What would possess you to get on a cruise ship headed for the pirate-laden Gulf of Aden is beyond me. But apparently, that's what 650 or so passengers did, only to have my fears fulfilled and be attacked by... pirates. Their Rome to Singapore voyage on a U.S. vessel was impolitely interrupted by gunfire on Tuesday.

Luckily, the good ship avoided capture. As CNN dramatically put it: "The ship took evasive maneuvers and accelerated to its full speed of 23 knots or 27 mph." That's some speedy driving.

But as we all know by now, others have not been so lucky. A Ukranian weapons ship and a Saudi oil tanker are still being held for ransom.

Back on land, the chaos ensues. The Ethiopian troops who have occupied the country since December, 2006, are pulling out next month, and the government is nervous it won't be able to stay in power (no wonder, since it was installed by Ethiopia to begin with). Peacekeepers are nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, the former Islamic government is gaining lost territory.

Hell of a cruise.

Photo: ERIC CABANIS/AFP/Getty Images

Impressive. Somali pirates have now succesfully hijacked a Saudi oil tanker -- their biggest, though apparently not their first, such vessel. A crew of 25 is on board. This is just one of several pirate incidents this week.

Even more impressive? All this goes on under the watch of U.S., Russian, NATO, Indian, and now South Korean and EU ships. 

The world's largest shipping line, Odfjell SE, owns the ransomed tanker and now says that its shipping route will change -- steering around Africa's cape rather than across the perilous Gulf of Aden. Since 4 percent of the world's oil supply passes through the pirate-infested route, a change of direction would be no small shift. Two million barrels of oil were lost to pirates today, and now shipping costs -- and probably oil prices, to some extent -- will go up.

Under normal circumstances, the world would be pressuring the Somali government to reign in the renegade ship-lifters. But that government is no shape to do so. It's falling apart as Islamic insurgent groups gain terrority.

I can think of a few pirates who are smiling right now.

Samuel Aranda/Getty Images

Remember the old Carmen Sandiego computer games, where each case began with Carmen and her gang carrying out an absurd heist of, for example, Niagara Falls or the Great Pyramids? I was reminded of these games upon reading that thieves in Jamaica had made off with an entire beach.

Hundreds of tons of white sand were removed from a planned resort on Jamaica’s shore and, three months later, the police still have not found the suspects or the sand. The scope of the operation – over 500 truck-loads of sand were hauled away - have raised speculation that the police or a rival hotel was complicit in the heist. The crime has turned political, with the opposition People National’s Party using the opportunity to hammer away at corruption in the beachfront development business.

People have complained for a long time, of course, that sand has a way of getting into the strangest places. This is, I suppose, just one more.

ALI MUSA/AFP/Getty Images

Thought that pirates belonged to the realm of children's books and a thick-eyelinered Johnny Depp? Well, there's nothing storybook at all about this story: Small-scale pirates off the coast of Somalia have attacked 62 ships this year, 25 of them hijackings.

On Sept. 25, the increasingly bold pirates caught their biggest ship yet, a Ukrainian boat carrying an estimated $30 million in weapons and ammunition. The pirates are asking for $20 million in ransom.

So, whence do such medieval-sounding avengers hail?

As someone who tried to write her undergraduate thesis on Somali pirates, I'm kind of perversely thrilled that they've become such a hot topic. Some quick background: For the last two decades, Somalia's politics have been one big power vacuum, with any number of unsavory characters (both Somali and foreign) vying to fill the gap. (I will refrain from expounding further, but a good update can be found here.)

About 10 or 15 years ago, fishermen, too, noticed that the power vacuum wasn't just a land-lubber phenomenon. As the pirates themselves describe in a fascinating interview with the New York Times, they call their merry band "the Central Region Coast Guard," and characterize it as a sort of ersatz navy that merely protects fishing vessels from outsiders eager to steal their catch. Of course, they have held humanitarian aid, yachts, and now weapons shipments hostage. And as for the ransom thing, who wouldn't ask for a bite, when there is nothing else to eat?

