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Deion Sanders and theColorado Buffaloeswenthard in the transfer portalthis past winter, aiming to find players with proven production to replace nearly 40 players who departed the program. And tomost national analysts, the staff succeededin finding players who fit and project as solid performers. ESPN recentlyranked college football's top 100 newcomersfor the 2026 season, which includes top freshmen and transfers. Colorado had two new faces make the list in wide receiver Danny Scudero and linebacker Gideon Lampron. Scudero lands at No. 35 on the list, ironically two spots behind Omarion Miller, who departed Colorado for Arizona State. Lampron, a transfer from Bowling Green, comes in at No. 92. Both Scudero and Lampron are touted as value pickups in the article and as necessary additions, given the losses at their respective positions. "Lampron is an extremely instinctive linebacker who continuously shows up around the ball," Billy Tucker writes. "He has a very quick trigger and has the short-area quickness to close on the ball carrier in a hurry. His pursuit angles put him in a great position to make plays. Lampron also has great quickness to slip blocks." Lampron might be my favorite transfer addition of the offseason. Colorado's defense struggled mightily to defend the run and make tackles at the linebacker level. Lampron should immediately shore up those issues, given his football instincts and ability to read angles. As for Scudero, he comes to Boulder as one of the FBS's most productive receivers, but must make the transition to the Power Four level. "The coverage will be tighter in the Big 12, but Scudero was ultra-productive at San Jose State (88 catches for 1,297 yards), and those intangibles and physical tools have transitioned smoothly in Boulder. He brings explosiveness and quickness that allow him to separate easily from defenders. That separation ability comes from his sharp change of direction and vertical speed. Combined with his natural feel as a route runner and big-play ability, Scudero gives QB Julian Lewis another dynamic option entering his second season." Scudero seems to have the skill set that will translate to the Big 12, and the only thing separating him from the upper quarter of the list is his unproven status at the next level. His getting on the same page as Julian Lewis would be huge for an offense that revamped nearly all of its skill players. In addition to Scudero and Lampron making the list, former Buffs Jordan Seaton (No. 5 overall) and Miller (No. 33) were also notable additions. WR DeAndre Moore Jr. and DB Boo Carter were notable admissions that certainly were viewed as top 100 transfers by several outlets. Follow Charlie Strella onX,ThreadsandInstagram. Contact/Follow us@BuffaloesWireon X (formerly Twitter) and like our page onFacebookfor ongoing coverage ofColoradonews, notes and opinions.

Una nave di Msc è stata vittima di un doppio attacco mentre si trovava il Golfo Persico che ha indotto la compagnia di navigazione ginevrina a uscire allo scoperto per chiedere che sia posta fine a questo bersagliamento. Nelle scorse ore la portacontainer Msc la Sariska V è stata colpita dal fuoco iraniano nel porto iracheno di Um-Qasr secondo quanto reso noto dall’agenzia di stampa iraniana Tasnim, vicina ai Guardiani della rivoluzione, che ha diffuso le immagini del lancio di un missile contro la nave che i Pasdaran attribuiscono al “nemico sionista-americano” rivendicando l’attacco come risposta alle azioni statunitensi contro la nave Lion Star (questìultima è una bulk carrier fermata in Medio Oriente dalle forse militare Usa). Msc con una nota ha confermato che la Sariska V è stata colpita da due colpi di arma da fuoco: il primo mentre il pilota era a bordo durante la partenza della nave dal porto, il secondo poco dopo su un’area destinata all’equipaggio. “Tutti i membri dell’equipaggio sono al sicuro, illesi e hanno agito con eccezionale professionalità durante tutto l’incidente per mettere in sicurezza la nave e il suo carico” ha reso noto la compagnia di navigazione. “Questa azione di ritorsione è del tutto ingiustificata sulla base delle accuse formulate dai pasdaran” aggiunge il comunicato, “poiche’ Msc è un vettore commerciale neutrale e non ha alcuna affiliazione con gli Stati Uniti o Israele. Fondata dal cittadino italiano Capitano Gianluigi Aponte, l’azienda ha sede legale e operativa in Svizzera ed è interamente di proprietà dei suoi figli, Diego e Alexa Aponte, entrambi cittadini italiani e privi di altre cittadinanze”. Msc infine “esprime profonda preoccupazione per questi attacchi non provocati e per il rischio che essi comportano per i propri marittimi innocenti e per il commercio marittimo essenziale nella regione”. Il riferimento e la definizione di “nemico sionista-americano” a Msc ha come unica spiegazione il fatto che, fino alla cessione in