Free Republic

Egypt’s first female ship captain has revealed she was blamed by hordes of online trolls for blocking the Suez Canal despite being on a different ship hundreds of kilometres away. Marwa Elselehdar, 29, was working as a first mate in command of a ship in Alexandria when she started seeing online rumours which claimed she was to blame for the huge container ship that became wedged, blocking one of the world’s major shipping routes on March 23. Despite already captaining ships, Ms Elselehdar will take her final exam to attain a full Captain rank next month and hopes that she...

YONAGUNI, OKINAWA PREF. - A team of Japanese and Taiwanese paddlers in a dugout canoe on Tuesday successfully replicated a hypothetical human migration between Taiwan and Okinawa about 30,000 years ago. During the two-day, 200-kilometer voyage from Taitung County, southeastern Taiwan, to Yonaguni Island, Okinawa Prefecture, the team of five paddlers — one Taiwanese, three Japanese men and one Japanese woman — relied solely on the stars, sun and wind for their bearings. They departed Taiwan on Sunday afternoon in their 7.6-meter-long, 70-centimeter-wide wooden canoe, crossing the Black Stream, which begins off the Philippines and flows northeastward past Japan. The...

Graves of the Pacific's First Seafarers Revealed Richard Stone INDO-PACIFIC PREHISTORY ASSOCIATION CONGRESS, 20-26 MARCH 2006, MANILA Little is known about the Lapita peoples, the first settlers of the Western Pacific, other than their ubiquitous calling card: red pottery fragments with intricate designs. But in what's being hailed as one of the most dramatic finds in years, researchers at the meeting offered a glimpse of the first-known early Lapita cemetery. "This is the closest we're going to get to the first Polynesians," says archaeologist Matthew Spriggs of Australia National University (ANU) in Canberra, a member of the excavation team. Face...

Mon, Sep 16 2002 12:39 AM AEST Ancient warrior grave unearthed in Lebanese port Archaeologists have unearthed several Bronze Age graves, including that of an ancient warrior interred with his axe, in the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon. Excavation team director Claude Doumet Serhal said the excavations are "among the most important archaeological projects in Lebanon as they are taking place in the centre of the city of modern Sidon." He also said the warrior's grave dated back to the Middle Bronze Age, around the second millennium BC, and included an unusually well preserved bronze duck-bill axe with a...

THIRTY-five years or so ago, one of the main reasons I decided to leave school at the age of 16 and go to sea was the prospect of 'seeing the world'. Pulling out all the stops: International shipowners' organisations and seafarers' trade unions are now planning a joint campaign to persuade governm In the event I wasn't disappointed. During my time as a cadet and subsequently deck officer at, almost, the end of the era of conventional general cargo services, I had lots of opportunity to go ashore, to look around and to get away from the ship. In...

They include American citizens, cleared by the U.S. Coast Guard. Many are Houston residents. Yet when they dock at American ports and coastal refineries, they are being treated like security risks, unable to leave the confines of their tankers after days at sea. They are also fed up, and on Thursday, seafarers, the Coast Guard and private industry met to discuss what can be done about what the seamen perceive as overzealous security implemented after the Sept. 11 attacks. What's happening is that port and plant officials, fearful that terrorists could use their loading docks as entry points to carry...