Month: January 2012

Just days after U.S. Navy SEALs rescued Jessica Buchanan and her partner, Hargen Thisted, from their Somali captors, pirates are threatening to kill an American hostage kidnapped on Saturday if they are attacked, reports the AP.  According to Abdi Abtidoon and Jay Bahadur of the Somalia Report, the hostage is Michael Scott Moore, an American…

The traffic signs are not the only things coming up in Mogadishu. After decades of war that reduced the Somali capital almost to rubble and banished all semblance of normalcy from the streets, there are now rumblings of awakening, much as they may resemble a drunkard rousing themselves from a deep stupor.     The…

UITHOORN, Netherlands — A small Dutch city less than 20 kilometres from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport has become the hub of Europe’s sales of khat, a plant chewed for its stimulant qualities, soon to be banned in the Netherlands. In a discreet warehouse tucked away in the city of Uithoorn, around a hundred Somalis and Yemenis…

The Somali government says it supports the U.S. military operation that freed two Western aid workers who had been held hostage in the war-ravaged country. In a statement released Thursday, Somalia’s transitional government said the rescue of Jessica Buchanan, an American, and Poul Thisted, a Dane, was a “great joy” to “right thinking people everywhere.”…

Kenya has been urged to continue providing refuge to Somalis fleeing violence and hunger in their homeland, a US State Department official said on Tuesday. “We continue to rely on and advocate strongly for the protection of Somalis inside Kenya, that they should not be sent back into Somalia in order to create some sort…

In Somalia it is sometimes said that the town Galkayo translates as “foreigner runs away”. After its airport was used as the base of a US Navy Seal (Sea, Air and Land Teams) hostage rescue in the lawless country’s pirate heartland; the town might now want to change its name. Locals reported that several aircraft,…

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The leader of a community advocacy group says the U.S. rescue of two hostages in Somalia is uplifting news for Ohio Somalis, although the kidnappings underscored their worries about their homeland. Jibril (Juh-BRILL’) Mohamed (Mo-HAHM’-ed) heads SomaliCan in Columbus. He says he and other members of the central Ohio community are glad…

Somalia’s growing Islamist radicalism is spilling over into Kenya. The militant Al-Shabaab movement has built a cross-border presence and a clandestine support network among Muslim populations in the north east and Nairobi and on the coast, and is trying to radicalise and recruit youth from these communities, often capitalising on long-standing grievances against the central…

Somali pirates have started to cut off their hostages’ limbs in a bid to extract even greater ransoms from the owners of the ships they capture. The horrific new tactic was used last Friday on the Vietnamese captain of a ship being held in the Somali pirate lair of Haradhere. Chao-I Wu’s right arm was…

American commandos raced into Somalia early Wednesday and rescued two aid workers, an American woman and a Danish man, after a shootout with Somali pirates who had been holding them captive for months. The American soldiers swooped in by helicopter, killed nine pirates and captured several others, before spiriting away the hostages, who were not…

FARMINGTON — Maine writer and performer Cheryl Hamilton will bring her one-woman show, “Checkered Floors,” to the Emery Community Arts Center at the University of Maine at Farmington on Wednesday, Feb. 1. The 7:30 p.m. performance is open to the public with requests for donations at the door. “Checkered Floors” is about a recent college…