Hargeisa, Somaliland (CNN) — “We want money,” say the group of inmates with a smile. Somaliland’s highest security prison hasn’t dampened the hustling spirit of its pirate prisoners. My government handler rolls his eyes. They do this a lot, he explains.

I was told there are over 40 convicted pirates in this facility in Hargeisa, capital of the tiny breakaway east African state. The authorities say the coast guard has caught close to 100 in the past two years.

Prison officials tell me that most of the convicts ventured into Somaliland waters from Puntland, a haven for pirates just down the north Somalia coastline. They rarely hijack ships in Somaliland waters, because the coast guard has a reputation for catching them, officials told me. But the pirates often run out of fuel and are forced to come into the Somaliland port town of Berbera.

The first group of pirates brought out to speak with me refuse to talk without money, having decided on a union of sorts. Mohammed Ali Orsamen then comes down the corridor, chancing his luck for some cash but still keen to speak even after I refuse payment. He is serving fifteen years for piracy.

“I am not a pirate, I am a fisherman,” he begins. They all say that, smiles my government minder. Ali Orsamen does however have strong opinions on piracy. “The Westerners are doing illegal fishing and arresting fishermen and accusing them of being pirates,” he repeats several times.

To Ali Orsamen, arresting so-called pirates was an excuse for Western fishing companies to take over Somalia’s fishing territory.

“Because of the collapse of the Somali government there is no patrolling of our territories and that is why there is illegal fishing and those Westerners are entering our territories, and those pirates are only hijacking ships in Somali waters,” he says. “Please tell the international community to stay away from Somali waters. If we hijack one Western ship and we kill one Westerner, then they kill ten of us.”

Ali Orsamen and his fellow inmates are at the mercy of a new and extremely strict judicial system in Somaliland. Pirates in the past used to get five to eight years here, now with the world struggling to combat a major pirate plague in the region, they are being sentenced from 15 to 20 years each.

Osman Rahim, Berbera’s regional court judge, presides over an historic court house in Berbera, just down the dusty street from the old prison. When suspected pirates are caught by the coast guard, this is where they end up before being sentenced and transferred to Hargeisa’s high security facility.

Shortly before my visit, a group of suspected pirates had been caught and taken to Berbera prison, causing much excitement amongst officials. Their boat had been marked by a coalition warship as a pirate vessel, said officials, and their leader was a well-known pirate boss.

The man in question, Omar Abdullah Abdi, disagrees. “We were arrested doing our work – fishing. I don’t know why we were arrested,” he says. The group of six had elected him their spokesman, and none of the others are keen to disagree with his version of events. Pointing out that his boat was marked, Abdi says: “We have not been charged in court yet. We have nothing to do with these charges.”

Rahim explains that Somaliland is taking a very tough stance against piracy, in part to discourage others from following the practice. “Now when they hear that they can get 20 years and 15 years, everybody is stunned,” he adds, “and not going to the sea. That’s why we are sentencing them for a long time – to restrict them.”

With millions of dollars to be made by pirates in hijacking ships for ransom, such risks may seem small in comparison. The hope in Berbera, however, is that these waters gain a reputation for a fierce rule of law: keeping pirates at bay.

More at CNN

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqf4bWGvd08

Wearing a green safari hat, dark glasses and a black jacket, Gaddafi pumped his fists in the air and waved as people chased his convoy of vehicles through the streets.

A screen caption said the trip had taken place earlier when, according to state-run Al-Libiya TV, Tripoli was under Nato air attack.

Four blasts were reportedly heard and plumes of smoke were seen rising from the south-east of the city.

Government spokesman in Tripoli, Mussa Ibrahim said: ‘A few civilians were killed here in Tripoli. I know that three men who were walking by a checkpoint were killed immediately in the south of Tripoli.’

He added that two men were killed in Sirte, 450 km east of Tripoli, suggesting there had been air strikes there as well, without giving details.

Meanwhile, Libyan rebels begged for more Nato air strikes, saying government artillery had killed 23 civilians, mostly women and children, in besieged Misrata.

They warned of a massacre in the city.

Source

metro.co.uk

With clouds overhead in the salty air, irritable Pacific waves swelled to up to four feet. Perfect conditions, in other words, for the Navy to fry a small boat with a laser beam — a major step toward its futuristic arsenal of ray guns.

Researchers mounted the Maritime Laser Demonstrator, a solid-state laser, aboard the USS Paul Foster, a decommissioned destroyer. Off the central California coast near San Nicholas Island on Wednesday, the laser fired a 15-kilowatt beam at an inflatable motorboat a mile away as both ships moved through the sea. As the above video shows, there was a flash on the boat’s outboard engines, igniting both of them in seconds, and leaving the ship dead in the choppy waters.