This time, the Somali pirates are likely to get their cut of at least a few million dollars. Ransoms paid to various captors this year alone have cost $30 million. But five U.S. warships and another Russian vessel on the way will ensure that no funny business takes place. Many had feared that the pirates would sell the weapons to terrorists on a dangerously well-connected Somali black market.

I'm sure they would love to do that, but since they attacked from wooden fishing boats, it's not likely they could even begin to offload the weapons. Tanks -- unlike pirates -- don't do so well on the high seas.

Correction: This original blog stated that Dickinson wrote her thesis on Somali pirates. Alas, she attempted to, but ended up focusing more broadly on Somali maritime security and U.S.-Somali relations, instead. We regret the error.

European governments frequently accuse Russia of playing pipeline politics with its energy supplies, but a group of enterprising smugglers found a way to keep a different kind of liquid fuel flowing into Eastern Europe.

Estonian authorities recently discovered a two-kilometer underwater pipeline that was set up to pump cheap Russian vodka under a reservoir into Estonia where it could be sold at a markup without export tarrifs. The smugglers managed to pump 6,200 liters of the stuff under the border before they were shut down.

With this supply cut off, Western diplomats will, no doubt, soon be dispatched to strong-arm Caucasian states into an amibitious trans-Caspian project to pump Uzbek vodka into southern Europe.

FILE; JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images

There's a fascinating article in today's New York Times about India's controversial practice of using electronic brain scans for lie-detection in interrogation. Two Indian states have been using electroencephalograms (EEGs) to interrogate criminal suspects since 2006, but this summer was the first time a judge handed down a conviction based on the data. Here's how the procedure works:

This latest Indian attempt at getting past criminals’ defenses begins with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, in which electrodes are placed on the head to measure electrical waves. The suspect sits in silence, eyes shut. An investigator reads aloud details of the crime — as prosecutors see it — and the resulting brain images are processed using software built in Bangalore.

The software tries to detect whether, when the crime’s details are recited, the brain lights up in specific regions — the areas that, according to the technology’s inventors, show measurable changes when experiences are relived, their smells and sounds summoned back to consciousness. The inventors of the technology claim the system can distinguish between people’s memories of events they witnessed and between deeds they committed.

Based on this scan, a woman who claims to be innocent was convicted in June of poisoning her fiancé.

Neuroscientists have widely condemned this application of EEGs, which has not been sufficiently peer-reviewed to have gained wide acceptance. It's not too far-fetched, though, to see it as the future of criminal investigation. Officials from Singapore and Israel have expressed interest in the Indian program and similar procedures have been developed in the United States.

Before we condemn India for using such an unproven technology in murder trials, it's worth pointing out that U.S. law enforcement agencies still regularly administer polygraph tests even though the Supreme Court ruled them unreliable a decade ago. And of course, there's bullet lead analysis, which the FBI used for four decades before it was discredited.

Let's just be sure these new technologies really work this time around before we start putting them in front of juries.

The drug wars in Mexico have sunk to a new low.

Yesterday, a gang of hooded gunmen shot eight patients to death and wounded six others at a rehab center in Ciudad Juárez in what looks like part of a drug-gang feud in the cartel-ridden city. The gunmen reportedly stormed the center (during a Wednesday night prayer service, no less), then picked out their victims and took them to the back patio to be shot. The gunmen then opened fire inside the rehab center, leaving behind 60 shell casings.

FILE: ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/Getty Images

These shootings bring the city's total of drug-related killings to a whopping 40 -- for just this week. A major drug transit point, the border city has always run rampant with cartels and crime. But the recent outbreak of murders and kidnappings is something new. So far this year, Ciudad Juárez's murder toll sits just below 800, most of them drug-related.

Things don't look too good for Felipe Calderon, who vowed to crack down on Mexico's drug traffickers at the beginning of his term. This year's wave of violence might just be a reaction to his stepped-up efforts to combat crime, but the Mexican president has some house-cleaning to do. Just today, six members of the government's top organized crime unit were arrested for supposedly leaking information to drug traffickers.

