Dubai ports giant DP World is set to build an inland port in Jammu and Kashmir as part of plans by the emirate to invest in the Indian territory, Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha said on Thursday.

The Centre last year said Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), would invest in infrastructure and other projects in the disputed region claimed by India and Pakistan but ruled in parts by both.

Sinha, who is in Dubai this week to promote investment, said DP World would soon visit the 250 acre site earmarked for the inland port facility.

“We will finalise it shortly,” he told Reuters, describing the project as a “firm commitment” by state-owned DP World.

A DP World spokesperson said the company had a “productive meeting” with Sinha on Thursday and that it was preparing a proposal for the project.

The announcement last October that Dubai would invest in the region was the first by any foreign government since Kashmir’s autonomy was revoked in 2019 and the Muslim-majority state was divided into two territories directly ruled by New Delhi.

Emirati newspaper Khaleej Times reported this week that Dubai developer Emaar Properties would build a mall in Srinagar, the main city in Jammu and Kashmir.

Lulu Group, an UAE-headquartered company headed by an Indian billionaire, also plans to set up a food processing hub there.

But investment in the heavily militarised Jammu and Kashmir is fraught with risk. There are frequent attacks by militants, while the Indian government has at times faced international criticism for widespread crackdowns there by security forces.

“As far militancy is concerned, we are dealing with it … and I can assure it will be dealt (with) fully” said Sinha, who insisted the region was a safe place for foreign investment.

Source: marasinews

An extraordinarily undiplomatic communique from the EU has been circulated to International Whaling Commission members. It calls upon the Faroese Government to immediately provide the same strict cetacean protection as the EU Member States. But the EU has neither a legal right nor a moral responsibility to tell the Faroe Islands, a decidedly non-EU autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, to stop hunting dolphins and whales.

But when it comes to appeasing the animal rights lobby, the EU, it seems, feels unburdened by protocols that otherwise compel it to respect other nations’ cultures and legal systems. The EU is waving its big stick at the Faroe Islands because last year’s one-day grind at Skalabotnur beach on the island of Ejsturoi corralled a record 1,423 white-sided dolphins.

The scale of this spectacular event, with its transparent but humane and regulated killing of wriggling mammals, sparked outrage among squeamish animal rights activists. So, what’s new? Certainly not the accusation in the communique that the Faroe Islanders were observed using “cruelty” and “torture” in last year’s grind. As the EU statement itself acknowledges:

“Even before this particular grind, grinds have been considered gruesome and unethical by parts of the civil society [they mean unaccountable NGOs] and by most of EU Member States.”

We should be thankful to the EU for forewarning us that no amount of regulatory measures short of prohibition will suffice. But saying this does not mean that we shouldn’t be concerned about what happened in the grind on September 12, 2021.

Source: bairdmaritime

By Brendan Murray (Bloomberg) The Port of New York and New Jersey is working to clear a small but rare bottleneck of container ships anchored off the coast of Long Island as Covid-19 cases among dockworkers collide with a pandemic-fueled surge in cargo volumes.

“We have seen a spike in the number of labor going out into quarantine,” Port Authority Director Sam Ruda said in an interview this week. The average wait at anchorage for container carriers was 4.75 days in the final week of 2021, compared with an average of 1.6 days for all of last year.

Jim McNamara, a spokesman for the International Longshoremen’s Association, said in an email that the number of its members unavailable to work because of Covid is running about 350 a day. Still, he called the impact “slight” because some crews are returning from quarantine or illness and others are available from cruise-ship terminals.

The New York area’s port terminals, the busiest on the East Coast, have largely avoided backlogs like those gripping the twin gateways of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, where scores of vessels are still running into delays of more than three weeks to offload.

Ruda credited the waterfront workforce and other stakeholders that run 24-7 operations for keeping short the anchorage waits for New York. But some factors have converged to require the queue: omicron’s spread across the region, year-end holiday time off for workers, and an increase in charter vessels needing one-time berth space.

Add those issues to what was already a busy 2021 and a backlog was unavoidable. The port has been running at full capacity for almost two years, handling almost 27% more volume in November 2021 than it did in November 2019.

“We’ve essentially had five years of cargo growth in the space of 18, 20 months or so,” Ruda said.

The number of containers per ship visit is also notable. From January through October last year, the New York-New Jersey terminals greeted 298 vessels capable of carrying 10,000 to 15,000 20-foot containers, up from 55 four years earlier, when a $1.7 billion project to raise the Bayonne Bridge to accommodate those bigger vessels was completed.

Ruda said the port started 2022 with 12 to 13 ships at anchor and by the middle of this week, the tally was down to nine. By mid-afternoon Friday — as a snowstorm interrupted operations — the port listed 11 ships at anchor.

“On an order of magnitude, it does seem quite small, but it does have our attention,” he said.

Source: gcaptain

Seaborne LNG imports to the EU have grown in size and importance of late, reversing the trend set for the most part of 2021. In a recent note, shipbroker Banchero Costa said that “global seaborne LNG (liquified natural gas) trade has been very disappointing in 2021. Already in 2020 trade slowed down considerably, given the impact from the Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions. In the 12 months of 2020, total seaborne exports of LNG increased by a very modest +1.5% year-onyear to 362.8 mln tonnes, according to vessel tracking data from Refinitiv. Whilst this still represented an increase from the 2019 figure, the growth rate was significantly slower than the +11.1% increase recorded in 2019 and the +9.1% y-o-y in 2018. In the first 11 month of 2021, things were significantly worse”.

