Bank structures'
| Israel 'approves W Bank structures' | |||
Israel has approved a plan to promote the construction of 14 structures in northern settlement of Kiryat Netafim in the occupied West Bank, the Haaretz newspaper says quoting a radio station. The defence ministry on Tuesday approved the Kiryat Netafim construction plans to legalise the construction of 14 structures, the paper quoted Army Radio as saying on Wednesday. Peace Now, a leftist human-rights group, petitioned Israel's High Court of Justice recently against the construction of 14 structures that were illegally built, some of them on Palestinian land without any authorisation. The paper described the decision as surprising following the government recent declaration of a 10-month settlement construction freeze. The paper quoted Yariv Oppenheimer, Peace Now's secretary-general, as telling Army Radio that while Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, calls for relaunching peace talks with the Palestinians, in practice he and Ehud Barak, the defence minister, are doing everything in their power to promote new construction plans in the West Bank and to authorise illegal construction in outposts and settlements. The new constructions followed the Israeli housing ministry's approval on Monday of plans to build almost 700 new apartments in three illegal Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. Monday's announcement invited construction companies to bid to build 198 housing units in Pisgat Zeev, 377 homes in Neve Yaakov and 117 dwellings in Har Homa. Palestinian officials and the US were quick to condemn Monday's move as incompatible with efforts to restart the stalled peace process. About 190,000 Israelis live in East Jerusalem and another 290,000 settlers currently live in the occupied West Bank. | |||
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Migrant workers flock to Mumbai
| Migrant workers flock to Mumbai | ||
Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers flock to India's biggest and richest city, Mumbai, every year. They come from all over the country to find stable work, but many remain on the street for years. Casey Kauffman followed one man seeking a living in the city, beginning with his two-day train ride to his first day looking for work. | ||
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Online gaming grows in China
| Online gaming grows in China | ||
The world's most populous nation also has the world's largest number of internet users. At least 338 million people use the internet in China, and more than half of them are online gamers. But with the gaming industry expanding, the government is finding it harder to maintain control. Melissa Chan reports. | ||
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Yemen in focus over US bomb plot
| Yemen in focus over US bomb plot | ||
The US is increasing its security assistance to Yemen following a failed airline bombing attempt in the US. A Yemen group calling itself al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed to be behind the attempted attack and Yemeni officials said security forces clashed with suspected al-Qaeda fighters on Wednesday in the western part of the country. Al Jazeera's Owen Fay reports. | ||
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A decade of digital advances
| A decade of digital advances | ||
| By Tarek Bazley | ||
In the fast-changing world of technology, one electronic component has been the star of what is being called the digital decade: memory. Back in 2000 it was expensive. This meant powerful computers and electronics were costly, just toys for the rich or tech-crazy. But as the cost of memory has come down, a new world of consumer electronics has become possible. The ipod – first launched in 2001 - made use of a tiny hard drive. It put hundreds of songs into the palm of one’s hand. Its popularity made it a hit and the device fast became a design icon. "If we look at the 1990s where technology and software was all about empowering business, with the likes of Oracle and Microsoft, I think that the last decade that we have had has all been about empowering the individual – particularly in the last couple of years. The emergence of mobile technology", Mark Casey, a London-based technology expert, says. Simple telephone handsets have fast incorporated music-players, video gaming, cameras and satellite positioning technology. In the developing world the advantage of a wire-free mobile network and the falling cost the mobile phone have seen sales rocket. African advances About 350 million Africans now have mobile phones and their uses continue to expand, even allowing Ugandan farmers to check the prices at market before they harvest their crops "People are hungry for market information. People are hungry to network and stay in touch with relatives in far-off places. People are hungry for selling or buying things as simple as it can be and there is no simpler way than just sending a code to your telecom operator for anything that you want” John Kibuuka, the owner of an Internet Café in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, says. Along with more powerful devices – a leap in connection speeds, the internet has fast become a place where we work, play, communicate and interact. It started with weblogs or blogs – but soon video-sharing sites like Youtube gained popularity. Whether used to share family moments – or circumvent government censorship – the internet has fast become a potent force. So what will the decade ahead likely bring? Pundits are