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Russia and China Vie for Najin Port Russia is trying to strengthen ties with North Korea, citing a "China threat" in Korea and the Far East. The Gudok, the daily newspaper of Russian Railways, said in an article Tuesday, "If China takes control of Najin port in North Korea, Russia may suffer huge losses in the project to link the TKR (Trans-Korea Railway) and the TSR (Trans-Siberian Railway)." Gudok is published by Vladimir Yakunin, the president and CEO of Russian Railways and one of the closest allies of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Sources say the report can be viewed as...

In a lesson for the ages about political grandstanding, Rep. John Garamendi said, "Nine multinational ocean shipping companies formed three consortiums to raise prices on American businesses and consumers by over 1,000% on goods coming from Asia," as he and other members of the Swamp proudly passed the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022, which former NIT-League president Ed Emmett has rightly called "a cure that's worse than the disease." Never mind that the containership lines have actually operated these alliances, known as Vessel Sharing Agreements, for over a generation, strictly for the benefit of the consumer. The accusatory term...

News AnalysisA recent report from the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) showed that China’s control of global container manufacturing poses a threat to supply chains and economies worldwide.On March 30, FMC Commissioner Carl Bentzel released his assessment (pdf) of China’s control of container and intermodal chassis manufacturing after a year of research, market observation, and synthesis interviews.The report points out that the three largest Chinese manufacturers control over 86 percent of the world’s supply of intermodal chassis. Those same companies manufacture over 95 percent of the 44.2 million containers used in global shipping, including U.S. domestic train and truck intermodal...

The Port of Los Angeles has announced plans to begin charging ocean carriers a dwell fee for empty containers lingering in marine terminals to combat congestion, adding pressure for carriers to pick up empties for transport back to Asia. The fee will be similar to the import container dwell fee announced in late October, which has yet to be implemented. The new empty fee is still subject to approval by the Los Angeles Harbor Commission and would take effect on January 30, 2022, at the discretion of the Executive Director.

Join with fellow FREEPERS to pray for AMERICA: For those in Authority in Government, Family, Military, Business, Healthcare, Education, Churches, and the Media. I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone: for kings and all those in authority that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. 1 Timothy 2:1-2 Religion Forum threads labeled “Prayer” are closed to debate of any kind.

The penalties on 58,900 containers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are officially racking up charges. These containers were part of the 60,000 containers the ports alerted the ocean carriers last Monday to move or face a daily $100 penalty per container, increasing in $100 increments per day.American Shipper reached out to both ports for updates on the removal of the “lingering” containers.Photo of Pier 400 courtesy of Port of Los AngelesAccording to Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka, there are a total of 84,000 total imports on docks waiting to be transported, a total...

Halloween is going to be an extra scary day for the logistics world. A total of 60,000 containers have been marked as beyond the dwell time and need to be moved out of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach by the carriers or the penalties will start racking up. A total of 33,000 containers need to be rolled out of the Port of Los Angeles and 27,000 loaded containers for the Port of Long Beach — a whopping $2,633,940,000 value in trade.Carriers were put on notice this week when the ports announced that, starting next Monday, a daily...

A California longshoreman, who works at California’s San Pedro Bay Port Complex, reportedly said the labor unions are exascerbating the supply chain crisis. Identified as Alfred to Yahoo News, the longshoreman blamed Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) for “cutting the work” at the port, which is increasing the jam of containers stuck at sea and on the docks. “They’re [PMA] the ones who are not training: skilled positions. [That] means crane operators, top handler drivers, trans drivers,” said Alfred. “They’re the ones who are keeping the ships out there at sea anchored.” Despite the delays and mounting shipping costs American families...

The global supply chain is in complete tatters. Tens of thousands of items and services are in short supply or can’t be found at all. This is leading to higher prices, a/k/a cost-push inflation, and a general decrease in the purchasing power of all fiat currencies, be it the US Dollar, the Japanese Yen or the Euro. The choice of items to include here could fill volumes. We picked things that often appear very obscure, such as ketchup or pallets and yet are staples of modern life. Pallets Wooden shipping pallets are required to transport almost anything imaginable including: paper...

Will prolonged disruptions shift the pattern of trade? Agiant ship wedged across the Suez canal, record-breaking shipping rates, armadas of vessels waiting outside ports, covid-induced shutdowns: container shipping has rarely been as dramatic as it has in 2021. The average cost of shipping a standard large container (a 40-foot-equivalent unit, or feu) has surpassed $10,000, some four times higher than a year ago (see chart). The spot price for sending such a box from Shanghai to New York, which in 2019 would have been around $2,500, is now nearer $15,000. Securing a late booking on the busiest route, from China...

