ORIGINAL GANGSTAS OF THE SEA Pirates Grip World Attention!

Day three (or four, depending on which time zone you are in) of the tense international pirate standoff off Somalia is bananas! They have been sitting on a hijacked ship of Ukrainian tanks bound for either Kenya or Sudan (could someone clear up whose arms are being traded for whose hostages, please?) for days now, while several U.S. warships have them boxed in on the coast. Now: "A U.S. defense official says three pirates are believed to have been killed in a gunfight among themselves on the ship they hijacked off Somalia's coast." But the pirates say this is an anti-pirate lie! The pirate spokesman says everything is fine. The Somali pirates are local heroes who cleaned up dirty coastal waters and who have become perhaps a little bit greedy!

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