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Global shipping firms under pressure to cut carbon emissions are experimenting with an age-old technology: sails to harness ocean winds and reduce reliance on costly fuels.

starting January 1, levels of air-polluting sulphur in marine fuel must be below 0.5 percent, according to new International Maritime Organisation standards — a sharp drop from today’s 3.5%

“Our 136-metre ship costs 30% more than current ships,” Zanuttini said, “but we compensate by using 80 to 90% less fuel.”Wind-powered vessels are also slower — a hard sell for some shipowners and clients who want their raw materials and merchandise to move as quick as possible.

the grounding of Ever Given also has exposed how the complex ownership structures in global shipping might make it difficult to hold anyone accountable. The Ever Given is operated by Taiwan-based shipping company Evergreen Maritime. Evergreen charters the ship from a Japanese firm; a Dubai-based company acts as the agent for the ship in ports; and the ship flies the flag of Panama

Flags of convenience, or open registries, have more lax labor and environmental regulations, and lower thresholds for safety and insurance provisions.

Last summer, the Wakashio, another ship owned by a Japanese firm but flagged to Panama, ran aground in Mauritius, spilling oil into the island’s sensitive marine ecosystem. The fracturing of ownership and operation across different legal jurisdictions and national boundaries also makes it much harder to assign responsibility for accidents such as the grounding of Wakashio and Ever Given.

Russian warships entered the Barents Sea on Wednesday to rehearse protecting a major shipping lane in the Arctic, its Northern Fleet said on Wednesday, as Moscow stages sweeping military exercises involving all of its fleets.

The exercises will also include manoeuvres in the Mediterranean, the North Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk, the northeast Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific.

designed to assess troops' combat readiness in the Arctic and their ability to protect the Northern Sea Route

Many diplomats have been dismayed by the Trump Administration; since the Inauguration, sixty per cent of the State Department’s highest-ranking diplomats have left. But Feeley broke with his peers by publicly declaring his reasons

Mariela Sagel, a prominent columnist with La Estrella, wrote to me, “Feeley’s lightning passage through Panama was as devastating to the self-esteem of Panamanians as it was for the Waked businesses. After less than two years on the job he quit, claiming that he was not in agreement with Trump’s policies. If those were his reasons, why didn’t he resign when that demented man won the Presidency?”

When Tillerson was fired, this March, eight of the ten most senior positions at State were unfilled, leaving no one in charge of arms control, human rights, trade policy, or the environment. For diplomats in the field, the consequences were clearly evident. In 2017, Dave Harden, a longtime Foreign Service officer, was assigned to provide relief to victims of the war in Yemen, one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. The entire diplomatic staff for the country was barely a dozen people. “We worked out of a three-bedroom house,” he said. “It felt like a startup.” There was no support from State, and no policy direction, he said: “The whole system was completely broken.” Harden resigned last month.

a forum joining Israel, Egypt, Cyprus, and other neighbors to develop their new natural gas discoveries. The Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum, announced Monday in Cairo, formalizes growing energy ties among recent rivals and could spur much-needed development of energy infrastructure required to tap the region’s potential as a source of energy for Europe and beyond. The forum in particular cements the growing commercial links between Israel and Egypt; Israel expects to start shipping natural gas to Egypt in the next few months as part of a landmark, $15 billion deal between the two countries.

a few notable absences, including Syria and Lebanon—both of which are trying to develop potential offshore gas fields—and especially Turkey

The new body will promote “discussions among countries that already have cooperation with each other,” said Brenda Shaffer, an energy expert at Georgetown University. “Hopefully, in the next round of the forum, Turkey will be involved, and that would make it much more significant and not just include the happy campers.”

Today, according to a report by the British Overseas Development Institute, China’s blue-water fishing fleet is by far the world’s largest, and includes 12,490 unique vessels that were observed to have been fishing outside China’s internationally recognized EEZ in 2017 and 2018. That’s many times more than previous estimates, and very different from China’s own claim of having only 3,000 ships fishing international or other countries’ waters—but that’s only because China doesn’t recognize the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty’s demarcation of maritime borders.

