BC: catch up 04-10-09

shucks I think i missed a few...

April 10th, 2009 2:54 pm
Commandos free hostages in Somalia but …
They were French commandos. The Spanish newspaper 20 Minutos has the story about how French citizens were rescued, but at the loss of one hostage. It hasn’t hit the English press yet. I hope our readers are better at Spanish then French, a loose translation follows after the “read more”. “Rescate” means rescue.

April 10th, 2009 3:33 am
Teach the free man how to praise
Pity is a selective thing. Western navies are advised by lawyers that pirates must be given asylum if they are apprehended while hundreds of Indians, Pakistanis, Africans and Filipino seamen, working for a pittance, languish in captivity while seized in the service of their employers, without prospect of legal residency in Europe. The Times Online reports that the “Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights.”

April 10th, 2009 12:03 am
Additional resources
I’ve revamped Wretchard.com to serve as an additional resource to people interested in the range of issues commonly described at this site. There are a whole bunch of RSS feeds and iframed maps which I hope are helpful to the reader. If you know of any bloggers who are “go to” people on different regions, please drop me a line so I can include them on the blogmap.

April 9th, 2009 11:45 pm
Who you talking to?
The Asia Times claims that Richard Holbrooke has met with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a key enemy of coalition forces. But other sources have denied it. Syed Saleem Shahzad writes:

April 9th, 2009 11:31 pm
At sea
The NYT writes about the apparent inutility of navies and the potential to “come together to end the scourage of piracy”.

April 9th, 2009 8:00 pm
And we sailed the seas of green in a yellow submarine
The Somali government says the rampant piracy along its coasts can be suppressed, if it is given the money to do so. The VOA reports:

April 9th, 2009 6:51 pm
In plain sight
Familiarity with secret documents breeds contempt — and carelessness. In some. Security is ultimately only as good as the people who run it. Because security features normally carry with them the cost of inconvenience, people in authority are sometimes tempted to cut corners, and are photographed doing it.

April 9th, 2009 4:11 pm
Bookends
Is revolution brewing in Georgia? And will Russia get involved?

April 9th, 2009 2:23 am
Sadr City
Michael Totten has one of his trademark detailed portraits of a place and a time. This time it’s Sadr’s city in Iraq. Please hit his tipjar if you can.