Triton: Cost of newbuild container hits ‘unprecedented’ $3,800 per TEUWhen will the container capacity crunch finally ease? For an early indicator, keep an eye on production of the humble 40-foot dry cargo box. If the volume and cost of new containers pull back, supply chain pressures are abating. Unfortunately for beleaguered cargo shippers, these bellwethers now imply the opposite: that the scramble for container capacity is growing even more intense. New container prices still risingOn Tuesday, the world’s largest container-equipment leasing company, Triton International (NYSE: TRTN), announced record results and provided the latest intel on box production.Price per TEU for...

The Port of Los Angeles announced Tuesday that it had earned the distinction as the first port in the Western Hemisphere to handle more than 1 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in a single month. May was the busiest month in the 114-year history of the United States’ busiest port. The Port of LA moved a total of 1,012,248 TEUs, up 74% from May 2020, when COVID-19 had stalled global trade. The Port of Long Beach and South Carolina Ports Authority last week also reported record Mays. And the Georgia Ports Authority announced it had had 10 consecutive months of...

CAIRO - A giant container ship remained wedged sideways in the Suez Canal on Friday as signs of its potentially huge global economic toll emerged with shipping rates rising and cargo ships being rerouted away from the vital waterway. The Ever Given, a Panama-flagged vessel whose length is nearly the height of the Empire State Building, has been stuck in the canal since Tuesday, creating a massive traffic jam on both sides of the waterway that connects Asia to Europe. On Friday morning, the canal’s service provider, Leth Agencies, said in a tweet that the Ever Given “remains grounded in...

SUEZ, Egypt, March 27 (Reuters) – Efforts to dislodge a giant container ship blocking the Suez Canal had allowed its stern and rudder to move on Saturday, but it remained unclear when it could be refloated, the head of the canal authority said.

Are virtual machines (VM) more secure than containers? You may think you know the answer, but IBM Research has found containers can be as secure, or more secure, than VMs. James Bottomley, an IBM Research Distinguished Engineer and top Linux kernel developer, writes: One of the biggest problems with the current debate about Container vs Hypervisor security is that no-one has actually developed a way of measuring security, so the debate is all in qualitative terms (hypervisors 'feel' more secure than containers because of the interface breadth) but no-one actually has done a quantitative comparison. To meet this need, Bottomley...

Kenya on Saturday inaugurated the first part of a new container terminal at Mombasa which is expected to boost by 50 percent the volume of cargo handled by East Africa’s largest seaport.

Linux is all grown up. It has nothing left to prove. There's never been a year of the Linux desktop and there probably never will be, but it runs on the majority of the world's servers. It never took over the desktop, it did an end-run around it: there are more Linux-based client devices accessing those servers than there are Windows boxes.Linux Foundation boss Jim Zemlin puts it this way: "It's in literally billions of devices. Linux is the native development platform for every SOC. Freescale, Qualcomm, Intel, MIPS: Linux is the immediate choice. It's the de facto platform. It's...

In the still-developing container world, it seems like new functionality is being released every time you turn around. Engineers are trying to solve the questions of how to make containers run faster, smarter, and take up fewer resources.This week's hack comes from Iron.io, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) company. In a word: Microcontainers.Last week, Iron.io co-founder Travis Reeder explained how to reduce the size of Docker Images by using what they have dubbed Microcontainers, following up on a post in December on how to build your own Docker Image."A Microcontainer contains only the OS libraries and language dependencies required to run...

Major gateways say more ocean containers are shipping out empty, a sign of weak demand in troubled global markets and the tough sell American exporters face abroad ___ One of the fastest-growing U.S. exports right now is air. Shipments of empty containers out of the U.S. are surging this year, highlighting the impact the economic slowdown in China is having on U.S. exporters. The U.S. imports more from China than it sends back, but certain American industries—including those that supply scrap metal and wastepaper—feed China’s industrial production. Those exporters have suffered this year as China’s economy has cooled. In September,...

On July 21 at OSCon, Google announced that Kubernetes, its open source container deployment and management tool, was ready for the big time -- general use in production environments -- by releasing Kubernetes 1.0. Google wants Kubernetes to be in every one's cloud, and with the 1.0 release it's already well on its way. Chances are many of you don't know Kubernetes, but the odds are even greater that you use it every day. That's because every time you run a Google program -- Search, Gmail, Google Docs, whatever -- you are running it in Google's own container technology, lmctfy...