Though China isn’t alone in its destructive fishing practices, it stands apart by virtue of its sheer size and the extent to which it pushes its highly subsidized fleet across the world’s oceans. It’s also the only country whose fishing fleet has a geopolitical mission, taking over weaker countries’ waters and expanding Beijing’s maritime territorial ambitions. One of the malicious consequences of all this is that China’s monster fishing fleet robs poorer nations—from North Korea to the countries of West Africa—of desperately needed protein.

Chinese authorities don’t enforce many rules either, so very few Chinese ships opt to fly flags of convenience. “They are their own flag of convenience,” Schvartzman said. “And they effectively created a port of convenience—a pirate port—in Montevideo.”

Denmark has for the first time put mineral-rich Greenland top of its national security agenda, ahead of terrorism and cybercrime.The Defence Intelligence Service (FE) linked its change in priorities to US interest in Greenland, expressed in President Donald Trump's desire to buy the vast Arctic territory.

The FE's head Lars Findsen said Greenland was now a top security issue for Denmark because a "power game is unfolding" between the US and other global powers in the Arctic.

Greenland's strategic importance has grown amid increased Arctic shipping and international competition for rare minerals. Arctic waters are becoming more navigable because of melting ice, linked to global warming.

With Ukraine’s seaports blockaded or captured by Russian forces, neighboring Romania’s Black Sea port of Constanta has emerged as a main conduit for the war-torn country’s grain exports amid a growing world food crisis.It’s Romania’s biggest port, home to Europe’s fastest-loading grain terminal, and has processed nearly a million tons of grain from Ukraine — one of the world’s biggest exporters of wheat and corn — since the Feb. 24 invasion.But port operators say that maintaining, let alone increasing, the volume they handle could soon be impossible without concerted European Union support and investment.

Constanta’s proximity by land to Ukraine, and by sea to the Suez Canal, make it the best current route for Ukrainian agricultural exports. Other alternatives include road and rail shipments across Ukraine’s western border into Poland and its Baltic Sea ports.

U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization projects up to 181 million people in 41 countries could face food crisis or worse levels of hunger this year in connection with the Ukraine war.

Russian maritime dominance in the Black Sea is back. The shift was made possible by Moscow’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and subsequent buildup of combat and maritime law enforcement capabilities in the region. The Nov. 25 seizure of three Ukrainian naval vessels off the coast of Crimea has underlined this return, which is one of the most important changes in the region’s maritime security relationships in the last decade

“Several years ago the Russian [Black Sea] fleet’s combat capabilities were in stark contrast with that of the Turkish Navy. Some even said that Turkey was in full command of the Black Sea. Now it’s different.”

In the Black Sea region, this growing fusion of shore- and sea-based capabilities is the fulcrum upon which the maritime balance in the Black Sea has tipped in Russia’s favor.

optimism is raging about the potential energy bounty lying underneath the eastern Mediterranean Sea. But energy development could as easily become a casualty as the cure for the region’s tortured geopolitics

Lebanon and Israel are at daggers drawn over new plans for exploration in offshore gas fields in disputed waters, and Hezbollah is using the energy dispute to ratchet up rhetoric against Israel. And this month, a Turkish naval ship intercepted an exploration vessel working in waters off Cyrus, threatening to escalate tensions between the Greek and Turkish halves of the divided island.

Israel’s first two gas fields are running at full speed, and two more could see investment decisions this year, notes Nikos Tsafos, an energy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Meanwhile, Egypt brought the Zohr field, its own mammoth gas discovery, online in record time, which promises to ease a cash crunch in Cairo aggravated by importing pricey gas.

The outbreak spreading on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, one of the Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers, reveals yet another victim of the coronavirus pandemic: the American military’s ability to patrol the world’s oceans and deter or fight wars.

Warships and submarines, even more than cruise ships, are breeding grounds for viruses. Crew members are packed into narrow confines, working and sleeping within inches of one another.

