When the Mole was going through the childhood stage of wanting to be a train driver one week and astronaut the next, a career on the ocean waves as a pirate was always high on the list. Well, opportunities in the sector have never been so good. As this column is being typed, US Navy snipers have just shot dead three Somali pirates who were holding the captain of a 17,000-ton American cargo ship hostage aboard a lifeboat.
Our reporters have followed the extraordinary spate of piracy incidents off the Horn of Africa in recent months and marvelled that no concerted effort has been made to tackle the problem on the ground.
