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After five years without a major hijacking, the Somali pirates did it again... maybe because the international folks stopped their anti piracy effort in December....but then they released the ship and crew, without ransom...
more here.
Back story here: Wikipedia article on Punt.... the Puntland anti piracy effort. website HERE.
for later reading LINK
a lot of the sailors who had been kidnapped in the past were Filipino sailors.
UKGuardian story of 26 released late last year
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one of the tactics the pirates used was "swarm boat" tactics, i.e. lots of small civilian looking boats in an attack.
Iran is now threatening the same to US boats
Having A-10s on call, which is quite common in the Persian Gulf, gives the navy another weapon available to deal with any large scale use of swarming tactics in an effort to, for example, close the Hormuz Strait by sinking some large tankers at key points or simply to make a point..
another reason to keep the old but reliable A-10 warthog.
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I read somewhere that Kong Island (which with B&tB is playing at our local cinema) is racist because it suggests King Kong is black.
But actually, many in the black community saw this in the original movie: where Kong was made to seem more sympathetic than scary; the character was kidnapped and killed by evil people who wanted him to make them rich, and later when he freed himself in rage for the mistreatment, he was killed by those who exploited and hated him.
Of course, as Tolkien might have pointed out, it was not allegory per se but it was application... like all classic stories it could be read as a story of slavery and/or of the racism of 1930's...
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maybe Trump should silence the kerfuffle about importing unscreened Muslims from countries with lots of bad guys pretending to be refugees by importing some of the Rohingye. from AlJ:
More than 90,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar since October when the military launched a crackdown against what it called Rohingya insurgents after an attack on an army post....
less than 3000 were allowed in the US under President Obama last year.
Rohingya refugees have been living in Bangladesh since the 1970s. Estimates of the total number vary from 300,000 to 500,000.
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