All previous tests of the laser have come on land — steady, steady land — aside from an October test of the targeting systems. But for the first time, the Office of Naval Research has proven that its laser can operate in a “no-kidding maritime environment,” says its proud director, Rear Adm. Nevin Carr.

“I spent my life at sea,” Carr says in an interview with Danger Room, “and I never thought we’d see this kind of progress this quickly, where we’re approaching a decision of when we can put laser weapons on ships.”

Fewer than three years after the Navy awarded Northrop Grumman a contract worth up to $98 million to build the Maritime Laser Demonstrator, it’s proven able to cause “catastrophic failure” on a moving target at sea the first time out, says Quentin Saulter, one of ONR’s top laser gurus.

“When we were doing the shot and the engine went, there was elation in the control room,” he says. “It’s a big step, a proof of principle for directed energy weapons.”

The Navy hopes that by the next decade, solid state lasers — which generate powerful beams of light by running electrons through crystals or glass — will be aboard its surface ships, disabling enemy vessels and eventually burning incoming missiles out of the sky. That latter goal will take at least 100 kilowatts of power.

But a beam in the tens of kilowatts, ONR proved this week, is deadly, accurate and, Carr says, “can be operated in existing power levels and cooling levels on ships today.”

Solid state lasers are just the beginning. The Navy’s also working on a much more powerful Free Electron Laser weapon thanks to ONR’s research. That laser works across multiple wavelengths, compensating for debris in the sea air, to cut through 20 feet of steel per second once it gets up to megawatt class. Its electron injectors are ahead of schedule and ONR expects it to be ready in the 2020s, though after its solid state cousins are operative.

Next up will be to “develop the tactics, the techniques, the procedures and the safety procedures that sailors are going need to develop” to wield laser weapons, Carr says. And then it’s time to scale up the laser’s power.

“This is an important data point,” the admiral says, “but I still want the Megawatt death ray.”

Update: Corrected the strength of the megawatt-class FEL after an earlier miscommunication with the Office of Naval Research.

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Source

wired.com

The question as to why US-led NATO forces are determined to engineer a regime change in Libya is now becoming clear. Whilst media pundits and political experts still argue over whether the Libyan rebel gangs are actually being backed and directed by US, UK and Israel intelligence agencies, broader long-range Western policy objectives for Libya are being completely ignored.

One only has to read the strategic briefings in U.S. AFRICOM documents to realise the true endgame in Libya: the control of valuable resources and the eviction of China from North Africa.

When the US formed AFRICOM in 2007, some 49 countries signed on to the US military charter for Africa but one country refused: Libya. Such a treacherous act by Libya’s leader Moummar Qaddafi would only sow the seeds for a future conflict down the road in 2011.

NATO: It’s been reduced to a mere private security force for western corporate interests.

According to Dr Paul Craig Roberts, the situation with Qaddafi is much different than the other recent protests in the Arab world. “Why is NATO there?” has become to real question, says Roberts, who fears that risky involvement stemming from American influence could lead to catastrophic breaking point in Libya.

WHY WE ARE IN LIBYA: a revealing interview with Dr Paul Craig Roberts.

CHINESE INTERESTS IN LIBYA

According to Bejing’s Ministry of Commerce, China’s current contracts in Libya number no less than 50 large projects involving a contracts in excess of 18 billion USD. What is even more revealing here is that due to the recent instability in the North African region, China’s investments have taken a serious hit. The recent political turmoil in the region has caused China’s foreign contracted projects to drop with new contracts amounting to $ 3,470,000,000, down 53.2%. Among them, the amount of new contracts in Libya, down by 45.3%, 13.9% less turnover; to Algeria, the amount of the contract fell 97.1%, turnover decreased by 10.7% – all within the first 2 months of this year.

In addition to the numerous Chinese investments in Libya, the North African nation has also recently completed one of the most expensive and advance water works projects in world history- Libya’s Great Man Made River. A 30 year venture, finished only last year, gives Libya the potential for an agricultural and economic boom that would certainly mean trouble for competing agri-markets in neighbouring Israel and Egypt. It could also transform Libya into the emerging “bread basket” of Africa. With global food prices on the rise, and Libya possessing a stable currency and cheap domestic energy supply, it doesn’t take an economic genius to see what role Libya could play in the global market place.

VALUABLE ASSET: Libya’s Great Man Made River.

