The pirates of Africa’s most failed state get ever more ambitious, and dangerous

TO BOARD the Sirius Star, one of the world’s largest oil tankers, Somali pirates had to haul themselves up ropes tied to grapnel hooks the height of London’s Big Ben, with the 330-metre (1,100 feet) long ship pitching all the while in the tropical swell. Then there was the location, way out in the high seas, fully 450 nautical miles off the coast of Kenya. The feat of vertiginous thuggery will be taken everywhere as proof of what is possible; it was the biggest ever catch by any pirate, anywhere in the world.

As if to underline the point, the tanker’s capture on November 15th, with $110m of crude oil bound for America, was followed by several other hijackings by Somali pirates, including a Thai tuna boat, a Turkish chemical tanker, an Iranian freighter loaded with wheat and a Greek bulk carrier. Against this, an Indian warship, the INS Tabar, reported that it had blown a Somali pirate “mother ship” to smithereens in retaliatory fire on November 18th. Warships from several countries now patrol the Somali coast. ...

No good faith, no good future

IT HAS been more than two months since President Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) signed an agreement to share power. The prospect of the long-standing foes governing together briefly raised hopes that the lot of ordinary Zimbabweans might at last become less wretched. But following weeks of bickering, the deal is all but dead. Mr Mugabe says he will name a new cabinet regardless of the continuing lack of agreement. The MDC says that it will not participate unless it gets its fair share of seats.

The main issue is control of the interior ministry, which controls the police. Mediators have proposed sharing the ministry between the MDC and Mr Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, but the MDC has rejected that. Having won most votes in March’s election the opposition controls a majority in the National Assembly for the first time since independence. Under the power-sharing deal, Mr Tsvangirai’s party is supposed to control 13 ministries and a small MDC splinter led by Arthur Mutambara was assigned three. ZANU-PF is allocated 15. Mr Tsvangirai’s group insists on getting the interior ministry because Mr Mugabe’s party is to keep the army and intelligence services. ...

It’s official (nearly): Iraq’s government wants America’s army out by the end of 2011

WHEN General David Petraeus, now America’s most celebrated military commander, arrived in Iraq in 2003 at the head of an airborne division, he asked a journalist: “Tell me how this ends?” For years nobody had a good answer. But now, thanks to a military pact between America and Iraq, a conclusion is in sight: America’s war in Iraq will end in three years’ time, with American troops being shown the door and Iraqi politicians competing to claim credit for getting rid of the foreigners.

A “withdrawal agreement” approved by the Iraqi cabinet on November 16th requires American troops to pull out of Iraqi towns and cities by the end of June next year, and to leave Iraq altogether by December 31st 2011. Those deadlines, said Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, in a televised address, would not be extended. The deal was not perfect, but marked “a solid start for Iraq to regain its full sovereignty in three years.” ...

The latest efforts to end the fighting and help the refugees

IT HAS been a week of shuttle diplomacy and sporadic fighting in the east of Congo. General Laurent Nkunda, the Tutsi rebel commander who says he is also a self-styled evangelical Christian pastor, cemented his position in North Kivu province bordering Rwanda and Uganda, while promising to allow in food and medicine for 250,000 civilians displaced in recent fighting. Mr Nkunda was frozen out of recent talks in Nairobi, so the world visited him this week in the portly form of Olusegun Obasanjo, retired Nigerian president and now the United Nations’ special envoy.

Once a wily soldier himself, Mr Obasanjo pressed a plan to slow the fighting long enough to allow the deployment of 3,100 extra UN peacekeepers to eastern Congo. They are perhaps the UN’s last roll of the dice, intended to shore up the 17,000 blue helmets already spread thinly across a country nearly the size of western Europe. To help Mr Obasanjo, Mr Nkunda promised to abide by a ceasefire and withdraw his rebels from two fronts. He was acting from a position of strength. With the lakeside town of Goma encircled by his men, and with new funds from captured mines and checkpoints, Mr Nkunda can afford to show willing. Even while he ordered a pullback, fighting continued, almost all of it to Mr Nkunda’s advantage. ...

Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has had a good run. For how much longer?

MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, Iran’s president, predicted in March that Barack Obama would never reach America’s highest office. “They will find a way of keeping him out of the White House, even if the entire American nation votes for him,” he said. In July Mr Ahmadinejad ventured another prediction. The price of oil, he declared, would never fall below $100 a barrel.

Maybe Mr Ahmadinejad’s foresight was clouded by wishful thinking. The arch-conservative faction he represents has thrived during the Bush administration. America’s belligerence allowed Iran’s president to pose as a heroic underdog while record oil prices enabled him to pay for a binge in public spending. ...

A secular entrepreneur is elected to run the holy city

THE hollowness of Israel’s rhetoric about “united Jerusalem” is never starker than on local election day, when the city’s 537,000 adults, together with the rest of Israel, can go to the polls to pick their new mayor. Among Jerusalem’s Palestinians, who make up some 30% of the citizenry, hardly anyone bothers to vote. In East Jerusalem, the mainly Arab part of the city captured and annexed by Israel in 1967, polling stations in schools and public buildings stay yawningly empty, apart from a trickle of municipal employees and their families.

This time was no different, except that most of the Palestinians who did vote in Jerusalem on November 11th gave their support to Arkady Gaydamak, a colourful but mysterious ex-Russian oligarch who has been trying to make his way in Israeli politics despite a French warrant for his arrest on gun-running charges. With the help of Palestinians, he got a paltry 3.5% of the overall vote. Palestinian commentators attributed his modest popularity in their community not just to his wealth but to the fact that he doesn’t look Jewish. ...

And the political cost of ending the ceasefire in Gaza

THE angry crowds are back on the streets of Gaza, along with the corpses wrapped in symbols of martyrdom and the militiamen in battle fatigues firing their guns. For five months the teeming Palestinian enclave has been quiet, thanks to a ceasefire agreed in June by Israel and Hamas. But that may all be coming to an end.

The new cycle of violence, rocket-firing, skirmishes and economic blockade started on November 4th, when Israeli forces made an incursion to destroy a tunnel which, they say, was to be used to abduct a soldier. In the view of Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Israeli prime minister, it is not a matter of whether full-scale hostilities resume, but when. ...

Why post-apartheid South Africa, once a shining beacon of human rights, is cosying up to nasty regimes around the world

ANOTHER African summit, another disappointment. Any hope that the change of leadership in South Africa might bring change across the border in Zimbabwe has proved in vain. The new president, Kgalema Motlanthe, may sound tougher than his ever-appeasing predecessor, Thabo Mbeki. But he seems no more willing to turn the screws on his errant northern neighbour, Robert Mugabe.

Regional leaders meeting on November 9th all but kowtowed to Mr Mugabe over the terms of September’s power-sharing deal with the opposition. This was intended to arrest the country’s political and economic collapse but has foundered, particularly over who should run the interior ministry, and by extension the police. Morgan Tsvangirai, who won more votes than Mr Mugabe in the presidential poll in March, says his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) should be in charge, given that the ruling ZANU-PF controls the army and intelligence organs. ...