US-bound oil tanker seized by pirates

The BBC reported that nine armed Somali pirates seized a massive supertanker full of oil on Sunday, 800 miles off the coast of Somalia.

The ship, a Greek-owned vessel named the Maran Centaurus, has 28 crew members and is believed to be one of the largest ships seized by pirates in that region yet. It was also captured unusually far from the Somali coast, a sign to some that piracy, apart from simply increasing, is becoming a more dangerous and aggressive game.

“This incident clearly shows the pirates are becoming more bolder,” Somalia analyst Rashid Abdi said.

Piracy off the coast of Somalia has been rising, despite greater international naval enforcement and patrol of the area.

“So I don’t think the solution is in building the naval deployment there, or increasing the naval deployment,” Abdi continued. “The problem is actually in dealing with the governance crisis, which feeds the problem of piracy.”

The captured tanker might have been captured so easily because it was moving very slowly, no faster than 27 km/h or about 16 mph, and was fully stocked with oil. The worth of the oil is unknown, but a similarly-sized tanker captured in November 2008 was said to have $100 million worth of oil on it and was ransomed for a scant $3 million.

Conservatives appear to win contested Honduras election

According to Al-Jazeera, Honduras’ right-wing opposition party, the National Party, led by Porfirio Lobo, is claiming victory in the country’s first election since a military coup ousted President Manuel Zelaya this summer.

The legitimacy of the election was almost immediately called into question by Zelaya, who did not run for president, based on the grounds that election turnout was far lower than official numbers stated.

The official voter turnout was put at 60 percent, but Zelaya said the turnout was visibly much worse than that, and polls conducted by him and his supporters place the rate of voter abstention at 60 percent instead.

“We are fighting a dictatorship, and until we defeat it, we will not be satisfied,” Zelaya told Al-Jazeera.

Despite Zelaya’s claims the vote is being recognized around most of the international community, including the United States. It would be hard to steal this election for the military, some analysts say, when the candidates were chosen long before Zelaya was even removed from power.

Nazi war criminal stands trial in Germany

John Demjanjuk, recognized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as their most-wanted Nazi war criminal, is finally standing trial in Germany this week for the murder of 27,900 Jews during the Holocaust.

Demjanjuk, now 89, had been working as an autoworker in the United States but was a guard in the Sobibor camp in Poland in 1943. He has also been sentenced for war crimes once before, receiving a death sentence from Israel in 1988, but the sentence was dropped in 1993 as a case of mistaken identity.

Demjanjuk’s trial is the latest in a slew of Nazi trials that have been starting and wrapping up in the past few months, the fourth since August alone.

“These are the final efforts, where one says, the time really is running out, but there is still the chance to bring a few more cases,” said Andreas Eichmuller, a Nazi prosecutions researcher.