favore dei figli avvenuta e annunciata recentemente, il gruppo armatoriale è stato controllato per mezzo secolo al 50% da Gianluigi Aponte e dalla moglie Rafaela Diamant Pinas, quest’ultima figlia di un banchiere israeliano di base in Svizzera. Sulla vicenda è scesa in campo (un po’ a sorpresa) l’Associazione delle port authority italiane, Assoporti, che per voce del suo presidente, Roberto Petri, ha espresso “a nome dell’Associazione dei porti italiani e di tutte le Adsp, la più sincera vicinanza e solidarietà all’amministratore delegato di Msc e a tutto il Gruppo Msc” a seguito del grave attacco che ha colpito la nave Msc Sariska V nelle acque del Golfo Persico. “Desidero esprimere la piena solidarietà alla famiglia Aponte e a tutta la comunità marittima della compagnia per questo ennesimo episodio che colpisce il trasporto marittimo internazionale e mette a rischio la sicurezza dei lavoratori del mare” ha dichiarato Petri. “Msc rappresenta una realtà strategica per il sistema logistico e portuale italiano ed europeo. La compagnia svolge un ruolo fondamentale nel garantire la continuità delle catene di approvvigionamento, la competitività dei nostri porti e la crescita dell’economia nazionale. Attacchi come questo non colpiscono soltanto una singola impresa, ma mettono a repentaglio la sicurezza della navigazione, la libertà dei commerci e la stabilità degli scambi internazionali” ha aggiunto. Il presidente di Assoporti ha inoltre sottolineato come il protrarsi delle tensioni nell’area dello Stretto di Hormuz stia generando crescenti preoccupazioni per l’intero comparto marittimo e portuale mondiale, con possibili ripercussioni sulle rotte commerciali, sui costi logistici e sulla sicurezza degli equipaggi. “In un momento così delicato, è fondamentale che la comunità internazionale continui a impegnarsi per garantire la sicurezza della navigazione e la tutela del personale marittimo. I porti italiani restano al fianco di Msc e di tutti gli operatori che ogni giorno assicurano il funzionamento del commercio globale, spesso operando in contesti sempre più complessi e rischiosi”. La nota conclude dicendo che “Assoporti rinnova pertanto il proprio sostegno a MSC, ai suoi equipaggi e a tutti i professionisti del settore marittimo, auspicando una rapida de-escalation delle tensioni e il pieno ripristino delle condizioni di sicurezza nelle principali rotte commerciali internazionali”. ISCRIVITI ALLA NEWSLETTER QUOTIDIANA GRATUITA DI SHIPPING ITALY SHIPPING ITALY E’ ANCHE SU WHATSAPP: BASTA CLICCARE QUI PER ISCRIVERSI AL CANALE ED ESSERE SEMPRE AGGIORNATI

Myanmar’s civil waris one of the clearest tests of the international community’s promise to protect civilians. Two decades on from the creation ofthe United Nations’ “Responsibility to Protect,”that promise has been quietly abandoned. Myanmar has spent most of its independent life in conflict. Since its inception in 1948, it has struggled to build a political order that can hold together its highly diverse ethno-politico-religious communities. At its core is an unequal relationship between a Bamar-dominated central state and the ethnic border regions. Military rule has defined the country’s governance. Since General Ne Win’s 1962 coup, the army — known as the Tatmadaw —has governed directly or through proxies. The so-called8888 uprisingof 1988 and the monk-ledSaffron Revolution of 2007were both handily crushed. À lire aussi :Myanmar military’s ‘ceasefire’ follows a pattern of ruling generals exploiting disasters to shore up control A democratic opening from 2010 to 2015 gave Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy a landslide victory before the military seized power again inFebruary 2021. The elections the junta staged in late 2025 and early 2026 werewidely condemned as neither free nor fair. Myanmar should matter to anyone who takes theResponsibility to Protectseriously. The edict emerged from the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001,a process tied to Canadian leadership, and was endorsed byUN member states in 2005. Its premise is simple: when a state cannot or will not protect its people from ethnocide, commits war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, that responsibility passes to the international community (although this is an ambiguous entity in geopolitical terms). Yet Responsibility to Protect provisions have always been applied selectively. Some crises attract diplomatic energy and intervention; others are treated as distant and inconvenient. A doctrine written for human protection loses its moral authority when it’s applied selectively. À lire aussi :Why has the West given billions in military aid to Ukraine, but virtually ignored Myanmar? Myanmar exposes this weakness. Its war draws far less western attention than Ukraine or the Middle East. Why is such an enduring and intractable conflict being treated with scant urgency? The cost is not