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Image from splash247 The Galicia Spirit is a fairly new Liquefied Natural Gas carrier that was built in 2004.  It is 280 meters long by 43 meters wide. It was attacked yesterday by armed men on a fast small craft.  The attack occurred in the choke point of the Bab el Mandeb between Yemen and Djibouti and Eritrea. Super LPG tankers like this are big, fat, slow and unmaneuverable targets.  It was fired on with small arms and a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG).  RPGs are designed to pierce tank armor, so one should be able to pierce the hull...

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson, then a minister to the French government of Louis XVI, had a concern more intimidating than anything else he’d faced before: the threat of pirates off the coast of North Africa, a region known as the Barbary Coast. These pirates had already taken over two American ships, the Dauphin and the Maria, plundering their goods and taking their crews hostage. Unfortunately, this was a common fate for ships venturing near the area, where the Sahara’s arid coast was divided into four Islamic nation-states. Running west to east were the Barbary nations Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and...

Johnny Depp returns to the big screen as the iconic, swashbuckling anti-hero Jack Sparrow in the all-new “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.” The rip-roaring adventure finds down-on-his-luck Captain Jack feeling the winds of ill-fortune blowing strongly his way when deadly ghost sailors, led by the terrifying Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem), escape from the Devil's Triangle bent on killing every pirate at sea—notably Jack. Jack's only hope of survival lies in the legendary Trident of Poseidon, but to find it he must forge an uneasy alliance with Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario), a brilliant and beautiful astronomer, and...

Baseball is a funny thing. Investing time, energy and focus on a given team or game can bring out the innermost emotions of fans. The seemingly arbitrary on-field events can hold especially powerful emotional weight for the supremely invested, something to which most young fans can attest. One young Pirates fan definitely can, and was caught on-camera riding the emotional rollercoaster in Sunday's tense affair with the Nats at Nationals Park that was eventually won by Pittsburgh, 2-1, in 18 innings. Early on, with the Bucs up, 1-0, this young man was feeling pretty good, throwing around high-fives and being...

Pirate gangs in West Africa are switching to kidnapping sailors and demanding ransom rather than stealing oil cargoes as low oil prices have made crude harder to sell and less profitable, shipping officials said on Tuesday. Attacks in the Gulf of Guinea - a significant source of oil, cocoa and metals for world markets - have become less frequent partly due to improved patrolling but also to lower oil prices, according to an annual report from the U.S. foundation Oceans Beyond Piracy (OBP), which is backed by the shipping industry. "They have had to move towards a faster model and...

In this case, the pirates still had a lot to learn about hacking. They didn't encrypt their commands or use proxies, making it easy to trace their activities. They also weren't skilled enough to compromise systems as much as they wanted. However, those tidbits aren't about to comfort other shipping companies. If there's a pirate outfit that's both well-armed and technically savvy, it could create havoc by plundering ships with relatively little fear of getting caught.

If you own a pirated copy of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, you'll have the chance to come clean. If you pirated Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, Microsoft wants to welcome you back—all is forgiven. Microsoft said Thursday that it will run an “experiment” to offer a path for those users who have either pirated or purchased an unlicensed copy of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 to download a licensed copy from Microsoft itself, or to use a code from a third-party reseller. Either way, the licensed Windows 10 software will be used to update the PC with a valid...

I will try to post one of these for each series also, NOT EACH GAME, or something like that. Thanks to ken5050!

The Chicago Cubs have clinched a playoff spot for the first time since 2008. The Cubs were assured of at least an NL wild-card slot Friday night when San Francisco lost to Oakland 5-4, eliminating the Giants from playoff contention. The sign outside Wrigley Field lit up with "Cubs Clinch Postseason Berth'' after it became official late Friday night. Fans gathered around to take pictures and mark Chicago's return for the first time since 2008.

Divers in Madagascar have found a silver bar weighing about 50 kilograms (110 pounds) that they believe was part of the treasure of pirate Captain Kidd. The bar was presented to Madagascar's president, Hery Rajaonarimampianina, in a ceremony Thursday on the island of Sainte Marie, near the country's northeast coast. The bar was found in a bay off the island, the diving team said. The team was led by Barry Clifford, an American undersea explorer who has been searching for pirate treasure for many decades. Clifford believes there could be more treasure on the bay floor where he found the...