With Mexico still awaiting some $400 million in U.S. drug-war aid, Calderon better step up his efforts to kick out the bad guys soon.

SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images

As if we needed more bad news from Afghanistan. Afghanistan's drug lords are now recruiting foreign chemists to help refine raw opium into heroin, the U.N. warns:

Most of the chemists come from Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, the UN says, and are going to some of Afghanistan’s most troubled areas to oversee the mixing of poppy resin with smuggled industrial chemicals to produce heroin of the highest quality.

Christina Orguz, Afghanistan country director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said Afghanistan’s drug lords were behaving like businessmen and recruiting the best talent available. Afghanistan now supplies more than 90 per cent of the world’s heroin.

The refining process requires large amounts of otherwise-legal chemicals, smuggled across the border into Afghanistan. Earlier this year, a shipment was seized in -- you guessed it -- Pakistan.

ABDELHAK SENNA/AFP/Getty Images

The BBC has a pair of interesting stories today about an awful practice in Nigeria and other African countries where conmen pose as sports agents and dupe young, would-be soccer players out of thousands of dollars. These fraudsters tell youths -- many of whom live in the slums of Lagos, Accra and other cities and see soccer as a way to escape poverty -- that they can guarantee them a trial with a club in the English Premiership, the most competitve soccer league in the world.

Trafficking in African youths has become a growing concern for soccer's governing body, Fifa, as middlemen can bypass work permit restrictions and bring teenage Africans into European countries, where they are then sold to clubs for large sums of money, or simply discarded on the streets of major European cities.

In an accompanying video, an undercover reporter from the BBC -- posing as the parent of a talented teenaged soccer player -- can be seen negotiating with one of the swindlers in a Lagos hotel. After promising the undercover reporter that his son will be given a trial with Manchester United, the man is confronted with a television crew before being carted off by Nigerian police.

Nigeria is not the only country affected. Just over a year ago, 34 young boys from Ivory Coast were promised trials in Europe, borrowed the money to pay their bogus agents, and were then robbed and held against their will in neighboring Mali.

Sepp Blatter, the President of Fifa, has accused Europe's wealthy soccer clubs, who often turn a blind eye to this despicable practice, as commiting "social and economic rape" of Africa.

He's right. European clubs are often the subjects of the wildest dreams of young African soccer players. They have a responsibility to see that these dreams are not abused by criminals.

BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images

Today, apparently, is International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is launching a new three-year campaign called "Do drugs control your life?"

But instead of releasing statements from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon or posting video clips in Serbian on YouTube, maybe the office should spend more time lobbying the Security Council and the IAEA.

The ongoing standoff with Tehran over its nuclear aims is threatening a rare cooperative venture between Iran and the West: Tehran's campaign to stem opium and other drug trafficking from Afghanistan through Iran to Europe. In a little-noticed provision in the incentives package offered to Tehran on June 14, Western countries threatened to cut off further aid to the anti-drug efforts unless Iran agrees to halt its uranium enrichment.

Such measures would harm anti-drug efforts in the Middle East and Europe, U.N. officials say. Iran caught approximately 900 tons of Afghan drugs in 2007, and UNDOC Director Antonio Maria Costa warned that a "heroin tsunami" could hit Europe if aid were cut. And it could be devastating for Iran as well. Despite devoting 30,000 troops (like the fellow in the photo above) to drug patrols in border areas, the Islamic Republic already contains the highest proportion of heroin and opium addicts in the world, experts believe.

Here's a question for all you expert readers out there. What happens when you burn 260 tons of hashish?

Afghan counternarcotics officials said Wednesday that they uncovered 260 tons of hashish hidden in 6-foot-deep trenches in southern Afghanistan in what one DEA official said appears to be the world's biggest drug bust.

The hashish, found in the southern province of Kandahar on Monday, was worth more than $400 million and would have netted the Taliban about $14 million in profits, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said.

The hashish weighed as much as 30 double-decker London buses, ISAF said. The drugs were burned on site. Hashish is a concentrated form of marijuana.