only battlefield deaths, but the slow attrition of refugee camps, children growing up stateless and unschooled and people denied for years the right to return home or work. The scale of displacement is hard to absorb. Bangladesh hostswell over a million Rohingya refugees, most in the camps of Cox’s Bazar, withroughly 150,000 more arriving since early 2024as violence in Rakhine, a coastal state in western Myanmar, intensified in 2025-26. Thailand shelters more than80,000 refugees from Myanmarin nine temporary shelters along the Thai-Myanmar border. In addition, it’s home to several million Myanmar nationals or migrants, with theInternational Organization for Migration estimatingaround 4.1 million Myanmar nationals residing in Thailand in 2024, including a large irregular migrant population. These are not temporary inconveniences; they are long-term political failures. The Rohingya are the most visible face of this catastrophe. The 2017 exodus from Rakhine drew global attention, andGambia’s genocidecase has kept legal pressure on Myanmar. In January 2026, the International Court of Justice heldthree weeks of hearings on the merits, with a judgment expected this year. But the Rohingya are only one part of a wider conflict. For decades, ethnic armed organizations have fought the state for autonomy or territory, and many are more than armed entities. As Prof. Imtiaz Ahmed from Dhaka University has argued, some function as“proto states,”meaning they have their own currencies, control over territories and armed forces. Most importantly, the cost of non-resolution is enormous. Thefive economic and cost-analysis modelsin the Myanmar Crisis Dashboard show that inaction carries measurable human, regional and economic consequences. A war economy keeps the fighting alive. Rare earth mining, drug trafficking and online scam compounds did not cause the conflict, but they sustain it. Kachin State has becomecentral to the global rare earth supply chainand UN investigators have traced amulti-billion-dollar scam industryto the country’s lawless border zones. À lire aussi :Inside Southeast Asia’s scam compounds: A trafficked worker tells of fraud, coercion and torture If a war economy helps sustain the conflict, ending it means building something that can out-compete it. That is the premise behind Charting a Lasting Peace in Myanmar, a projectfunded by Global Affairs Canadaand implemented by the organization I direct, theConflict and Resilience Research Institute Canada. Myanmar needs peace architecture that offers an alternative to war. One idea is a stabilization and reconstructionplan for Rakhine, among the country’s poorest regions and central to both Rohingya displacement and the wider conflict. The reconstruction proposals draw inspiration from thepost-Second World War Marshall Planand, more recently,from China’s Belt and Road Initiative À lire aussi :US pressure has forced Panama to quit China’s Belt and Road Initiative – it could set the pattern for further superpower clashes Justice alone has not produced safety or peace for decades. A reconstruction plan could build a peace dividend, showing that infrastructure, schools, clinics and livelihoods can deliver more than a war economy ever will. Such a plan would rest on three commitments. Displaced people, in the camps and the diaspora, would be trained for work so they are ready to rebuild when conditions allow. Planning should not wait for a final peace deal; negotiation and reconstruction are separate tracks that reinforce each other. These proposals also need credible backing from donors and regional governments. The risk is that reconstruction money could be seized by the entities who profit from the war. Designing to guard against that possibility is part of the work. Geopolitics cannot be ignored. China holds major stakes through the Belt and Road Initiative and hedges between the military and the armed groups;India has concerns about its northeastern frontier. The crisis is regional, not just domestic. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN,must play a larger part. Its Five-Point Consensus, agreed in 2021, has not resolved the crisis and is nowwidely judged as a failure, yet it remains the most legitimate regional platform. The organization’s Institute for Peace and Reconciliation could study reconstruction-based alternatives. Canada has a role, too. It helped shape the origins of the Responsibility to Protect and has funded research onpeace in Myanmar. It can do more by lobbying partners, supporting regional reconstruction architecture and ensuring Myanmar isn’t forgotten. The Responsibility to Protect cannot apply only when intervention is politically convenient. The real test isn’t how loudly governments speak when a crisis is visible, but whether they act equitably when the suffering is slow, distant and inconvenient. Myanmar is one of those tests. So far, the world is failing it.