Central to AFRICOM’s strategic goals is to confront the increasing Chinese influence on the continent. One AFRICOM study suggests that China will eventually dispatch troops to Africa to defend its interests there:

“Now China has achieved a stage of economic development which requires endless supplies of African raw materials and has started to develop the capacity to exercise influence in most corners of the globe. The extrapolation of history predicts that distrust and uncertainty will inevitably lead the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to Africa in staggering numbers…”

So we have a vocalised fear on the part of US military planners, of a military confrontation with China… in Africa. Today it’s Libya, but tomorrow, it will be in Sudan. Does this sound a little familiar? Well, it should…

THE NEW COLD WAR WITH CHINA

What this data does show clearly is that the strategic policy objectives outlined in Washington’s AFRICOM, particularly those ones designed to confront and minimise China’s economic interest in Africa, are working well as a result of instability in the region. In effect, what we are witnessing here is the dawn of a new Cold War between the US-EURO powers and China. This new cold war will feature many of the same elements of the long and protracted US-USSR face-off we saw in the second half of the 20th century. It will take place off shore, in places like Africa, South America, Central Asia and through old flashpoints like Korea and the Middle East.

AFRICOM: outlining America’s new military playground.

What makes this new cold war much deeper and more subtle than the previous one, is that it will not be cloaked in a popular ideology like ‘Capitalism vs Communism’. This new war is all about one thing: natural resources. The capture and control of the world’s remaining resources and energy supplies will be the theme which will govern- and literally fuel, all major conflicts in the 21st century. It will be fought through numerous proxies, and on far-flung pitches across the globe but it will never be spoken of by the White House Press Secretary or the Foreign Office in Downing Street.

Early reports out of Libya confirm that “Rebels” are being backed and directed by Western intelligence agencies.

Read more at Info Wars

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMKGv3KFqKo

The National Transportation Safety Board plans to investigate what happened Monday night when a huge Air France A380 jet clipped a smaller aircraft at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, CNN reported Tuesday. No one was reported injured in the incident.

The A380, the world’s biggest passenger jet, collided with the tail of a Delta Connection Comair Bombardier CRJ-700 while taxiing to the runway for takeoff, CNN said. The Delta plane had earlier arrived from Boston.

CNN correspondent Jim Bittermann, who was on the Air France flight headed to Paris, said that he felt a slight rumble as his plane was moving on the ground Monday at about 8:15 p.m. The pilot then stopped the aircraft, and eventually fire department crews surrounded it and the other plane, CNN reported.

Both planes sustained some damage.

The much-heralded A380, sporting wings almost as long as a football field, has proven to be a mixed blessing for some airports, which have had to adapt to its heft. Reporting in 2009, Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Weikel wrote of LAX:

“Service roads, taxiways and runways must be closed to airfield trucks, cars and other commercial aircraft as the world’s largest passenger plane — with wings almost as long as a football field — arrives, departs and taxis with an official escort of operations vehicles.

“The plane is so immense that air traffic controllers give it priority so it doesn’t have to wait for takeoff at the end of the airport’s southern runways in cloudy or foggy weather because it can disrupt radio signals from the airport’s instrument landing system.”

________

LA Times

Egypt‘s former president, Hosni Mubarak, has been detained as authorities in the country investigate allegations of corruption and abuse of his authority.

His detention comes after the 82-year-old reportedly suffered a heart attack while being questioned on Tuesday night.

Mubarak’s two sons, Gamal and Alaa, have also been detained after being questioned over corruption claims into the early hours of Wednesday morning.

A statement from the prosecutor general’s office announcing Mubarak’s detention said the ongoing investigation was into allegations of corruption, the squandering of public funds, and the abuse of authority for personal gain.

“The prosecutor general orders the detention of former president Hosni Mubarak and his sons Gamal and Alaa for 15 days pending investigation after the prosecutor general presented them with the current state of its ongoing investigations,” it said.

Egypt’s interim government issued subpoenas to Mubarak and his sons over the weekend, compelling them to testify in court over claims that they illicitly acquired wealth and abused their power during the former president’s reign.

The announcement of their detention came just hours after Mubarak was hospitalised with heart problems in Sharm el-Sheikh. He has been in internal exile in the Red Sea resort since Egypt’s mass uprising earlier this year.

In a sign his health may not be in immediate danger, justice minister Mohammed el-Guindi said questioning of the former president continued in hospital.

While the ex-president was in hospital – where he is expected to remain for the period of his detention – his sons were taken for questioning to a local court by prosecutors from Cairo.

Gamal Mubarak, his younger son, was a top official in the ruling party and was widely seen as being groomed to succeed his father before 18 days of popular protests brought down the regime on 11 February.

