Reporter's Preteen Daughter Gets Pirates to Talk

After a BBC reporter failed to get Somali pirates on the phone, her 12-year-old daughter begged for a chance to call them. "Mummy, mummy," she said from the back seat of their car. "I want to phone the pirates." At the end of her rope, the frazzled mother agreed—and soon heard her girl giggling on the phone with pirates on-board the Sirius Star. The next day, the reporter told a BBC producer, who was inspired to call the pirates again.

“We have no life. Our last resource is the sea, and foreign trawlers are plundering our fish,” a pirate said when the BBC called. He added that the crew was in good shape. "They can move from place to place. They can sleep in their own beds, they even have their own keys. The only thing they're missing is their freedom to leave the ship." (More Somalia stories.)