UNITED NATIONS – On the same day Somali gunmen seized two more ships, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to authorize nations to conduct land and air attacks on pirate bases on the coast of the Horn of Africa country.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on hand to push through the resolution, one of President George W. Bush’s last major foreign policy initiatives.

ADDIS ABABA : Ethiopia announced on Friday that its troops will withdraw from Somalia by the end of 2008, ending an ill-fated two-year occupation but raising fears of a security vacuum in the war-ravaged country.
With unprepared African Union troops confined to some parts of Mogadishu and joint units not yet operational, a hasty pull-out would leave most of Somalia under the control of the Islamist group Shebab and its allies.
Ethiopian foreign ministry spokesman Wahide Belay said that the deadline for the pullout was announced in a letter sent on Tuesday …

Two British and one Irish security guard have been plucked from the sea by a military helicopter after jumping from a chemical tanker seized by pirates off Somalia.
Their decision to abandon the two dozen crew members still on board attracted some criticism, but their British employer insisted that the three former soldiers were heroes who had resisted a sustained attack by heavily-armed pirates with great courage and would have been killed if they had stayed any longer.

The owner of a Thai fishing trawler has said the Indian navy sank it off Somalia’s coast last week after wrongly assuming it was a pirate “mother ship”.
Wicharn Sirichaiekawat said the Indian frigate had attacked the Ekawat Nava 5 while it was being hijacked by pirates.
He said one of the crew had been found alive after six days in the Gulf of Aden, but that another 14 were missing.
The Indian navy has insisted the vessel fired in self-defence at a pirate ship which had been stacked with explosives.
Almost 40 …

MOGADISHU (AFP) — Somali pirates Tuesday were engaged in talks over ransoms for several vessels, including a Saudi oil tanker, an Ukrainian freighter carrying arms and their latest catch, a Yemeni cargo ship.
As the world mulled a response to the problem which has sowed panic in the shipping industry and threatens an ailing global economy, increasingly brazen pirates continued to dodge navy ships to prey on foreign vessels.
Officials from Yemen, which shares the Gulf of Aden’s shores with Somalia, said Tuesday that a Yemeni cargo ship carrying building materials was …

The leader of a Somali pirate group holding a Saudi-owned supertanker carrying $100 million in oil has denied reports the group has moved the vessel away from the coast of the central Somali town of Haradhere, where it had been anchored for more than a week. Eyewitnesses said the pirates moved the ship after Islamist militants threatened to rescue the supertanker by force. VOA Correspondent Alisha Ryu has this exclusive story from our East Africa Bureau in Nairobi.
Speaking to VOA by satellite telephone aboard the hijacked supertanker, the pirate leader, …

MOGADISHU, Somalia — At least two dozen people, including six children, were killed in heavy fighting here in Somalia’s capital on Friday as government troops tried to reassert control and Islamist insurgents fought back fiercely, witnesses said.
Bodies littered the streets of the bullet-pocked city, and hundreds of residents began to flee. Both sides claimed victory.

The battle with pirates operating off the coast of Somalia grew yesterday when raiders seized two more ships but lost one of their own in an uneven firefight with the Indian Navy. The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) described the situation yesterday as “out of control”.
The surge in hijackings came as Saudi Arabia confirmed that a ransom demand had been made for the freeing of the Sirius Star supertanker, seized at the weekend with her crew of 25 and a cargo of oil worth $100 million (£65 million).

Somali pirates have “stunned” the United States’ top military leader by seizing a supertanker three times as big as an aircraft carrier hundreds of nautical miles off the Kenya coast.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Monday that he was surprised both by the size of the vessel the pirates had hijacked and by its distance from the shore.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today voiced his concern at new acts of piracy off the Somali coast this week amid reports of a series of attacks or attempting hijackings in recent days in a region already notorious for the practice.
Mr. Ban “reiterates his condemnation of all acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea, wherever they occur,” according to a statement from his spokesperson, which was issued just days after heavily armed pirates hijacked a Saudi Arabian oil tanker. The Indian navy is also reported to have sunk a suspected pirate …