According to official figures released today, 893 U.S. military personnel across all the services have tested positive, as have 306 Defense Department civilian workers, 256 dependents, and 95 contractors. Of them, 85 have been hospitalized; five are dead.

The old fantasy that market mechanisms will somehow magically solve the climate crisis has been thoroughly dashed, and a new consensus is emerging: we need coordinated government action on a massive scale. 

Climate scientists are warning that it’s not feasible for high-income nations to transition to renewables fast enough to stay within the carbon budget for 1.5C, or even 2C, if they continue to pursue economic growth at the usual rates. Why? Because more growth means more energy demand, and more demand makes it all the more difficult to roll out enough renewable energy capacity. According to a team of scientists based in Canada,

Our dogged insistence on economic growth is making this vital task much more difficult than it needs to be. It’s like choosing to fight a life-or-death battle while going uphill, blindfolded, with both hands tied behind your back. We are voluntarily sabotaging our chances at success. 

A lot of foreign travelers have found themselves in dramatic situations over the last few months, sometimes because they waited too late in the global pandemic game to go home due to ignorance, stubbornness, or being lied to by travel agents or cruise ships. But Daniel was simply jumping through the exhausting bureaucratic hoops necessary to live and work legally in the country he’s called home for seven years. 

The endless paperwork involved in moving to another country has long been a slow-motion nightmare for most foreign nationals, but all the more so now that the coronavirus has forced border and, more importantly, embassy closures. Many expats, immigrants and asylum seekers are finding themselves in a state of legal limbo with no certainty in sight.

It’s quite common for foreign contract workers in Myanmar, like Daniel, to cross the border every couple of months for a quick visa run, sometimes for months or even years on end while they await their residency cards (the equivalent of a U.S. green card). Daniel’s process has been held up by red tape and a landlord who won’t sign his final paperwork. It’s been six years already. Like most foreign nationals, he’s nervous the virus will result in immigration policy changes that might force him to go “home.” His current health insurance wouldn’t cover him in the U.S., though. “And I have no ‘home’ to go back to,” Daniel says. “My whole life is in Myanmar. I have nothing in the U.S.”

geographic advantage has helped make Killybegs the largest fishing port in Ireland. Last year, its trawlermen landed almost 200,000 tonnes of fish, helping to feed a burgeoning national export market for seafood. A large part of this catch is found around 420 kilometers north in the Rockall Trough, a remote stretch of the Atlantic between Ireland, Scotland, and Iceland. Here, the fish gather in vast schools, especially near the region’s namesake pinnacle: Rockall, a tiny, uninhabited, jet-black outcrop of granite crowned by a pointillist splattering of guano.

This unassuming speck on the map was thrust into the spotlight this past summer when the Scottish government accused Irish trawlermen of overfishing in its territorial waters, before announcing that its coast guard would board any Irish fishing boat venturing into a 19-kilometer zone around the islet of Rockall. Trawlermen from the town of Killybegs, who have been casting their nets in those waters since the late 1980s, were dumbfounded.

As Edinburgh and Dublin clash in distant boardrooms, Irish trawlermen continue to drop nets around Rockall, now under the watchful eye of Scottish enforcement vessels. For the moment, the outcrop’s status remains uncertain. But with Brexit threatening to cut off access to these waters to European Union trawlermen, Killybegs’s fishing community is set to be the first casualty in a maritime legal dispute decades in the making.

Scientists first produced Captagon, the brand name of the drug fenethylline, in the 1960s to treat depression and children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Two decades later, the World Health Organization banned the substance due its high potential for addiction, abuse, and other adverse health effects. But counterfeit Captagon—which is sometimes just a cocktail of amphetamines with no fenethylline—remains in demand on the black market in the Middle East.

pills intercepted in Salerno arrived on three ships from Latakia, a Syrian port, and Italian police quickly announced that the Islamic State was responsible for their production and shipment—allegedly to fund its global terrorism operations.