predicting the continuing convergence of multimedia – songs, films, photo, maps and more - and the opportunity to buy or sell – all on one handset. Challenge ahead Breakthroughs in microscopic technology – or nanotechnology – make concepts like morphing handsets a possibility, allowing phones to change shape, colour and look to suit the owner. Those handsets, connected to wireless networks, will allow the owners to remotely control everything from their banking to the heating in their so-called "smart" homes. Advanced high-speed networks will allow "cloud" systems – where all files and programmes are stored and accessed from a remote server on the network, rather than one’s own computer – making computers lighter and cheaper. And it is this question of affordability that will open up all these technological developments to the developing world. A quarter of the world’s mobile users are already in China – and many millions more expected to sign on in the coming years. For any new technology to make it on a global level it will have to cross cultural and cost barriers. That is the challenge for the decade ahead. | ||
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The Bubble Decade
| The Bubble Decade | ||||||
| By Adhip Chaudhuri | ||||||
It is befitting that Time magazine made Bernard Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, as its “Man of the Year” for 2009. Surely, the decade of 2000-09 will go down in history as the decade of the forming and bursting of one of the biggest financial bubbles ever. Though this was the decade of 9/11, followed by the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the economic ups and downs may have put more of a signature on the decade 2000-09 than even those world-altering events. The decade of 2000-09 began with an economic smarting due to the dissipation of the personal computer-internet boom. The PC-internet boom was a major technological epoch covering more than the previous decade. It had brought about high and sustained economic growth to the US and most of the world. But by 2000, not only was the technological epoch over, but the financial bubble that had accompanied the real growth had also burst. As the US economy was floundering around aimlessly, the only policy issue being talked about was the Bush tax cuts, which once implemented transformed the US government’s annual budgets from surpluses to deficits. And then came 9/11. Wall Street crashed in the ensuing days, and there was a serious concern that the US would go into a downturn.
In response, the Fed [the US federal bank] under Alan Greenspan started creating money at an unusually high rate. This brought the Fed’s lending rate to commercial banks to 1% and sometimes even below. The Fed continued to pump money into the banking system for a long period of time, making it one of the longest binges of money creation in it's history. Where was all this liquidity supposed to go? As mentioned before, there was nothing happening in the real economy once the PC-internet boom was over. Most of this money found its way into the real estate sector, and by 2003 a real estate boom had begun in the US. The boom was not driven by construction as it was in China, India and Dubai, but mostly by Americans turning over the existing stock of housing among each other. This artificial boom was the cause of the financial crisis in the latter part of the decade. Real growth However, while financial booms were the order of the day in the US, and as we shall explain below also in western Europe, most of the rest of the world was enjoying real economic growth. China, which had already achieved 10 per cent growth rates of GDP in the1990s, continued its turbo-charged growth rates into the first decade of the 21st century. What was really new in this decade was that even India managed to raise its growth rates to about 7-8% per annum. While South Korea did not have the same high growth rates as China and India(having had its share in the 1990s), it recovered rapidly from the so-called East Asian Financial Crisis of 1998, and established itself as a leading manufacturer of high-end industrial products. The rest of East and South-East Asia also did very well, with Vietnam achieving high enough growth rates to herald itself as yet another successful newly emerging country from that region. Even Indonesia, the fourth-most populous country in the world, finally recovered from the east Asian crisis and achieved high growth rates. In Asia, only Japan stagnated, or worse still, declined. Good news came from many sources. In fulfillment of our hopes and wishes, sub-Saharan Africa started growing at an average annual rate of 5 per cent, outperforming their population growth rate of 2 per cent. The AIDS situation in Africa started improving thanks to the efforts of many: the WTO; the US and European governments; pharmaceutical companies from not only the West, but also from Brazil and India; private charitable trusts like the Bill Gates and the Clinton foundations; and several others. Latin America also poised itself for economic “take-off”. Brazil, under the new leadership of Lula, laid the foundation for the latest economic miracle -- the unfolding of which we are witnessing now, and will most definitely continue into years to come. The Middle East, especially the oil and natural gas exporting countries, performed remarkably well too. Qatar, for instance, became one of the richest countries in the world. It also became evident that the Russian economy’s performance was also tied to the price of oil.
