Smart Reads November 6, 2013

By Luisa Frey
♦ “Assad is using starvation to commit his murders”, says FT columnist David Gardner. The many Syrians who face starvation are victims of a “silent massacre”, which does not seem to call as much international attention as the use of sarin nerve gas did.
♦ In Roula Khalaf’s opinion, Egypt is in the wrong path and deposed president Mohamed Morsi’s trial is a clear sign of that. As military rule creeps back, it seems that a much broader intolerance is setting in.
♦ Somalia’s pirate king Mohamed Abdi Hassan wanted to be immortalized on the big screen as a seafaring bandit and got arrested instead. He was caught by the police in Belgium, where he wanted to consult on the film based on his life. Known as “Afweyne” (“big mouth”), the pirate made Somali piracy into an organized, multimillion-dollar industry.
♦ Somali piracy is so lucrative that the Global Post asks: “Do you earn more money than a Somali pirate?” The World Bank, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and Interpol’s Maritime Piracy Task Force estimate that the owners of 179 ships hijacked between since 2005 paid out ransoms totalling over $400m.
♦ In Murder on the Mekong, a report supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Jeffe Howe writes about the largest massacre of civilians outside of China in over half a century. It all happened in 2011 in the Golden Triangle – the borderlands between Burma, Laos and Thailand – and was first explained by Thai military commandos as a regular confrontation with drug runners.