Word: coasts
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...reversed anytime soon. While Singaporean and Malaysian authorities do their best to police their parts of the strait, in Indonesian waters pirates roam virtually unchecked, using the hundreds of islands and bays as bases and sanctuaries. Indonesia's navy, says a senior officer based on Sumatra's east coast, is "poorly paid, poorly equipped and poorly motivated. The government can't even pay our wages on time or in full, and often we can't go out on patrol anyway because we don't have enough money for fuel. The pirates have faster boats, plenty of cash and better intelligence...
...tanker is difficult?crude oil does not catch fire easily, for example?but it's not too hard to blast a hole in one so that its cargo is released, creating a maritime disaster. There's also the economic impact. When the oil tanker Limburg was attacked off the coast of Yemen in October 2002, insurance costs for calls to the country's ports rose by some $150,000 per ship. Such a situation would force shipping companies to make long detours around the strait, notes Dominic Armstrong, research chief for the London-based security firm Aegis Defence Services...
...director of the IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre. The cause is an outbreak of kidnapping for ransom by pirates in the strait, which most recently saw four sailors spirited away from a tugboat in October (two of the men are still missing). In the worst such incident, off the coast of northern Sumatra, four crew members were killed in January after negotiations between their kidnappers and the ship's owners broke down. "We have to do something about the kidnappings before they spiral out of control," says Choong...
...penalty for smoking pot in Alabama is up to 99 years in prison. But that hasn't stopped the Cotton State--along with Mississippi and Georgia--from siding with California in its battle to keep medical marijuana legal. All three filed briefs supporting Left Coast medipot users before the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on Nov. 29 on whether patients can cultivate and possess physician-prescribed cannabis. "We happen to believe California's medical-marijuana policy is misguided," says Alabama solicitor general Kevin Newsom. "But this isn't about the drug war. It's about states' rights...
Libyans' friendliness to Americans is even clearer hundreds of miles down the coast at the Essider Marine Terminal, from which oil is shipped by the government-owned Waha Oil Co. The company took over the operation from U.S. companies in 1986, when sanctions drove out the Oasis Group, a combination of Amerada Hess, Marathon Oil and Conoco. But a handful of American citizens are still at work in the facility and have been throughout the decades of sanctions, in violation of U.S. laws. "Basically, we never left," says Conrad B. Cazalas, 58, an electrician from Corpus Christi, Texas, sitting...