mink

There's been an explosion in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania in which several people have died. The explosion was apparently an accident at a military camp. Excerpt: "Officials said it was a tragic accident and not a repeat of the deadly terrorist blast that rocked the country's main commercial center in 1998." Full BBC article here .

I found this a few weeks ago but forgot to post it. Word clouds aren't a new thing, but more and more people are starting to use them on their blogs. A word cloud is basically a group of words bunched together, but their size/color/format is directly associated with the number of times they are repeated on any given source or page. The NewsMap above ( check it out here ) is interesting because it makes a word cloud of out news pages, and divys everything up by country, topic, and type of news. Sweet idea that I was going to try and work on with my RSS project , but oh well... one closed door is another door opened!

I've written out a couple of posts about the pirates who have been seizing vessels off the Somalian coast. In recent weeks, pirates (likely to be from similar groups) have taken control of even more vessels, including those belonging to the United States, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. Now an American captain has been held hostage by the pirates, prompting the US to send in warships to "monitor the situation". I still hold my reservations about how the general problem of piracy is being acknowledged and responded to. I will ask the same questions I asked in a previous post about this: 1. Incentive I think it would be tremendously helpful to try to find out what is driving these pirates to seize vessels. They have held anything from lethal arms, to oil, to food aid. In my view, it seems to always come down to ransom, hence it seems the pirates are looking for money. They do not seem to want to hurt anyone (a recent BBC article mentions "pirates holding a US...