The Balkans, once Europe's "powder keg," has just been crowned "one of the safest [regions] in Europe" by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in its report Crime and Its Impact on the Balkans.

According to the report (full pdf), the region has relatively little problem with conventional crime. In fact:

Croatia has a lower murder rate than the United Kingdom. The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia had less homicide per capita than Portugal or Sweden. Romania was safer than Finland or Switzerland."

But that doesn't mean Croatia is all kittens and roses. Rather than taking the form of street crime, the report explains, the region's ugly transition from communism and years of war has lingered on in the form of organized crime networks and illicit trade. The region's two biggest problems today are trafficking of drugs and humans (predominantly sex trafficking).

About 100 tons of heroin enters the region each year, of which 85 tons are sold on to the West for a gross annual flow worth $25 to 30 billion -- more than the annual GDPs of Albania, Macedonia, and Moldova put together.

On the human trafficking front, the UNODC calls the Balkans an "epicenter" of trafficking in Europe. While the report repeats an outside estimate that 120,000 women and children are moved through the region each year, it quickly points out the utter lack of information on the real magnitude of the problem. (For insight into the world of sex trafficking and those trying to fight it, check out this story and this recent essay in FP).

Take-away message: The Balkans may be Europe's new Mayberry, but only if you're not vulnerable, young, and female.

ROBERT ATANASOVSKI/AFP/Getty Images

For months, Greece has been threatening to veto Macedonia’s admittance into the EU, all because the two can't agree on the name issue.  But with violent outbreaks pock-marking Macedonia in the weeks before its June 1 elections, it appears the tiny Balkan state might just knock itself out of contention before Greece even gets the chance.

Last month, Macedonia’s parliament moved to disband and hold snap elections after months of deadlock (and the occasional headlock) over reform issues and rights for its 25 percent Albanian minority.

Since the beginning of the campaign last Sunday, a member of the Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA) has been stabbed to death and members of the rival Democratic Union for Integration (DUI), have been beaten, shot at, and had their offices attacked. In the latter cases, the DUI has blamed the violence on DPA supporters.

EU leaders have expressed concern over Macedonia’s pre-election troubles, saying that "violence has no place in an election campaign."  

This seems like an awfully understated response on the part of the EU, for whom Macedonia is quite close to the front of its new membership queue.  A candidate country since 2005, Macedonia is on track for EU membership in the coming years. But if the country can’t better control its pre-election tensions, is it really ready?  After all, as Bulgaria has shown, EU membership is not just going to make crime and corruption disappear.  But on the flip side, the promise of an EU future may be the only thing keeping countries like Macedonia on track toward an eventually stable government.

So back to Greece and its veto-happy approach to its northern neighbor. Is prolonged regional instability really worth it for one little modifier?

Just a few ordinary days in modern Mexico...

This weekend:

Gunmen killed 17 people over the weekend in the southern coastal state of Guerrero in a wild hunt for the head of the state cattlemen’s association, who has gone into hiding, the authorities said Monday.

On Saturday morning, several men dressed as commandos and carrying assault rifles opened fire on a cattlemen’s meeting at a hotel in Iguala, killing seven ranchers but missing the leader of the group, Rogaciano Alba Álvarez.

The next day, eight trucks full of armed men pulled up outside a house on Mr. Alba Álvarez’s ranch in Petatlán. The men asked for the owner of the ranch. His family and ranch hands denied knowing his whereabouts.

The gunmen then lined people up against a wall and opened fire, killing 10 people, including two young sons of Mr. Alba Álvarez, Alejandro and Rusbel, a witness told The Associated Press. Then they kidnapped a teen-age girl believed to be Mr. Alba Álvarez’s niece or daughter and fled, authorities said.

Last week:

TIJUANA – A confrontation between rival criminal gangs left 13 dead and nine injured early yesterday in gunbattles that started along a major thoroughfare and continued near a private clinic where police exchanged gunfire with injured suspects.

Saturday:

Police have recovered the remains of seven men who were killed and dumped along a road in northern Mexico.