This week’s Clinton Global Initiative conference in Morocco will feature a speech by K’naan Warsame, a prominent hip-hop artist and Somali pirate advocate. ...

The security situation in the Mediterranean will continue to deteriorate to the point where we can expect Islamist raids on European islands, a recently retired Royal Navy Admiral has told Breitbart London. [snip] Rear Admiral Chris Parry CBE, the straight-talking former Director General of the Ministry of Defence Development, Concepts, and Doctrine Centre, ... made the comments in an interview this week as European nations gathered to discuss the sudden migrant crisis gripping the Mediterranean. THE THREAT OF ISLAM Parry, who warned in a government paper in 1990 that Islam would replace Communism as the main threat against the West...

The latest fantasy from the fanciful imagination of Barack Obama: We hear a lot about the United States' Judeo-Christian heritage, but according to President Obama, "Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding." That's what the president told a White House conference on "countering violent extremism" on Wednesday. Obama has said similar things in the past: "I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story,” Obama said in a June 2009 speech in Cairo, Egypt. "Islam has always been part of America," he said in a 2010 statement marking the start...

The EU's top human rights court on Thursday ordered France to pay thousands of euros to Somali pirates who attacked French ships for "violating their rights" by holding them an additional 48 hours before taking them before a judge. The Somali pirates were apprehended on the high seas by the French army on two separate occasions in 2008 and taken back to France for trial. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said that French authorities should have brought the pirates before a judge "without delay" when they arrived on French territory after being held at sea. The EU’s top...

Armed Israeli security guards thwarted an attempt by Somali pirates to a hijack a ship that was sailing to Israel on Tuesday. The ship was sailing with a foreign flag but had Israeli security guards on board. The ship continued on its way to Israel and will arrive in a couple of days. Israeli security companies have conquered the shipping security industry in the past couple of years. Hundreds of former IDF combat unit fighters secure foreign ships, both trade and commercial, from the threat of pirates.

“When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks…” (Qur’an 47:4) “When you gonna wake up, and strengthen the things that remain?” (Bob Dylan, echoing Revelation 3:2) This is denial and willful ignorance on a scale so massive as to spell nothing less than a doomed society. “Woman beheaded ‘with machete’ in north London garden,” by Tom Whitehead, Ed Malnick, Tom Brooks Pollock and Gordon Rayner, the Telegraph, September 4, 2014 An 82-year-old woman was beheaded in a north London garden after a crazed attacker went beserk with a machete. Pensioner Palmira Silva was decapitated at her house in Edmonton in...

Armed pirates robbed a petroleum products tanker near Ivory Coast's port of Abidjan, a maritime agency and a private security advisor said on Wednesday, in an indication of the increasing mobility of Nigeria-based gangs. The raid on the tanker came just a day after two failed pirate attacks that occurred just hours apart in waters off Nigeria's southeastern coast, according to the same sources. Pirate attacks in West Africa's Gulf of Guinea, a significant source of oil, cocoa and metals for world markets, have almost doubled from last year, jacking up insurance costs for shipping companies. The vast majority of...

A British tourist had the tops of two of his fingers sliced off while riding on the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disney World in Florida. The victim lost the tip of his ring and little finger after apparently dangling them outside the log fume ride which inspired the Johnny Depp movies. Disney officials in Orlando, Florida, immediately shut down the ride in the Magic Kingdom park following the incident.

The Russians captured the Pirates, tied them up, put them on their boats, then set them all on fire. No more pirates. Plus, probably no more Somali pirates attacking Russian ships. This video shows Russian Navy commandos on a Somalia pirate ship shortly after the ​pirates had captured a Russian oil tanker. All conversations are in Russian with a single exception of when a wounded pirate says something in English and the Russian soldier says "This is not a fishing boat." All conversations between the commandos are in Russian. If you don't understand Russian, the pictures ​speak for themselves. The...

Somali pirates on Friday unsuccessfully launched their first attack of 2014 on a tanker in the Gulf of Aden, resulting in the apprehension of five suspected pirates by naval counter-piracy forces a day later. The International Maritime Bureau reported Friday that a group of pirates used a mothership to launch an attack on a tanker underway approximately 115nm South of Salalah, Oman. During the attack, the pirates approached in a skiff and fire upon the vessel, but the attack was aborted after the ship’s armed security team returned fire. The IMB report stated that following the attack a coalition helicopter...