Somalia may have a new government, but it can't seem to shake its history of chaos.
In Mogadishu, the capital of the Horn of Africa nation, gunmen threw grenades and a land mine exploded near the convoy of Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi on Sunday, killing at least five bodyguards and wounding several others, said Mohamed Ali Americo, a senior official in Gedi's office. Gedi was unharmed.
It was the second such narrow escape for Gedi. On May 3, an explosion went off just 10m from Gedi during his first visit to Mogadishu since he took office last year. He was not harmed and said the incident was an accident, but others suspect the blast was an attempt to kill him and guarantee his exiled government never takes power.
Gedi's transitional government, formed late last year after lengthy peace talks in Kenya, faces opposition from warlords who thrive in the anarchy Somalia has known since opposition leaders ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Fundamentalist Muslim leaders also oppose the secular transitional government.
The government is further weakened by internal rivalries. Gedi and President Abdulahi Yusuf Ahmed have set up in Jowhar, a Somali town 90km northwest of the capital, saying Mogadishu is considered unsafe. Rivals have set up another camp in Mogadishu.
This nation of 7 million has since 1991 been a patchwork of battling fiefdoms. The transitional government makes little pretense of having much influence on land, let alone on the seas, where pirates have been seizing merchant ships and holding them for ransom.
Somalia lies along key shipping lanes linking the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.
Even before the recent cruise ship attack signaled pirates had opened a new and bolder chapter, Gedi had called on neighboring countries to send warships to patrol his 3,000km coastline, Africa's longest. The International Maritime Bureau, citing a sharp rise in piracy this year along Somalia's coastline, has for several months warned ships to stay at least 240km away.
On Saturday, two boats full of pirates approached the Seabourn Spirit about 160km off the coast of Somalia and fired rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles.
The cruise ship sped away. None of its passengers, mostly Americans with some Australians and Europeans, were injured, said Bruce Good, spokesman for the Miami-based Seabourn Cruise Line, a subsidiary of Carnival Corp. One member of the 161-person crew was injured by shrapnel, cruise line president Deborah Natansohn said.
Judging from the location of the attack, the pirates are likely to have been from a group that hijacked a UN-chartered vessel in June and held its crew and food aid hostage for 100 days, said Andrew Mwangura, head of the Kenyan chapter of the Seafarers Assistance Program.
Somali pirates "are getting more powerful, more vicious and bolder day by day," Mwangura said.
Britain's National Union of Marine Aviation and Shipping Transport, which represents merchant navy officers, called on Sunday for a naval task force to protect ships traveling off the coast of Somalia.
US and NATO warships patrol the region to protect vessels in deeper waters further out, but they are not permitted in Somalia's territorial waters.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
RSS