Given all the reporting on piracy off the Horn of Africa, we hear very little about another crisis – the flood of refugees fleeing the instability and chaos of Somalia’s clan wars. Last year 74,000 people crossed the Gulf of Aden in smugglers’ boats to reach Yemen, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.
On Monday the USS Winston S. Churchill attempted to render aid to an overloaded skiff drifting in the Gulf of Aden with 85 refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia. The skiff’s engine had broken down. According to a statement released by the Navy:
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Yesterday we posted that scientists are not sure where all the plastic floating in the vast Atlantic and Pacific garbage patches is going. Sadly, the answer is probably not that a big vacuum cleaner is vacuuming the stuff up to recycle it. Nevertheless, here is a great story about 
We have previously 
The 
This sounds completely nuts. It might possibly work but there is the question of scale to be addressed. Hurricanes, or typhoons in the Pacific, need warm water to provide energy to the storm. The idea is to built a fleet of submarines to dive in the path of a typhoon and pump cold water to the surface to deprive the storm of its source of power. (I’m not making this up.)
The 
Every year the