Michael Rubenstein, a photographer working with The New York Times reports from outside the Taj hotel in Mumbai that the top floor of the hotel is still on fire and that hotel guests are banging on the windows begging to be rescued.
I hope they don’t have to face the choice of jumping or burning alive.
Breaking now: mass terror attacks underway in Mumbai, at hotels and other locations. Government says 78 people dead now, hundreds injured. The attacks are apparently coordinated, and taking place simultaneously all over the city. One Indian terrorism analyst on CNN now saying: “The whole city is being held hostage.”
It does not seem be over yet. The death toll now stands at 80 dead with 900 injured. Updates here.
Edit: Watch this Clip for a good overview.
As if things weren’t chaotic enough in the Gulf of Aden: a suspected pirate ship that was sunk last week by the Indian Navy now appears to have actually been a Thai fishing trawler, according to CNN, which cites the ship’s owner.
Last week, the Indian Navy reported that one of its warships, the INS Tabar, which had been deployed to the region to repulse the growing pirate threat, encountered a flotilla of three pirate vessels some 320 miles south west of the Omani coast. The Tabar fought a battle at sea, sinking one suspect vessel — what it called the “mother ship” — and forcing the pirates to abandon a second as they fled.
The comments are skeptical. But I think this story may be true and India may not care. These are the comments of a retired Indian Admiral….
So eventually when pressure from the Indian navy finally prompted the MEA to allow Indian participation, INS Tabar, a Talwar class frigate was sent to join at the Eastern end of the corridor. Coordination was arranged through diplomatic channels. The big difference in the way INS Tabar operated was that it was given clear instructions on the Rules of Engagement or ROE at it is commonly referred to by Naval Headquarters.
The commanding officer was given wide latitude to use force, at his discretion. Clearly, such explicit ROEs don’t exist for ships of TF 150.
This is a ridiculous situation, as the ROE of the NATO ships worries more about the human rights of the pirates, than about stamping out piracy. Actually there is an 1838 convention that permits any warship to interfere anywhere on the ‘High Seas’ to intercept pirates and try them — without handing them over to the country of origin.
Today’s interpretation by human rights lawyers state that pirates cannot even be handed over to their own state if that state does not respect the human rights of the pirates. This is an absurd situation. The US is not going to amend its rules regarding Centcom and Pacom. The answer appears to lie in New Delhi, where the MEA needs to draw up its own coalition of Indian Ocean powers, under the Indian navy to stamp out the pirates, in their harbours, ruthlessly
Note the ruthless part.
Also, it should be noted that story could be true and the ship could still be a mother ship for the pirates. I doubt the pirates have the sea going skills to go as far as they have been going on their own. Moreover, as Thai fishing trawler who would suspect you?
The objectives issued by DARPA are for a vehicle that would have an airborne tactical radius of 1,000 nautical miles, a low-level flight radius of 100 nautical miles (which may leverage surface effects), and a submerged tactical radius of 12 nautical miles. The sum of these must be achieved within eight hours. Endurance on the surface has to be 72 hours in sea states up to five between inserting and extracting personnel. The craft’s payload objective is eight men and their equipment with a total cargo weight of 2,000 pounds.
They obviously want this thing for sneaking commandos into a country off of a sub. As such, it is a waste of money to even try to create such a thing.
Sneaking commandos into a country with a plane flown off of a sub implies truly sending them in with out support (otherwise you could insert them with out needing something that can fly through the air and underwater). This country does not have political courage to send in American soldiers without any hope of support.
Rant of the week is California’s Broke And I Don’t Care by Sippican Cottage.
From The Wall Street Journal….
The U.S. is alone among the five declared nuclear nations in not modernizing its arsenal. The U.K. and France are both doing so. Ditto China and Russia. “We’re the only ones who aren’t,” Gen. Chilton says. Congress has refused to fund the Department of Energy’s Reliable Replacement Warhead program beyond the concept stage and this year it cut funding even for that.
From later on in the article…
Gen. Chilton pulls out a prop to illustrate his point: a glass bulb about two inches high. “This is a component of a V-61” nuclear warhead, he says. It was in “one of our gravity weapons” — a weapon from the 1950s and ’60s that is still in the U.S. arsenal. He pauses to look around the Journal’s conference table. “I remember what these things were for. I bet you don’t. It’s a vacuum tube. My father used to take these out of the television set in the 1950s and ’60s down to the local supermarket to test them and replace them.”
And here comes the punch line: “This is the technology that we have . . . today.” The technology in the weapons the U.S. relies on for its nuclear deterrent dates back to before many of the people in the room were born.
I am not sure what to make of this. Sometimes old school works far better then the new fangled stuff. On the other hand, I would really hate to see the safety mechanisms degrade. The only thing worse than having a nuclear weapon go off on purpose would be for one to go off by accident.
Islamist fighters have warned pirates holding a Saudi oil tanker they may launch an attack unless the ship and her crew are released.
Why have the Somali Islamist groups come out and demanded that the Saudi oil tanker be released? Perhapses this quote from later on in the article reveals the answer…
“Every Somali has great respect for the holy kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We have nothing against them but unfortunately what happened was just business for us and I hope the Saudis will understand,” the pirate said.
The Pirates seem to think that the Saudis are behind the Islamist threat. Wonder if they know about a connection between the two that is not common knowledge?
Yet the latest birth figures tell a story. In the state of Punjab, only 798 girls were born for every 1,000 boys. Haryana was next up the list with 819, followed by Chandigarh with 845 and Delhi, the national capital, came in fourth with 868. The Delhi-based Centre for Social Research, which recently surveyed the worst-affected parts of Delhi, estimates that 10 million girls have been lost to female foeticide in India over the past 20 years.
Most alarming for those monitoring the figures is the fact that the gap appears to be widening. Today the national average for births is 933 girls to 1,000 boys; in 1991 it was 945. ‘The low numbers in a state like Delhi tells us the enormity of the situation,’ said Anju Dubey Panbey, of the Centre for Social Research. ‘In India today, if you are blessed with a son you are almost revered, and if you are the mother of daughters you are made to feel guilty and your status in your family goes down. It is very, very disturbing.’
As India’s wealth and power grows, its sex unbalance gets even worse. The emerging Hindu middle class in India are more determined to kill their daughters than the more backward Hindu farmers in rural areas. This is one of the reasons that the sex imbalance is far worse in urban areas then it is in rural areas.
Remember this when you hear people predicting that India is going to become one of the next world powers.
From The Telegraph….
What irks officials in Puntland most, though, is the failure of the multi-national force now patrolling the Gulf of Aden to take a robust approach to the problem. In a land where rule has seldom been by anything other the gun, few have been impressed by British and European officials’ talk of pirates having “human rights” that spare them from more traditional punishments like hanging.
The case in September, where a Danish warship dumped 10 arrested pirates back on a beach after deciding they lacked the jurisdiction to prosecute, caused widespread bemusement here. “Where is the deterrent for people to join the pirates, if they think they might not even get arrested?” asked Dr Abdirahman Bangah, Puntland’s acting fisheries minister.