Word: somali
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...political leaders in Beijing will force its military to respond in kind. Prior to the festivities in Qingdao this week, Admiral Gary Roughead, the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, visited his counterpart in Beijing, Vice Admiral Wu. There, the two talked up the two nation's cooperation in combating Somali pirates, but that wasn't the real point of the meeting. For years, the Pentagon has been frustrated by China's secrecy over its military budgeting and its intentions. The U.S. brass simply doesn't believe Beijing when it says its defense spending in 2008 was only $60 billion...
...scene from an action movie, but in the Gulf of Aden it is legal business practice. That's because the pirates are regarded as criminals, rather than terrorists, under U.S. or international law, which bans money going to individuals or organizations listed as terrorists. Unlike in, say, Iraq, Somali pirates appear to have little interest in killing hostages who are seized along with vessels, and the crews are usually released with the ships when the ransoms are paid. "Paying ransoms is not illegal," says Guillaume Bonnissent, a special risks underwriter for Hiscox Insurance Co. Ltd. in London, which writes about...
Here is how the system works, according to kidnap-and-ransom experts who agreed to talk to TIME: Within minutes of a vessel being seized by Somali pirates (or foreign oil workers being nabbed in Venezuela or Nigeria) the crew alerts its company headquarters. There, officials call the company's insurer, which then contracts a "response company" - private firms, like Control Risks in London or ASI Global in Houston, which are generally staffed by former military personnel experienced in hostage situations, and whose day rates can run to thousands of dollars, according to insurance brokers. Those companies begin negotiations with...
...negotiations which can drag on for weeks, the sum is agreed - usually more than $2 million for a container ship or oil tanker. Then the cash is air-dropped by private security companies that specialize in delivering ransoms to Somali pirates; insurance brokers say that's only about three companies. "The money is concealed in large floating plastic containers, and flown by air and dropped," says Mike Regester, an insurance broker for the London company Cooper Gay, which covers oil and shipping companies for kidnap and ransom. "Then the pirates go out and pick it up," he says...
...meantime, Somali piracy has metastasized into the country's only boom industry. Most of the pirates, observers say, are not former fishermen, but just poor folk seeking their fortune. Right now, they hold 18 cargo ships and some 300 sailors hostage - the work of a sophisticated and well-funded operation. A few pirates have offered testimony to the international press - a headline in Thursday's Times of London read, "They stole our lobsters: A Somali pirate tells his side of the story" - but Lehr and other Somali experts express their doubts. "Nowadays," Lehr says, "this sort of thing is just...