By Barrett Sheridan

Last week, the world cheered a little when an Indian warship said it had encountered a Somali pirate “mother ship” in the Gulf of Aden and, after being fired upon, blew it to smithereens. International shippers needed a reason to celebrate. Earlier that week, Somali pirates had captured their biggest prize yet, a Saudi supertanker carrying $100 million of crude, and, with nearly a hundred attempted hijackings so far this year, were making waters around the Horn of Africa about as welcoming as a bed of nails.   

Well, put away the champagne glasses. CNN is now reporting that the sunken “mother ship” was actually a Thai fishing trawler and that, while pirates were in the process of commandeering it, the vessel still had 14 innocent fishermen onboard when it was sunk by the Indian navy. One of them, a Cambodian, spent six days adrift before being rescued by a passing ship. (One other is confirmed dead; the rest are still missing.) The sailor is now recovering in a Yemeni hospital, where he had the chance to inform the Indian navy of their mistake.

The event underscores the difficulty of tracking pirates in waters where they easily blend in with fishing trawlers or other private watercraft. “The bulk of Somali coastal dwellers are still fishermen,” says Peter Lehr, a lecturer in terrorism studies at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. “They are now caught in the fray and being attacked by western warships. How can you divide a real fisherman and a pirate from one another? They use the same vessels.”

That means recent military operations in the region—the European Union and NATO now have forces there—might not be a very adequate defense against the pirates. So what line of defense is left? The ships themselves. Armed guards aren’t an option, because they’re too expensive for ship owners, and firefights are risky onboard ships carrying two million barrels of flammable crude oil. But there are alternatives. Hanging barbed wire around a ship’s perimeter is a simple way to dissuade would-be boarders. Electrified fences also work, but they’re out of the question on ships carrying volatile cargoes. The Long-Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, has become popular after it effectively repelled an attack on a cruise ship in 2005; it blasts a deafening wall of sound at targets up to 300 meters away. Fire hoses also do the trick at shorter ranges. Even simply gunning the engines and picking up speed can deter pirates, who look for easy prey.

It’s worth trying anything to avoid being taken hostage. Although the Somali pirates, which are currently holding 300 hostages, treat their captives fairly well—they are, after all, worth a lot of money to them—negotiations can last weeks or months. The MV Faina, a Ukrainian ship carrying 33 Soviet-made tanks, was captured in late September and is still being held in the port of Eyl, in the Puntland region of Somalia. “These guys are very patient people,” says Stephen Askins, a maritime lawyer at London firm Ince & Co. “One guy may be having a bad day and he’ll say, ‘I want $5 million,’ and the next guy might say, ‘Well, I’m a bit more reasonable than that.’ It’s not like buying a car. It’s a very long, drawn out process.”

A competing jumble of climate change negotiations have turned the forum itself into a debate topic as polarizing as the carbon markets and global targets being proposed. Not one, but two extra groups have joined the G8 at Hokkaido, each with the potential to reach its own set of conclusions. The G8 + 5 group brings major developing emitters like China and India into the fold, and the Major Economies Meeting (MEM), George  W. Bush’s brainchild, adds three other big carbon emitters—Indonesia, Australia and South Korea—into the mix. Together, the groups account for 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Washington would prefer to settle the major points at the MEM before tackling the unwieldy 200-country United Nations gatherings, which are coming up against their deadline for a post-Kyoto treaty to be approved in Copenhagen in December of 2009. Coming out of Hokkaido empty-handed will make pre-Copenhagen talks this fall just that much messier.

Still, while none of the three groupings at Hokkaido will likely produce a major consensus on emissions caps, they are producing a lively diplomatic chess match. E.U. members, who want the group to commit to steep cuts in carbon emissions by 2050, are butting heads with Bush over his unwillingness to commit to numerical targets. Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is trying to broker a compromise. With a more green-friendly Obama or McCain administration only months away, Fukuda apparently believes that a tussle with Bush is counterproductive. Instead, he’s pushing for agreements on less-polarizing issues, such as encouraging carbon capture and storage technology for coal power plants, promoting nuclear energy and lowering tariffs on clean technology.

Call It the cough heard round the world. The World Health Organization's Feb. 26 report on how super strains of tuberculosis are on the loose has shaken physicians and policy makers everywhere to the marrow. And rightly so. The study, based on a massive survey of 90,000 patients worldwide, is eloquent testimony to the ravages of a modern killer: multi drug resistant tuberculosis, known as MDR TB in the chilly shorthand of public health, and its even deadlier next of kin, extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, or XTR-TB, which is practically untreatable.  

It's no surprise that poor countries, rife with malnutrition, claustrophobic slums, and especially AIDS are super TB's closest ally. Precisely because HIV strafes the human immune system, patients are sitting ducks for infection. That's why almost everywhere that AIDS is prevalent,  tuberculosis is soaring. Worst hit are the fragments of the old Soviet Union (led by Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where one in four new tb patients have the super variety) and Africa, with the highest rate of TB in the world and the worst public health statistics (only six nations on the continent managed to report to Geneva).  At this rate the Economic Forum at Davos might have to be scrapped in favor of the sanatorium that once crowned that Magic Mountain.

