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The image shows the 17,000-ton container ship Maerkal Alabama, when it was operating under the name Maerkal Alva. The ship was hijacked by Somali pirates with 20 crew members aboard on Wednesday while sailing from Salalah in Oman to the Kenyan port of Mombasa via Dilhoub.
Somali pirates attack U.S. ship
American crew regained control after highjacking; captain being held hostage in lifeboat
KATHARINE HOURELD Associated Press Writer
NAIROBI, Kenya — In a riveting high-seas drama, an unarmed American crew wrested control of their U.S.-flagged cargo ship from Somali pirates Wednesday and sent them fleeing to a lifeboat with the U.S. captain as hostage.
The destroyer USS Bainbridge, one of a half dozen warships that headed for the area, arrived at the scene Thursday morning a few hours before dawn, said Kevin Speers, a spokesman for the company that owns the Maersk Alabama. He said the boat with the pirates was floating near the ship, the first with an American crew to be taken by pirates off the Horn of Africa.
Speers said officials were waiting
to see what happened when the sun came up. Crew members had been negotiating with the pirates Wednesday for the return of the captain.
A family member said Capt. Richard Phillips surrendered himself to the pirates to secure the safety of the crew.
"What I understand is that he offered himself as the hostage," said Gina Coggio, 29, half sister of Phillips' wife. "That is what he would do. It's just who he is and his responsibility as a captain."
Details of the day's events emerged sporadically as members of the crew were reached by satellite phone, providing a glimpse of the maneuvering.
A sailor who spoke to The Associated Press said the entire 20-member crew had been taken hostage but managed to seize one pirate and then successfully negotiated their own release. The man did not identify himself during the brief conversation.
A family member said Capt. Richard Phillips surrendered himself to the pirates to secure the safety of the crew.
The crisis played out hundreds of miles off the coast of Somalia
— one of the most lawless nation, on earth. President Barack Obama was following the situation closely, foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough said.
The Maersk Alabama was the sixth vessel seized by Somali pirates in a week. Pirates have staged 66 attacks since January, and they are still holding 14 ships and 260 crew members as hostages, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a watchdog group based in Kuala
Lumpur.
Somalia's 1,900-mile long coastline borders one of the world's busiest shipping lanes and offers a perfect haven to the heavily armed pirate gangs. They often dress in military fatigues and use GPS systems and satellite phones to coordinate attacks from small, fast speedboats resupplied by a larger "mother ship."
The pirates usually use rocket propelled grenades, anti-tank rocket launchers and automatic weapons to capture large, slow-moving vessels like the U.S. flagged
According to reports from the crew, the pirates sank their boat when they
boarded the ship. The captain talked them into getting off the vessel using one of the ship's lifeboats.
Second Mate Ken Quinn told CNN in a live interview Wednesday that the crew also had held a hostage.
"We had a pirate, we took him for 12 hours," Quinn said. "We returned him, but they didn't return
Maersk Line Limited CEO John F. Reinhart said his company received a fax.
the captain."
received a call that indicated the crewmen were sale. But the got cut off, and the company could not ask any more questions.
It remained unclear how the unarmed sailors could have overpowered pirates
There were 111 attacks in 2008, and more than half that number have occurred in the first four months of this year.
armed with automatic weapons
Capt. Shane Murphy, second in command on the ship, told his wife, Serena, that pirates had followed the ship Monday and pursued it again for three or four hours before boarding it Wednesday morning, family members said.
The ship was taken about 7:30 a.m. local time some 380 miles east of the Somali capital of Mogadishu. Analysts said many of the pirates had shifted their operations down the Somali coastline from the Gulf of Aden to escape naval warship patrols.
Reinhart said the company's vessels had received a heightened alert about piracy activity. He did not have particulars about how the ship was taken, but said the crew's orders were to hide in safe rooms until aid came. They did not have
weapons, he said, and typically their defense would be to fight the pirates off with fire hoses as they
climbed up the stern.
Coggio, speaking to reporters from the porch of the Phillips'
Andrea Phillips, the captain's wife, said that her husband had sailed in those waters "for quite some time" and that a hijacking was perhaps "inevitable."
farmhouse in Underhill, Vt., said the family had been told negotiations were being conducted to get the captain back to the boat.
Multimillion dollar ransoms are fueling a piracy explosion. There were 111 attacks in 2008, and more than half that number have occurred in the first four months of this year.
ENVIRONMENT
Last year, pirates made off with up to $80 million in ransom money, said Middleton. Those hauls included payment for a Saudi oil tanker and a Ukrainian ship loaded with military tanks, both of which were later released.
Obama considering climate engineering
SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer
WASHINGTON — Tinkering with Earth's climate to chill runaway global warming — a radical idea once dismissed out of hand — is being discussed by the White House as a potential emergency option, the president's new science adviser said Wednesday.
That's because global warming is happening so rapidly, John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month.
The concept of using technology to purposely cool the climate is called geoengineering. One option raised by Holdren and proposed by a Nobel Prizewinning scientist includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays.
Using such an experimental measure is only being thought of as a last resort. Holden said.
"It's got to be looked at," he said. "We don't have the luxury ... of ruling any approach off the table."
His concern is that the United States and other nations won't slow global warming fast enough and that several "tipping points" could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of "really intolerable consequences," he said.
Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."
At first, Holden characterized the potential need to technologically tinker with the climate as just his personal view. However, he went on to say he has raised it in administration discussions.
He and many experts believe that warming of a few degrees more would lead to disastrous drought conditions and food shortages in some regions, rising seas and more powerful coastal storms in others.
"We're talking about all these issues in the White House," Holden said. "There's a very vigorous process going on of discussing all the options for addressing the energy climate challenge."
Holden led discussions included Cabinet officials and heads of
sub-Cabinet level agencies, such as NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The 65-year-old physicist is far from alone in taking geoengineering seriously. The National Academy of Sciences is making it the subject of the first workshop in its new climate challenges program for policymakers, scientists and the public. The British Parliament has also discussed the idea. At an international meeting of climate scientists last month in Copenhagen, 15 talks dealt with different aspects of geoengineering.
The American Meteorological Society is crafting a policy statement that says "it is prudent to consider geoengineering's potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment."
Last week, Princeton scientist Robert Socolow told the National Academy that geoengineering should be an available option in case climate worsens dramatically.
Holdren, a 1981 winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, outlined these possible geoengineering options;
- Shooting sulfur particles (like those produced by power plants and volcanoes, for example) into the upper atmosphere, an idea that gained steam when it was proposed by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen in 2006. It would be "basically mimicking the effect of volcanoes in screening out the incoming sunlight," Holdren said.
- Creating artificial "trees"
- giant towers that suck carbon dioxide out of the air and store it.
The first approach would "try to produce a cooling effect to offset the heating effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases." Holden said.
But he said there could be grave side effects. Studies suggest that might include eating away a large chunk of the ozone layer above the poles and causing the Mediterranean and the Mideast to be much drier.
And those are just the predicted problems. Scientists said they worried about side effects that they didn't anticipate.
While the idea could strike some people as too risky, the Obama administration could get unusual support on the idea from groups that have often denied the harm of global warming in the past.
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