The speculators in the oil futures were the same entities who were betting in the real estate markets -- Goldman Sachs, for example. The insane rise in the price of oil did some real damage to the world economy. The precipitous rise in the cost of jet fuel bode disasters for many airlines companies. In the US, this artificial rise in the price of oil put the last nail in the coffin of General Motors, which had mistakenly bet on gas guzzlers like many models of SUVs and the unforgettable, “in your face,” Hummer. However, the speculative mania of the last decade took the strongest hold in Dubai. The emirate came to represent the worst aspects of economic activities which took inordinate risks with cheap money. Regional economic integrations made a lot of news in the last decade. The European Union (EU) kept on expanding in membership, but more importantly, established a common currency—the euro. The euro was introduced at the beginning of the decade at a denomination at par with the dollar, but can now buy one-and-a-half dollars. The euro has indeed become a currency on par with the British pound and the Japanese yen for providing the world with an alternative to US dollar. The EU also introduced free internal movement of labour and capital which integrated the economies of the member countries even more in the last decade -- an integration which bore fruit in a strong co-operation between France, Germany, and the United Kingdom that withstood the financial crisis. Countries like Iceland, which stayed away from the EU on a rationale of “small is beautiful,” found out the virtue of being a part of the union when it went bankrupt in 2008. Multilateral gains Multilateralism did not do so badly either. Even though the Doha Round has all but collapsed, there were notable achievements in multilateral agreements. Meeting in Cancun in 2003 under the auspices of the Doha Round, the WTO allowed many poor African countries to import affordable generics to cure AIDS by extending waivers to circumvent international patent agreements. But at the same time, the US and the EU failed to lower agricultural subsidies which they had promised to do by the end of the Uruguay round in 1994. Four African countries, Benin, Burkina-Fasso, Mali, and Zambia, known as the ‘Cotton-4’, came to symbolise the hardships of the African farmers who could have improved their standards of living under free trade. But free trade made progress in the past decade, too. China joined the WTO starting in 2001, and has dramatically changed its policies toward protecting the intellectual property of foreign firms. The US has formally abolished the massive garment import quota system called the Multi Fiber Agreement. India has joined the international patenting system, and both Brazil and India have lowered tariffs on industrial goods as they had promised under the Uruguay Round. Surely the biggest multilateral achievement of the decade is the Copenhagen Accord where the US with the help of BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) pulled out a victory from the jaws of defeat, or more aptly, something from nothing. A nice way to end the decade! Saving United States Lastly, we come to the US where we started. The financial crisis has caused a deep recession in the US and while there are signs that the recession is bottoming out, by the time the US regains full employment and thereby starts producing its potential GDP, it could be three years all told. During the same time period China will have grown at a compound rate of 40 per cent! With all their shenanigans, the financial sector did create the perfect bubble, because when it burst it became clear that it was full of only air. The Dow Jones was at 10,000 in the year 2000, it is at 10,500 now. The latest news is that housing prices have fallen back to their pre-mania levels. Finally, the hourly wage rate in the US, allowing for inflation, had hardly changed during the last decade. But getting back to the low levels of unemployment and the higher growth rates of the GDP of 2000 will take some time, when it does happen we should thank Bernanke, the Fed chairman. Unlike during the Great Depression when the Fed sat on its hands, it is the activism of the Fed during 2009 which has saved the US. Adhip Chaudhuri is a professor of international economics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. |
