By Zachary Kussin

As Jason McClure writes in this week's magazine, piracy off the coast of Somalia has become a major maritime headache. Just last week, on Aug 20, another three vessels -- a Malaysian palm oil transport, a Japanese tanker, and a German cargo ship -- were hijacked. The machine gun-carrying pirates threatened uncooperative crewmembers with death, locked them up and steered the vessels to pirate bases on the northern Somali coast. Shortly thereafter, they began ransom negotiations with the ships' owners. The Gulf of Aden, which lies off Somalia and leads to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, is now considered to be the world's riskiest area for international shipping, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a non-profit organization dedicated to fighting marine crime. So far in 2008, 15 vessels have been hijacked off Somalia alone.

Lawlessness and heavy traffic -- 7.5 percent of world shipping passes through the Gulf each year -- makes the area a fat target for pirates. They can operate in Somalia's territorial waters with impunity. The Somali government, unable to patrol the Gulf on its own, asked the United Nations for help back in June, and the result was Resolution 1816, which allows the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Pakistan and Canada to help patrol the dangerous waters. The measure will help cargo containers and other commercial ships, of course, but its intended beneficiaries are the ships delivering humanitarian assistance to Somalia, which depends on food aid to feed close to three million of its desperately poor inhabitants.

The multilateral initiative hasn't lived up to expectations, however. In its three months on the job, the Canadian security contingent, which will head up the patrol until December, has helped prevent just two hijackings. And as of now, no naval force has agreed to take over from Canada once its six-month rotation is up. Pottengal Mukundan, the IMB's director, attributes the lack of participation "to items in other nations' foreign policy agendas, such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which surpass piracy." For now, ship crews will have to keep rolling the dice, or avoid the Gulf of Aden altogether.

DENVER, Colo. -- When times are bad, Democrats tend to sour on trade. So when Austin Goolsbee, an economic adviser to Barack Obama, reportedly told Canadian government officials that Obama wouldn’t really “redo” NAFTA (despite campaign claims), the campaign had to repudiate his comments. Obama also opposed the Colombian and South Korean free-trade deals. Yet while the American business establishment might see this as a red flag, Tom Donohue, the lead spokesman for American business, doesn’t take it too seriously. To him, Goolsbee’s comment was a “Kinsley gaffe”: when someone accidentally tells the truth.

Donohue told me he’d come to Denver to find common ground with Democrats (global warming, infrastructure investment) and remind them that, when they don’t see things his way, the Chamber—which represents three million companies—“can raise a lot of hell.” But he wasn’t lying awake at night imagining the death throes of free trade under President Obama. So Obama isn’t likely to “renegotiate” NAFTA? “When he started campaigning he might have been, but when he’s finished he won’t be,” Donohue says. “When he looks at NAFTA and sees that the largest sources of oil and gas are Canada and Mexico, he’ll forget all about a redo.”

In fact, the real bogeyman of business is “card check,” a proposed rule that would allow unions to organize more easily, partly by forgoing secret ballots. Unions, he says, will spend $500 million on this election, and he’s desperate to have enough business-friendly senators to keep a filibuster. “More Democrats than Republicans remind me of the importance of that, because they know if they’re owned by trial lawyers and the unions, they won’t be around long.”

Notably, there are no Obama advisers secretly telling businesspeople that Obama won’t really sign card-check legislation.