There is one bright spot in the developing world's deathlock with TB: Brazil. That may sound odd. Nearly a quarter of the 185 million Brazilians live below the poverty line, where contagions rage, and some 620,000 have AIDS, a third of all cases in Latin America. But unlike almost every other developing nation, Brazil has not seen the overall TB infection rate spike - much less a runaway outbreak of MDR-TB - among the most vulnerable population. The reason is as simple as it is controversial: free meds for HIV and AIDS patients. In 1996, the Brazilian congress passed a law requiring the government to hand out antiretrovirals to anyone with HIV free of charge. Drug companies were disgruntled, not least because Brazil browbeat them into slashing prices for the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals, the state of the art medicine used to combat the virus. The same policy encouraged nearly two dozen other developing countries to take on the biggest pharmaceutical corporations as well.

No one ever claimed Brazil was a health spa, of course. After a brief lull, mosquito-borne dengue fever has come raging back, including the killer hemorrhagic variety. An outbreak of micobacteriosis, which causes a nasty hospital infection, leaves lasting surgery scars and can withstand all but the most drastic disinfectants, is on the loose. And while in theory anyone may be treated at the country's public hospitals, chronic underfunding has apparently forced brain surgeons in Rio de Janeiro to resort to common power tools, like home drills, in the operating rooms.

Still, it's hard to argue with success. A team of international scientists recently crunched the numbers and found that Brazilians living with AIDS who reguarly took the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals had 80 percent lower TB infection rates than did patients who were not treated. (The study reviewed data from 1995 to 2001, but researchers say that the trend holds to this day.) The bottom line is that systematic use of  cutting edge HIV/AIDS medicine may be one of the best ways to keep this millennial scourge at bay. That may not be the best news for Big Pharma's shareholders. But it ought to give public health authorites a shot in the arm.

Judging by all the negative ink on biofuels lately - they're too expensive, energy inefficient, not so green, or so we're told - you'd think the rush to rescue the world from sky-fouling fossil fuels is a sham. That would be a shame. If there's any truth to the latest buzz out on what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will say next month when it weighs in with another major report on the state of the planet, then we're already cooked.

Or so says Tim Flannery, the Australian scientist and author of "The Weathermakers" who has become the rock star of climate scholars. Though not a member of the climate panel, Flannery pored over the official numbers recently and came away shaken.

Speaking to Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Lateline, on Oct. 9, he said that the forthcoming panel report will show that the earth's atmosphere has already passed the danger zone for the levels of gases which are driving planetary climate change. In fact, we passed the threshold two years ago - a decade earlier than had been predicted - when, thanks to acclerated burning of fossil fuels, the concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane reached 455 parts per million.

That's the level that scientists say will bring on at least a two degree centigrade (3.6 farenheit) hike in averagle global temperatures, after which all manner of environmental havoc is likely. Higher ocean temperatures, for instance, will not only hasten the melting of polar ice sheets and dangerously lift sea levels, but likely provoke megadroughts and wildfires in many of the world's rainforests.

What's causing the emissions to spike? Prosperity, says Flannery. Not just in China and India; economic growth has been the rule in many nations. And what's driving the wheels of progress? Mostly those expensive, inefficient, and not so green fossil fuels. In fact, instead of redcuing their earth-baking greenhouse gas emissions, the fastest growing nations in the developed and developing world alike are "recarbonizing," as energy wonks put it, thanks to the usual suspects: coal and oil.

There's been no official comment so far from IPCC insiders. Maybe they're  trying to catch their breath.

Yesterday's news that Apple had sold more than a million iPhones in less than three months--after dropping its price by one third to $399 last week--felt pretty anticlimactic. So, Apple's newest most covetable device is flying off the shelves? So what?

Actually, says one of the world's leading Internet security experts, David Perry, who stopped by Newsweek's London office yesterday, the iPhone's record sales are a "very big deal." While we're all thoroughly accustomed to PC viruses--which are now being circulated at the rate of 15,000 per day, compared to just 5 per month in 1990--to date there has yet to be any major cell phone virus.

Photo: John Moore/AP

It was 111 degrees Fahrenheit for Americans in Baghdad today (43 Celsius for the Iraqis), and it's supposed to be hotter - 117 F or 47C - for the rest of the week. That's in the shade, of course, for those who can find it. Such infernal temperatures are pretty much the same every year. Nothing is quite as predictable in Iraq as the summer heat.

But another simple fact is just as evident: the death toll among fighters tends to decline in the dog days, because nobody wants to have to do battle in that stifling air, and those who have to go into combat tend to move more slowly and cautiously.

On the other hand, to the extent public records are available on non-governmental Web sites like iraqbodycount.org and  icasualties.org (the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, with which Newsweek did a major presentation on the Internet in December of last year), it seems that the civilian death toll, mainly from terrorist attacks, actually may remain high or rise in the heat of summer. Security forces are thinner on the ground. Roadside bombs can be put out at night and suicide drivers don't usually have to brave the hellish heat for very long before they punch their ticket to Paradise.

An over-reaction? Okay, it's clear that Foot and Mouth is a nasty disease with sad and expensive consequences. Already more than 100 cattle have been slaughtered to prevent contagion. But these days Britian barely figures as an agricultural nation. As a fraction of the country's economic output farming figures behind tourism or financial services. The ordinary citizen's attachment to the land is almost wholly sentimental.