Con una cerimonia di battesimo della Gnv Aurora a Tangeri, la compagnia di traghetti Gnv, parte del Gruppo Msc, ha festeggiato il posizionamento di due dei suoi quattro nuovi ro-pax (l’altro è Gnv Virgo) sui collegamenti marittimi regolari tra Italia (Genova), Spagna (Barcellona) e Marocco (Tanger Med). Gnv rafforza così il proprio impegno strategico sul Marocco destinando a questo Paese due dei traghetti più moderni e tecnologicamente avanzati della propria flotta. Entrambe sono alimentate a gas naturale liquefatto (Gnl) e promuovono l’adozione di combustibili di transizione come il bio-Gnl e il Gnl sintetico. Gnv Aurora e Gnv Virgo saranno operative fra le due sponde del Mediterraneo rispettivamente dal 1° giugno e dal 1° luglio. Il capoluogo catalano fungerà da hub di transito per l’intero network di collegamenti tra Marocco, Spagna e Italia, mentre Genova sarà il principale porto di bunkeraggio di Gnl per le due unità, che effettueranno rifornimento mediamente ogni 4-5 giorni. La società del Gruppo Msc si prepara in questo modo alla stagione estiva 2026 e a supportare i flussi passeggeri legati all’operazione Marhaba, che ogni anno, tra giugno e metà settembre, coinvolge oltre tre milioni di cittadini marocchini residenti in Europa nei viaggi da e verso il Paese d’origine. Una nota spiega che “la compagnia rafforza il proprio ruolo nel sostegno agli scambi commerciali tra Italia e Marocco attraverso il porto di Tanger Med, principale hub logistico del Nord Africa e porta d’accesso strategica al continente africano. Un’infrastruttura sempre più centrale per le imprese e le filiere produttive che operano tra le due sponde del Mediterraneo. Un percorso che guarda anche al 2030, quando il Marocco co-ospiterà insieme a Spagna e Portogallo la Coppa del Mondo Fifa, evento che accelererà ulteriormente i flussi turistici e la domanda di mobilità tra Europa e Nord Africa”. Al battesimo di Gnv Aurora a Tangeri erano presenti oltre 500 ospiti, fra cui il presidente esecutivo di Gnv, Pierfrancesco Vago, l’amministratore delegato Matteo Catani, Abdessamad Kayouh, ministro dei Trasporti e della Logistica del Regno del Marocco, Fatim-Zahra Ammor, ministra del Turismo e dell’Artigianato del Regno del Marocco, e Pasquale Salzano, ambasciatore d’Italia in Marocco. Presenti anche Mohammed Kabbaj, partner storico di Gnv in Marocco, e Carole Montarsolo, direttrice generale di Gnv Marocco. Gnv Aurora è la seconda unità della flotta Gnv alimentata a Gnl e l’ultima della prima serie di quattro navi di nuova generazione commissionate al cantiere cinese Guangzhou Shipyard International. Con una stazza lorda di circa 53.000 tonnellate, una lunghezza di 218 metri e una velocità massima di 25 nodi, questa nuova unità può ospitare fino a 1.700 passeggeri in 426 cabine e trasportare fino a 2.780 metri lineari di carico. ISCRIVITI ALLA NEWSLETTER QUOTIDIANA GRATUITA DI SHIPPING ITALY SHIPPING ITALY E’ ANCHE SU WHATSAPP: BASTA CLICCARE QUI PER ISCRIVERSI AL CANALE ED ESSERE SEMPRE AGGIORNATI

Today’s9to5Toys Lunch Breakis headlined byAirPods Pro 3 back down at $199 via Amazon, or up to nearly$100 off via Amazon resale. We also have allAirPods Max 2 colors back to Amazon low pricingalongside a chance to score the regularly $129Apple Pencil Pro down at $49and another rare opportunity to score$200 off this 32GB M5 MacBook Air. Head below for a closer look. Late yesterday afternoon, Amazon knockedAirPods Pro 3 down a touch lowerto deliver one of the lowest prices we have tracked to date on one go the most sought-after set of earbuds in the game. Amazon is now offeringAirPods Pro 3 down at$199 shipped. They were lingering at $200 in the post Memorial Day offers, but the straight up $50 price drop is now live once again. Yesterday we also spotted a chance to score a set atcloser to$100 offin Used – Like New condition at Amazon, and that deal is still live at the time of writing, but stock is getting very low at this point. Get a closer lookright here. Amazon has also now officially revealed thestart times and datesfor the 2026 Prime Day sale event. This year’s 