An angry crowd of 2,000 people gathered outside and demanded the two be arrested.

Then, in the early hours of the morning, the head of provincial security in the South Sinai told the crowd that Gamal and his businessman brother Alaa would be detained.

“Brothers, whatever you wanted, you have got … 15 days,” said Major General Mohammed el-Khatib, as the crowd erupted in cheers.

As a police van with drawn curtains took away the two brothers, the crowd pelted it with water bottles, stones and their shoes, a sign of disrespect in the Arab world.

About 800 people are estimated to have been killed during the protests as police opened fire and cracked down on the crowds. Authorities are now investigating government officials for their role in ordering the violence.

Gamal is also believed to be the architect of Egypt’s privatisation program and economic liberalisation, which has brought in billions in foreign investment but has also widened the gap between rich and poor.

Many of his close associates were billionaires and held top positions in the ruling party and the government.

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Source guardian.co.uk

The former Libyan Foreign Minister Mussa kussa has warned against a civil war in his country. Kussa said in his first public statement with the British TV channel BBC, all parties in Libya must prevent a civil war. If not Libya would be a new Somalia.

Kussa further stated that he had no more contact with the regime of Muammar al Gaddafi in Tripoli. The unit of Libya should not be touched. Libya should not be divided in any case in one of Gaddafi and another of the rebel-controlled part. A solution had to be done through a democratic dialogue. The ex-minister urged the United Nations to help the Libyan people with relief supplies.

Mussa kussa is considered one of the most distinguished minds of the Gaddafi regime. He is in London at a hidden place. The interview was held with the British TV channel BBC. His prepared statement was delivered in Arabic. The speech should be a message to the Libyan people.

The police detained two fully veiled women at a small protest outside the Notre Dame cathedral in central Paris, where demonstrators were easily outnumbered by police officers and journalists. But it was not clear whether the women had been held under laws forbidding unauthorized demonstrations.

The new law, approved last year, has been controversial from the start, raising questions about France’s relationship with its Muslim minority of five to six million — Western Europe’s largest — at a time when right-wing and anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise.

Just days ago France‘s governing party pressed ahead with a contentious public debate on the nature of its secularist philosophy and the challenges of Islam. The discussion drew criticism across a broad front including government officials, religious leaders, the Socialist opposition and the far-right National Front.

According to the French authorities, fewer than 2,000 women in France wear the full-face veil, known as a niqab, but the ban has touched nerves, prompting accusations that it stigmatizes one gender among one religious minority in a land that prides itself on the values enshrined in its national motto of liberty, equality and fraternity.

The ban also applies to foreigners visiting France. The law forbids clothing intended to hide the face in public spaces such as streets, markets, private business, government buildings and public transportation. Violators may be punished with a fine of 150 euros, equivalent to $215. But people forcing others to cover their faces are subject to much stiffer punishments, including a maximum 12 months in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros, equivalent to more than $42,000, or twice that amount if the person forced to cover their face is a minor.

News reports said a Muslim property dealer had set aside a fund of some $2.8 million to help women fight the ban while a woman wearing a niqab planned to travel by train from Avignon in southern France to Paris in defiance of the prohibition.

Rachid Nekkaz, the property developer who called for the protest at the cathedral, said in a Webcast quoted by Reuters: “I am calling on all free women who so wish to wear the veil in the street and engage in civil disobedience.”

Police officers have been told by their superiors that they may not forcibly remove veils, but offenders may be taken to police stations to have their identities confirmed.

In some public debate, the niqab has been conflated with the full-body covering called a burqa, which is very rare in France. As debate flared over the law last year, Jean-François Copé, the parliamentary leader of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, defended the bill on the grounds of public security and as an important assertion of French identity and values. Mr. Sarkozy himself has said, “The burqa is not welcome in France because it is contrary to our values and contrary to the ideals we have of a woman’s dignity.”

When the law was approved by the lower house of Parliament last year, there was only one opposing vote, cast by Daniel Garrigue, an opponent of President Sarkozy, who said: “To fight an extremist behavior, we risk slipping toward a totalitarian society.”

The New York Times

Since then, residents have left their homes, and the “no man land” has been out of touch with the rest of the world.

A Japanese journalist, Tetsuo Jimbo, ventured through the evacuation zone last Sunday, and filed the following video report.

He says that, inside the evacuation zone, homes,building, roads and bridges, which were torn down by Tsunami, are left completely untouched, and the herd of cattle and pet dogs, left behind by the owners, wonders around the town while the radiation level remains far beyond legal limits.