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Friday, May 13, 2011

Canadian independent Africa Oil has penned a letter of intent with a mystery drilling outfit in advanced of a planned exploration well in Somalia.

The National Court also said that those convicted were Cabdiweli Cabdullahi and Raageggesey Hassan Aji.

The Alakrana tuna boat with 36 crew was seized off Somalia in October 2009 and held for 47 days.

A reported $US3.3 million ($A3.02 million) ransom was paid. Spain says it does not pay ransoms but in the Alakrana case, the government said earlier it did what it had to do.

Spanish commandos captured the men as they sailed away from the boat during the hijacking.

Source: Herald Sun

“We are preparing for the Somaliland shilling to be used all over Somaliland,” Central Bank of Somaliland Governor Abdi Dirir Abdi said in an interview on April 24 in Hargeisa, the capital. Abdi said the rate at which the currency will be exchanged has yet to be determined.

Somaliland, a former British colony, declared independence in 1991, following the ouster of former Somali dictator Mohammed Siad Barre. No sovereign state has formally recognized the region as independent.

The Somaliland shilling was introduced in October 1994, according to the government’s website. At the end of 2008, the currency was valued at 7,500 per dollar, it said. The Somali shilling is currently valued at 1,601 against the U.S. currency according to Bloomberg data.

The central bank of Somaliland expects lawmakers to enact a draft banking law by June enabling commercial lenders to extend credit to borrowers for the first time, Abdi said last month. Somaliland is in talks with Banque pour le Commerce et l’Industrie, based in neighboring Djibouti, and two other lenders to grant them banking licenses, Abdi said. The nation of 3.5 million people currently has no banks.

Bloolmberg

The reinstatement of the worker, Derek Fenton of Bloomingdale, N.J., was announced on Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, which sued the transportation corporation on his behalf, arguing that his actions were protected by the First Amendment. The reinstatement was part of a settlement agreement, filed this week in Federal District Court in Newark, in which Mr. Fenton dropped his suit in exchange for getting his job back.

“In America, we have the right to burn all kinds of things — letters, flags, books, Bibles and Korans,” Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the New Jersey group, said Friday.

Ms. Jacobs said the case should “serve as a reminder to our leaders that they can’t punish and censor political expression based on their own emotional reactions or sense of morality.”

Mr. Fenton, 40, was fired two days after the demonstration, accused of violating New Jersey Transit’s employee code of ethics by tearing pages from a copy of the Koran and igniting them with a cigarette lighter to protest plans for building a Muslim community center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero. He was participating in a protest staged by about 2,000 people near the proposed site of the center, 51 Park Place, during a day of memorial and prayer services marking the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

After the civil liberties union sued in February, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey told reporters that he supported Mr. Fenton’s dismissal. “That kind of intolerance is something I think is unacceptable,” he said. “So I don’t have any problem with him being fired. You’ve got to make decisions in this job. I made one.”

Mr. Christie said, however, that he was unaware of the decision to fire Mr. Fenton until after it was made.

A spokesman for the governor’s office did not return several calls and messages on Friday seeking comment. A spokesman for New Jersey Transit referred questions about the case to the state attorney general’s office, but a spokesman there did not return repeated calls.

Frank L. Corrado, a lawyer who represented Mr. Fenton with a co-counsel, Rubin Sinins, both working pro bono, said he did not know why Mr. Fenton felt so strongly about the proposed Muslim center, or whether his action was prompted by the last-minute decision of a pastor, Terry Jones, to scrap plans to burn a Koran that day outside his Florida church.

Ms. Jacobs said of Mr. Fenton, “He just seemed to be angry about the community center being too close to ground zero.” Opponents of the center described the proposed building as an assertion of Islamic “triumphalism.”

At Mr. Fenton’s request, his lawyers obtained an assurance in the settlement agreement that he would not have to attend extra sessions of cultural “sensitivity training” upon his return to work. “He did not want to have to do that,” Mr. Corrado said, “And we felt that thought control should not be the employer’s business here.”

The settlement was reported on Friday by The Star-Ledger of Newark.

Mr. Fenton, an 11-year veteran of New Jersey Transit who was a commuter train conductor before assuming duties as an $86,000-a-year supervisor several years ago, will still undergo “whatever diversity education is required from time to time of every employee,” Mr. Corrado said. “He just won’t get special treatment.”

The code of ethics Mr. Fenton was cited for violating forbids employees from “bringing disrepute” on the agency, Mr. Corrado said. But during the demonstration, Mr. Fenton was off duty and wore nothing to indicate that he worked for the transit agency, the lawyer added.

Pamela Geller, a blogger who was instrumental in organizing the Sept. 11 demonstration, said she did not know Mr. Fenton or condone his actions. “I wouldn’t do what he did, myself; it’s disrespectful,” she said. “But it’s free speech.”

Ibrahim Hooper, the spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights advocacy group, said his organization had not sought Mr. Fenton’s firing. “We have always believed,” he said, “that somebody should not be punished in their employment for actions taken — no matter how reprehensible — in their private lives.”

The NY Times

www.youtube.com/watch?v=51jbXZhwwh8

http://tvuniversal.tv/NS/vidID/1532

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.

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