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China sent 39 aircraft and three warships on military drills toward Taiwan on Thursday in a show of force against the self-governing democratic island nation. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said officials detected the aircraft and vessels around 6 a.m. and were closely monitoring the military drills. Thirty of the Chinese aircraft crossed over the median line of the Taiwan Strait, the ministry added in a Twitter post. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the name for China’s forces, sent various warplanes in a southwest direction toward the southeastern region of the island before doubling back. The PLA has recently conducted...

Slump in imports, cargo diversions to other ports help shrink queue of dozens of vessels The backup of container ships off Southern California’s coast that was at the heart of U.S. supply chain congestion during the Covid-19 pandemic has effectively disappeared. The queue of ships waiting to unload at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach fell from a peak of 109 ships in January to four vessels this week ... . U.S. import volumes are declining ... The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together handled 686,133 loaded import containers in September, down 18% from a year...

New York City shelters are so overwhelmed by the migrant crisis that Mayor Eric Adams is considering using cruise ships as temporary housing. “We examined everything from the legality of using any type of cruise ship for temporary housing,” Hizzoner during an interview on WCBS Sunday. “We’re looking at everything to see, how do we deal with this?” Adams made the suggestion just hours before The Post reported that a record number of 9 buses carrying migrants traveled into the city. Each bus typically carries between 40 and 50 migrants. The influx is crippling the New York shelter system. Full-time...

Europe's worst drought in years has pushed the mighty river Danube to one of its lowest levels in almost a century, exposing the hulks of dozens of explosives-laden German warships sunk during World War Two near Serbia's river port town of Prahovo.

153 ships stuck in queues off North American ports, up 66% from early June.. ... North American port congestion has just re-entered record territory. The offshore traffic jam is once again as bad as it’s ever been. In January and February, when North American congestion previously peaked, there were just under 150 container vessels waiting off the coastlines. Two-thirds were in the Los Angeles/Long Beach queue. As of Thursday morning, there were 153, the majority off East and Gulf Coast ports. Whereas the earlier West Coast pileup was centralized, highly publicized and relatively easy to track, today’s ship queue is...

Anchorages continue to fill with waiting container ships off East and Gulf Coast ports, where vessel queues have now far outgrown those off the West Coast. Along all three coasts combined, the number of waiting container vessels remains exceptionally high.There were 125 container ships waiting off North American ports on Friday morning, according to an analysis of ship-tracking data from MarineTraffic and queue numbers from California.Container ship pileup offshore of Savannah, Friday 8 a.m. Map: MarineTrafficThat’s down 16% from 150 waiting ships in January, when West Coast congestion peaked, but up 36% from 92 ships a month ago.The ship queue...

Endurance: Shackleton's lost ship is found in Antarctic Scientists have found and filmed one of the greatest ever undiscovered shipwrecks 107 years after it sank. The Endurance, the lost vessel of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, was found at the weekend at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. The ship was crushed by sea-ice and sank in 1915, forcing Shackleton and his men to make an astonishing escape on foot and in small boats. Video of the remains show Endurance to be in remarkable condition. Even though it has been sitting in 3km (10,000ft) of water for over a century,...

Port congestion — which dramatically worsened in the second half of 2021 — appears to have temporarily peaked, although it’s too soon to tell whether it’s a reprieve before the next runup, a high-level plateau, or the beginning of the end. The number of container ships waiting for berths at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach fell to 78 on Tuesday, the lowest tally in three months. That’s down down 23% from 101 ships on Feb. 1 (the average for the month of January was also 101) and down 28% from the all-time high of 109 ships on...

The search warrant executed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation at MedCure Inc headquarters here on November 1 is sealed, and the bureau and the company declined to comment on the nature of the FBI investigation. But people familiar with the matter said the inquiry concerns the manner in which MedCure distributes body parts acquired from its donors. MedCure is among the largest brokers of cadavers and body parts in the United States. From 2011 through 2015, documents obtained under public-record laws show, the company received more than 11,000 donated bodies and distributed more than 51,000 body parts to medical...

The supply chain problem is solved. How? Because the problem is not getting worse. Theoretically, that's a good thing. However, the absence of goods and the overwhelming presence of government-printed money means that the American economy is in for a world of hurt. Fewer ships are parked and waiting off the California coast than two months ago, and about the same number of ships are daily waiting during the last two weeks. In other words, the system has achieved stability because things are either getting better or are not getting worse depending upon the time frame observed. Of course, a...