Global media outlets disseminated the information provided by the Italian police without questioning it, replicating misinformation without considering how a scattered group of Islamic State members could pull off such an operation—but the truth is, they probably didn’t

The waters off the Somali coast were previously a hotbed for piracy, but it had all but stopped after international forces stepped up patrols.India, for example, has helped patrol the area constantly since 2008.However, many of those naval forces have moved up into the Red Sea, AFP news agency reports, where the Houthi rebel group, based in Yemen, have been attacking ships. Experts now fear the gap will be exploited by pirates in the region, the news agency said.

Western governments have treated the problem of growing Islamist extremism across North Africa as one of "terrorism". David Cameron has talked of an "existential struggle", warning it will take decades to defeat.But in reality, the rebels' earlier successes had less to do with hardline jihadist doctrine than with organised crime and drug smuggling. There is strong evidence, moreover, of collusion between the previous and possibly current Mali government and radical Islamist groups.In recent years, western nations have secretly paid millions of dollars in ransom to various Al-Qaida-allied factions for the release of kidnapped nationals. Since 2008, around 50 westerners have been abducted in the region. Eleven are still being held. The biggest beneficiary of this lucrative industry has undoubtedly been AQIM.It is this western cash – $40m to $65m since 2008 – that has enabled AQIM and other factions to capture the north. They bought weapons, especially after the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi, and political allies. The weapons facilitated their capture of Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu; the Malian army fled in disarray.

Since 2005-7, South American drug cartels have been using west Africa as a major transit route. Typically, the drugs arrive in small, dysfunctional west African coastal states, such as Guinea or Guinea Bissau, and are then shipped overland across the Sahel and Sahara to Europe. The route goes through Morocco, Algeria and Libya, often using ancient camel trails.

"It would be difficult for the [Mali] government to fully pursue AQIM, as there were a number of powerful and well-connected individuals who were profiting from Al-Qaida's smuggling activities."

Japan has the right to develop the ability to make a pre-emptive strike against an imminent attack given a changing security environment although it has no plan to do so now, the defense minister said on Thursday, days after North Korea conducted a third nuclear test. Any sign that Japan was moving to develop such a capability in response to North Korea's nuclear program could upset neighbors China and South Korea, which have reacted strongly in the past to suggestions it might do so.

Onodera said Japan needed to strengthen its ballistic missile defense in view of the North Korean threat. "Japan, the United States and South Korea managed to respond well to North Korea's missile launch on December 12. But North Korea is expected to boost various capabilities further. We need to improve corresponding capabilities as well."

"There already is a preliminary agreement between Japan and China to set up a maritime communication mechanism," Onodera said. "The mechanism would include annual meetings, specialists' meetings, hotlines between high-ranking people, and direct communications between ships and planes in the field. I would like to have final agreement reached as soon as possible."

In all, Overton found, the Pentagon provided more than 1.45 million firearms to various security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, including more than 978,000 assault rifles, 266,000 pistols and almost 112,000 machine guns. These transfers formed a collage of firearms of mixed vintage and type: Kalashnikov assault rifles left over from the Cold War; recently manufactured NATO-standard M16s and M4s from American factories; machine guns of Russian and Western lineage; and sniper rifles, shotguns and pistols of varied provenance and caliber, including a large order of Glock semiautomatic pistols, a type of weapon also regularly offered for sale online in Iraq. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Many of the recipients of these weapons became brave and important battlefield allies. But many more did not. Taken together, the weapons were part of a vast and sometimes minimally supervised flow of arms from a superpower to armies and militias often compromised by poor training, desertion, corruption and patterns of human rights abuses. Knowing what we know about many of these forces, it would have been remarkable for them to retain custody of many of their weapons. It is not surprising that they did not.

the Pentagon said it has records for fewer than half the number of firearms in the researchers’ count — about 700,000 in all

Overton’s analysis also does not account for many weapons issued by the American military to local forces by other means, including the reissue of captured weapons, which was a common and largely undocumented practice.