Bobby Ghosh, Columnist

At Last, Some Good News From Yemen

The UN is going forward with an operation to prevent a disastrous oil spill from a rusting tanker in the Red Sea.

April 3, 2023 at 4:00 AM UTC

Corrected

April 4, 2023 at 1:29 PM UTC

Bobby Ghosh is a senior editor in the digital weekend team. Previously, he was a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion, where he wrote mostly about international affairs and culture.

A happy ending in sight?
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It’s been so long since there was any cause for optimism in Yemen that you might want to cross your fingers before you read on: The likelihood of an environmental catastrophe in the Red Sea, one of the country’s many calamities, is abating.

The United Nations Development Programme has purchased a ship to take 1.1 million barrels of crude oil that has been sitting in a decrepit supertanker, SFO Safer, off the port of Ras Isa in Yemen’s west coast. It has contracted SMIT Salvage BV, a Dutch firm specializing in marine salvage, to extract the oil and remove the Safer to safety.