According to the shipbroker “in the period of January to November 2021, global LNG exports actually declined by a massive -9.1% y-o-y to just 299.6 mln tonnes, down from 329.7 mln tonnes in the same period of last year. Nevertheless, these totals mask significant differences in demand from the different importers. In Jan-Nov 2021, LNG imports to Mainland China still managed to increase by a very modest +1.7% yo-y to 59.8 mln tonnes. This is a significant slowdown from previous years, when volumes increased by +10.5% y-o-y in the same period of 2019, and by +14.0% y-o-y in the same period of 2018. Imports to Japan in Jan-Nov 2021 declined by -8.6% y-o-y to 61.1 mln tonnes. Japan remains the top importer of LNG in the world, but it’s margin over China is now wafer thin. Volumes to South Korea increased by +5.2% to 38.0 mln tonnes so far this year. To India they declined by -18.1% y-oy to 19.2 mln tonnes”.

Source: hellenicshippingnews

In September 2020, the stranding of the Bangladesh-flagged ship Maa, which ran aground in Visakhapatnam, India, was turned into an opportunity and turned into a touristic spot.

Source: news2sea

On Sunday morning, the boxship MSC Shannon sustained an engine room fire at a position in the Gulf of Finland, disabling her and prompting a large-scale emergency response.

At about 0200 hours Sunday, the Finnish Coast Guard received a distress call from the MSC Shannon reporting a fire in the engine room. The vessel was located about 11 nm to the south of Jussarö, a small island near the mouth of the Gulf of Finland. She had 24 crewmembers aboard and about 1,200 tonnes of containerized cargo – including dangerous goods like flammable liquids and oxidizers – and was under way on a voyage from Russia to Le Havre.

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Finnish authorities mounted an emergency response, mobilizing the patrol ships Turva and Uisko, along with two rescue helicopters. However, the MSC Shannon’s crew managed to bring the fire under control on their own, and did not require firefighting assistance.

At about 0800, a maritime patrol aircraft conducted an overflight and found no signs of pollution. No injuries were reported aboard the ship.

Tracking provided by Pole Star indicates that MSC Shannon successfully anchored off Sommaro, Finland, where she remained on Sunday evening. Janne Ryönänkoski, a rescue official for the Helisinki region, told local media that the shipowner is in talks to arrange an emergency tow. However, the MSC Shannon’s crew will first attempt to make repairs and resume the voyage under the vessel’s own power.

Source: assafinaonline

A team from the Transportation Safety Board has been assigned to investigate the fire that destroyed containers aboard a freighter now moored off the south coast of Vancouver Island.

A statement from the board says the team will “gather information and assess the occurrence” aboard the MV Zim Kingston.

The fire was reported in a row of containers stacked on the deck of the ship shortly after the vessel was caught in a severe storm on Oct. 22, near the entrance to Juan de Fuca Strait.

Source: cbc

Shipping has become an essential mode of cargo transportation in the world and the number of global ships is also on the rise, along with the increasing marine environment pollution caused by ship waste. Various countries and regions have attached increasing importance to the pollution caused by ship waste in recent years. How to address ship waste management from international shipping has been brought to the official agenda of the international community. This article starts with the ship waste management framework in the international maritime sector and compares and analyzes the regulatory challenges of ship waste management faced by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and typical countries and regions such as China, the United States, and the European Union, by analyzing the issues in their international maritime ship waste management regulations, including inconsistent and unclear standards, inadequate law enforcement efforts, and blind spots in high seas supervision. Targeting these challenges, this article proposes measures and directions for future supervision and stresses the necessity to unify ship waste discharge standards, improve port facilities, clarify standards, strengthen supervision and law enforcement, and establish a global monitoring system. This article lists the challenges of international maritime ship waste management and proposes practical countermeasures, which will help the international community better supervise ship waste discharge and reduce marine environment pollution.

MOSCOW — 

Russia’s Black Sea naval forces practiced destroying enemy targets on Tuesday as Moscow bristled at the presence of two U.S. warships in the area.

President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that Russian forces could observe the USS Mount Whitney navy command ship “through binoculars or in the crosshairs of its … defense systems” and complained about NATO activity near Russia’s borders.

On Tuesday, the Black Sea fleet said its ships had rehearsed destroying enemy targets and that their air defense systems had been put on alert at its bases in Novorossiysk and on annexed Crimea, the Interfax news agency reported.

“They … destroyed airborne targets of a mock enemy with anti-aircraft missile weapons and artillery,” it said in a statement.

Russia has previously warned Western countries against sending warships to the Black Sea and approaching the coast of Crimea, the peninsula it annexed from Ukraine in 2014. Russia considers Crimea part of its territory, but the peninsula is internationally recognized as part of Ukraine.

The U.S. Navy said on Monday that the USS Mount Whitney had arrived in Istanbul and that it would soon join forces with other ships in the Black Sea.

“Following this port visit, Mount Whitney will join USS Porter (DDG 78) in the Black Sea to further enhance collaboration between U.S. and NATO forces at sea,” the U.S. Navy said in a statement.

The Kremlin on Tuesday rejected as a “low-quality fake” a U.S. media report about a Russian military buildup near Ukraine, although it said it was up to Moscow where it moved troops around on its territory.

The Politico news outlet reported that commercial satellite photos taken on Monday confirmed recent reports that Russia is once again massing troops and military equipment on the border with Ukraine after a major buildup this spring.

Ukraine said on Monday it had not observed any increase in Russian troops or equipment near the border.

A NATO official said: “NATO is vigilant and routinely monitors Russian force movements. It’s important to ensure transparency and avoid any miscalculation.”

Russia has repeatedly accused NATO of carrying out provocative activities close to its borders. The alliance says it is determined to reinforce the security of member states close to Russia following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and its backing for pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.

Source: voanews