Caption from the U.S. Defense Dept.: "A boat crew from the guided-missile cruiser USS Chosin approaches three men who were spotted clinging to a piece of wood in the Gulf of Aden this week. Chosin is the flagship of Combined Joint Task Force 151, a multinational effort to conduct counter-piracy operations under a mission-based mandate to actively deter, disrupt and supress piracy off the coast of Somalia."
Highly trained detection dogs are being used help to determine the population status of the Javan rhino in Vietnam, in an attempt to save one of the world’s rarest mammals from extinction."
Pirate attacks on shipping lanes around the Horn of Africa have shown no sign of relenting, and the nations policing the seas are struggling to find solutions in a mission that seems to be covering a growing area and time frame.
Four people have been arrested in Peru on suspicion of killing some 60 people to sell their fat and other human tissue to Italian co-conspirators for cosmetic use in Europe, authorities say.
A suite of five ancient crocs, including one with teeth like boar tusks and another with a snout like a duck's bill, have been discovered in the Sahara by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno. The five fossil crocs, three of them newly named species, are remains of a bizarre world of crocs that inhabited the southern land mass known as Gondwana some 100 million years ago.
Sereno, a professor at the University of Chicago, and his team unearthed the strange crocs in a series of expeditions beginning in 2000 in the Sahara. Many of the fossils were found lying on the surface of a remote, windswept stretch of rock and dunes. The crocs galloped and swam across present-day Niger and Morocco when broad rivers coursed over lush plains and dinosaurs ruled.
Hardening of the arteries has been detected in Egyptian mummies, some as old as 3,500 years, suggesting that the factors causing heart attack and stroke are not only modern ones; they afflicted ancient people, too.
Somali pirates released 36 crew members and their Spanish fishing vessel Tuesday, the government here said, but officials declined to comment on reports that Spain had paid a ransom of nearly $3.5 million.
Around 40 families of a forested tribal village in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh fled home Sunday after wild elephants went on rampage bringing down several mud-built houses in their village, reported the Indo-Asian News Service.
A traditional buzkashi sport competition in Afghanistan's capital is scheduled next week in honor of President Hamid Karzai's inauguration, the national sport federation's head, Hadji Rashid ,said on Saturday.
The competition, which will be held November 19-21, consists of players on horseback who try to hold on to a headless goat as long as possible while riding full gallop to gain sympathy from the viewers. Other players attempt to tear the goat carcass from its "owner" using practically any means. The carcass is sometimes thrown over a goal line, or slam-dunked into a vat.
