The Economist Intelligence Unit, a division of the Economist Magazine,  has released it’s annual survey that ranks the top 130 cities in the world by cost of living, and for 2005 Oslo was the most expensive and surprise, surprise, Tehran was the least expensive city to do business in. New York City was the most expensive city in the United States coming in at 27th position.

Latin America saw inflation hit their currencies and moved up the list while the United States saw a modest increase and most of it’s cities moved down the charts.

The 10 Most Expensive Cities in the World

1 Oslo, Norway
2 Tokyo, Japan
3 Reykjavik, Iceland
4 Osaka Kobe, Japan
4 Paris, France 
6 Copenhagen, Denmark
7 London, UK
8 Zurich, Switzerland
9 Geneva, Switzerland
10 Helsinki, Finland

The Economist  goes on further to explain how the cost of living is determined:

There are two major reasons why a city’s cost of living index will change over time: exchange rate movement and price movement. Since a common currency is required in making a comparative calculation all local prices are converted into dollars, which emphasises the role of currency movement. If, for example, a currency strengthens or inflation pushes the price of goods up, so the relative cost of living in that country will also rise.

 

What may of been the result of the attack on the Seaborne Spirit, a Somalian pirate ship was taken into custody on the high seas by the USS Winston S. Churchill.

A suspected pirate ship was shadowed, shot at and finally surrendered to a U.S. warship after an eight-hour, slow-speed chase off the Somali coast, the navy announced yesterday.

The high-seas drama, not far from where gunmen in fast launches fired a rocket-propelled grenade and swept bullets across the decks of a posh cruise liner last November, was the first evidence of stepped-up efforts by Western navies to safeguard shipping from the increasing threat of seaborne hijackings and robberies.

The U.S. Navy said one of its guided-missile destroyers, the USS Winston S. Churchill, fired warning shots after the rusting, nondescript and unnamed vessel ignored multiple warnings to stop. via The Globe and Mail

Time for a little USA Jingo-ism: We tend to forget that the United States spends a great deal of time and money ensuring that international waters remain safe for travel and commerce. Congratulations to the sailors who captured this ship, and made cruise passengers (and cruise companies) very happy.

Eco-tourism is the new cool way to travel for the trendy. While not something that I would actively pursue, you can not argue with the concept. Essentially, eco-tourism is a form of travel that is built around assimilating within the local environment and people. It is not lets go teach the natives how to be “ecologically correct”, but more to lets explore the natural beauty of a country in its own way. Lots of hiking and exploring the jungles, as opposed to beaching and pina coladas. 

 Impressed by the success of countries like Costa Rica and Ecuador, which have lured flocks of travelers for mountain treks and jungle safaris, a growing number of regions across the globe are turning to eco-tourism as a strategy for economic growth.

Omar Bongo, the president of Gabon, a developing country in west central Africa, has set aside about 10 percent of the country’s landmass for 13 national parks. Green Visions, a tourism and environment protection company, based in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, is pioneering an eco-tourism development plan in Central Europe with “green adventures” that promote environmental principles and support local businesses. Even Greece, better known for its pumping night life and archaeological monuments, devotes a section of its national tourism Web site to “Greek nature” and eco-tourism.

Over the last four years, at least 48 countries, from Puerto Rico to Portugal, have created or started to define a national strategy for eco-tourism development, according to a 2004 eco-tourism report by Mintel International Group, a market-research company based in Britain.via New York Times.

Monarch Airlines had a problem with a drunken passenger. He was being abusive to both flight attendants and passengers. The beauty of the situation, they dropped him off in the middle of a desert island, to make his own way home! Monarch Airlines is in my Top 10 airlines list from now on.