LOS ANGELES – The FBI knew about Chi Mak's retirement plans, what his dining room looked like and what he allegedly took home from work. The 66-year-old engineer for a Southern California defense contractor and his 57-year-old brother, Tai Mak, were under surveillance for months. Agents tapped the Maks' phones, planted listening devices in their cars, sifted through their trash and installed a closed-circuit camera above Chi Mak's dining-room table. Investigators suspected Chi Mak was taking restricted documents about naval technology from his job at Anaheim-based defense contractor Power Paragon and passing them to his brother, who was going to...

President Biden told Americans that the supply chain is in “very strong shape” ahead of Christmas. Speaking from the White House Wednesday, Biden said his administration has partnered with the private sector to “ensure the store shelves are stocked.” But new shipping data shows snarled supply chains are worsening, and it could take months to untangle them. New shipping data from the busiest U.S. port complex, Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, shows 96 container ships idled offshore, waiting to unload cargo. FreightWaves’ Greg Miller described a new queuing system for vessels as pure optics, which reduces the number of...

Hong Kong (CNN Business)Ships in Chinese waters are disappearing from industry tracking systems, creating yet another headache for the global supply chain. China's growing isolation from the rest of the world — along with a deepening mistrust of foreign influence — may be to blame. Analysts say they started noticing the drop-off in shipping traffic toward the end of October, as China prepared to enact legislation governing data privacy. Usually, shipping data companies are able to track ships worldwide because they are fitted with an Automatic Identification System, or AIS, transceiver. This system allows ships to send information — such...

LONDON/HONG KONG, Nov 17 (Reuters) - Ships in Chinese waters are disappearing from tracking systems following the introduction of a new data law in China, frustrating efforts to ease bottlenecks that are snarling the global economy, according to three shipping sources directly impacted.

The logjam at California's ports for ships to wait is now as long as 17 days - a new record amid the continuing supply chain crisis just weeks before Black Friday and the holidays usually turn spending into overdrive.. There were as many as 83 ships at anchor and in a holding pattern outside ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach as of Friday night, officials said. The nearly 17-day wait is double the wait time from just two months ago.

In this historic fleet news update, we are reporting on the November 2021 sinking of USCGC Alert. For the map of museum ships: https://www.hnsa.org/map-view/ For our previous video on threatened museum ships: https://youtu.be/h_kkoY52JzU To support USS The Sullivans and their efforts to drydock that ship: https://buffalonavalpark.org To support Battleship New Jersey, go to: https://www.battleshipnewjersey.org/v...

Let’s face it.Joe Biden is not a rocket scientist, and he has a long history of being wrong on virtually everything he touches.But someone is going to have to help me understand his latest move that just makes absolutely no sense to me.Biden previously said he was going to try to solve the supply chain crisis.His first move — saying that the Port of Los Angeles was going to operate 24/7 – hasn’t been achieved yet and hasn’t seemed to do much of anything to change the situation. Indeed, after he said that, there were a record number of ships...

Pandemic-driven global trade disruptions and an increasing number of shipping companies abandoning their own vessels over mounting debts including older vessels deemed too costly to repair has led to the rise in the phenomenon of crewmembers simply being abandoned at sea, often left to fend for themselves as they await pay which sometimes never comes. A Friday investigative report in The Wall Street Journal has detailed some of the shocking stories of tanker crew members left adrift after companies abandoned vessels or sold or transferred them, or couldn’t pay mounting debts, while trying to survive oftentimes on little food even...

From anchorage stats to forward arrivals, ocean bookings, and inventory-to-sales numbers, all the latest data paints the same picture: The U.S. congestion crisis has never been more severe than it is now — and it’s getting worse. Hope for any relief this year has vanished. French carrier CMA CGM is the latest in a long line of market participants to push back its timeline on normalization. Capacity constraints “are expected to continue until the first half of 2022,” CMA CGM warned on Friday. Alarmingly, America’s import system — which is already stretched to the limit — looks like it will...

A record number of container ships are stuck waiting to enter California’s two largest ports as labor shortages and COVID-19 disruptions continue to roil a supply chain that’s being pushed to its limits ahead of the busy holiday shopping season. A total of 46 freight ships are at anchor or in a drift area waiting to enter the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which operates the Vessel Traffic Service for those two ports, reported late Monday evening. “Trend at anchor and in drift areas is essentially steady next 3 days,” the group...