4-day sale willkick off later this monthand there is a chance that we see AirPods Pro 3 drop even lower. There’s no telling if this will indeed be the case as Amazon has favored this same $199 deal thus far, and it is hard to imagine them dropping all that much more, if at all, but there is very much a chance. Something like $185 or $189 isn’t out of the question, but anything much lower than that will be a wild deal at this point in the lifecycle. The current AirPods Pro 3 deal is matching the Black Friday offer from last year though, so you’re certainly scoring a solid discount right now either way, and one that might very well remain as the best offer through until Black Friday 2026. There was, however, a short-lived offer at $185 earlier this year as part of a price match of a limited Verizon Store offer – Amazon might very well stick with the $199 offer unless another retailer forces its hand later this month. Alongside the return of holiday deal pricing onAirPods Pro 3and the ongoing25%price dropon the most affordableAirPods 4, Amazon has dropped the price on the newAirPods Max 2as well. We are still tracking theBlue AirPods Max 2 down at the$509Amazon all-time low, but it has now dropped the price onall five colorsback to the lowest price we have tracked (or within $1 of it). You’ll now find the Midnight, Blue, Purple, Orange, and Starlight models allstarting down at$509 shippedon Amazon. Regularly $549, this isn’t a giant deal, but it is the best we have tracked on brand new condition units since release in March of this year. There were some trade-in offers at launch and some open-box discounts, but this is about as good as it has gotten on brand new units to date. And if you’re looking to land a set right now, you might as well save as much as possible. For comparison’s sake, Best Buy is charging full price on AirPods Max 2 right now and even its open-box units aren’t much lower – the best of them are roughly $9 less than a brand new set at Amazon. For those looking towards Apple’s latest earbuds, the holiday deal pricing on AirPods Pro 3 is back to start the week off and AirPods 4 are still 25% off the list: Just after catching a nearly $100 price drop via Amazon Resale on AirPods Pro 3, today we have spotted one of thebest prices to date on Apple Pencil Pro– you can score the regular $99+ pro-grade iPad stylusas low as$49 shipped. Amazon is now offeringApple Pencil Pro down at$48.91 shipped. Currently listed at $61.14, it will drop an additional 20% in the cart to deliver nearly 62% in savings. Regularly $129 straight from Apple in new condition, and really more often closer to $99 these days, it is very rare to catch Apple Pencil Pro at under $90 in brand new condition. It is, in fact, rare to see anything less than $99 – it iscurrently sellingfor $115 at Amazon, which is one of the highest prices we have tracked in several months. This is an official Amazon Resale listing in the best quality it offers: Used – Like New: If you’re looking to bring Apple Pencil Pro to your iPad Air or iPad Pro setup, this is easily one of the lowest possible prices you’ll find without getting into some potentially sketchy refurbished listings. You’re also looking at Amazon’s best condition used tier here: While we are still tracking the15-inch M5 MacBook Air 16GB/512GBdown at the Amazon low at$200 offthe list price, but most configurations have now jumped back up in price there. Over at B&H, however, you will still find some of the best deals to date on the 15-inch models, and you can now add thisupgraded 32GB modelAmazon doesn’t even sell at$200 offas well. B&H has a small but quite notable collection of 15-inch M5 MacBook Air models sitting at some of the lowest prices we have tracked to date. You will find all of those detailed below, but we also wanted to touch down this morning to highlight this 32GB model as well: B&H is now offering the15-inch M5 MacBook Air with 32GB of RAMand the 1TB internal storage down at$1,699 shipped. Only the Midnight colorway is down at a price this low right now. Regularly $1,899 from Apple and other