Monarch Airlines has yet to decide whether to sue him for the cost of the unscheduled diversion, estimated at “many thousands of pounds”.
The unnamed passenger’s difficulties began on Tuesday evening at 35,000 ft when he began abusing the cabin crew of flight ZB558 from Manchester. He refused to calm down and then turned his attention to the other 210 passengers.
Eventually the pilot decided that he posed a risk to safety and had to be removed.
Rather than continue for a further 45 minutes to Tenerife he diverted his Airbus A321 to Porto Santo. Within moments of the plane touching down the passenger was escorted to the terminal. Last night he remained a castaway on the Portuguese-controlled island. His New Year home is a mere 10 miles long by three miles wide with a population of 4,000. There is little entertainment apart from walking on the sand dunes.Telegraph .

It looks like there is a ship that is sitting off Somalia and sending pirates to attack ships and Cruise ships that come within range. This “Mothership” has been associated with 5 attacks in the last few days.

At the center of the wave of recent attacks is a mysterious, so-called mothership that has been spotted three times since late July drifting off the northeast coast of Somalia.

“We understand that this is the vessel that is launching the speedboats that go to attack the victims,” Mwangura said. “We are still trying to discover the name of this ship, its owner, its nationality and the identity of the crew on board.”

The IMB, which called the situation completely out of control, confirmed a mothership had been involved in the attacks, which took place well off the coast.

The piracy watchdog has warned merchant ships to stay at least 200 nautical miles away from the Somali coast — an admonition that has gone unheeded.

After two years of relative calm, 32 pirate attacks have been recorded since mid-March, including raids on ships carrying supplies for the U.N. World Food Program, according to the IMB. via CNN

This story is amazing, pirates attacking in the 21st Century, all the while the ships are using modern age weapons to repel them. It is almost out of a science fiction novel.

So are you safe on a cruise ship? That is a question racing around the travel industry at the present time.

“No ship apart from a naval vessel is really prepared to protect against a waterborne assault of the sort against the Cole,” said Kim Petersen, president of maritime security consultant SeaSecure and a former cruise line security official. “Even those ships that are best equipped to cope with such a threat, in the case of the Cole, are in a difficult situation.”

Cruise industry officials said the Spirit’s successful efforts to repel the attackers validate security plans that all ships must have in place under U.S. and international law. They point out that no passenger was injured on the Spirit and just one crew member had minor injuries.via Washington Post

 

Got to love technology, especially when it is used by the good guys on the bad guys.

Congratulations to the security personnel on the Seabourn Spirit and their use of the sonic cannon on the invaders of the ship.

The crew of a luxury cruise ship used a sonic weapon that blasts earsplitting noise in a directed beam while being attacked by a gang of pirates off Africa this weekend, the cruise line said Monday.

The Seabourn Spirit had a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, installed as a part of its defense systems, said Bruce Good, a spokesman for Miami-based Seabourn Cruise Line. The Spirit was about 100 miles off Somalia when pirates fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns as they tried to get onboard.

The subsidiary of Carnival Corp. was investigating whether the weapon was successful in warding off the pirates, he said. The ship’s captain also changed its course, shifted into high speed and headed out into the open sea to elude the pirates, who were in two small boats, he said. He had no further details.

Device maker American Technology Corp. said earsplitting “bangs” were directed by trained security personnel toward the pirates. That, combined with ship maneuvers, caused the attackers to leave the area, the company said.

The LRAD is a so-called “non-lethal weapon” developed for the U.S. military after the 2000 attack on the USS Cole off Yemen as a way to keep operators of small boats from approaching U.S. warships.

Or why not to cruise near Somalia. This is an amazing story.

A cruise ship sailing off Somalia has beaten back gunmen in speedboats who opened fire on it in an apparent pirate attack which terrified passengers. At least two boats closed in on the Seabourn Spirit, firing automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades at the cruise liner. But crew took evasive action, repelling the attackers without returning fire. One crew member was lightly injured in the early-morning incident in waters notorious for pirate attacks.

‘Rocket hit ship’

The Bahamian-registered ship was carrying 302 passengers and crew, most of them are believed to be Americans as well as some Britons. “My daughter saw the pirates out our window,” passenger Edith Laird from Seattle in the US told the BBC News website in an e-mail from the ship. “There were at least three RPG that hit the ship, one in a stateroom four doors down from our cabin,” she said. via the BBC