authorized dealers, this is a straight up $200 in savings and the lowest price we have tracked to date. Considering this is a configuration Amazon and big box retailers do not sell – you can really only get 32GB machines from Apple and smaller dealers, the chances of seeing deals on this setup are far more rare than the standard configs found from the big boys. As mentioned above, this 32GB machine also joins a few other configs you can still land at up to $270 off with upgraded Apple charger add-ons: We caught some deep price drops across the 2026 MacBook lineup last week and over the weekend. But just as pricing is starting to jump back up by $50 or more on most of them, we wanted to highlight this$200price dropon the most affordablecurrent-gen M5 MacBook Proyou can buy (that’s$300 offits late 2025 release date). Amazon is offering the14-inch M5 MacBook Prowith 16GB of RAM and the 1TB internal storage capacity down at$1,499 shipped. This deal is only still live on the Space Black and it might not be for much longer. Regularly $1,699, this is $200 off the list price and matching the lowest price we have tracked on Amazon. This is really only the second time it has been down this low since release. As a quick refresher, this model released in late 2025 as the first MacBook to house Apple’s latest M5 chip. It started life at $1,799 and is now $300 less than that – Apple has since ditched the 512GB storage tier on the current-generation MacBook lineup, which has effectively lowered the MSRP on this machine to $1,699. Again, many of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro deals we featured last week and over this past weekend have now jumped up in price to some degree, but this entry M5 Pro is still rolling alongside some notable AirPods deals that are live to kick off the week: FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links.More.

Dolphin Drilling, an Oslo-listed, Aberdeen-headquartered owner and operator of a fleet of harsh environment mid-water and deepwater semi-submersible drilling rigs, has picked up an assignment in the UK with an undisclosed oil and gas operator for one of its semi-submersible rigs. Dolphin Drilling has revealed a contract fixture for itsBorgland Dolphinsemi-submersible rig with an unnamed player on the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS), which represents approximately $239 million in firm contract backlog, as outlined in theletter of intent(LOI). The contract is scheduled to start in the second half of 2027, following the rig’s release from its existing contract. The firm term runs through to the expiry of the semi-submersible’s current special period survey (SPS) in October 2031, inclusive of mobilization and demobilization. The deal entails options for up to a further five years, with a contribution to the SPS. With a weight of 18,000 tons, a length of 109 meters, and a beam of 67 meters supported by 12 sturdy pillars, the 1977-built Borgland Dolphin rig was constructed by Harland & Wolff. Michael Boyd, Dolphin Drilling’s Chief Executive Officer, highlighted:“This contract award represents a significant milestone for Dolphin Drilling, materially strengthening our firm backlog to approximately USD 602 million. “Importantly, it delivers long-term earnings visibility across two rigs in the UK, both rigs firmly secured on contract for the next five years, as we guided on and in line with the strategic plan for Dolphin.” The semi-submersible received major upgrades in 1998/1999. With a maximum drilling depth of 27,800 feet, the rig can undertake operations in water depths of 1,476 feet. The semi-sub was selected by Repsol last yearfor a seven-well contract, with an option available to extend the deal to include three more wells. Boyd emphasized:“With this enhanced backlog, we are establishing a more robust and cost-efficient operating platform, positioning the company to generate sustainable cash flows and capture further opportunities in an increasingly tight offshore drilling market.” Take the spotlight and anchor your brand in the heart of the offshore world! Join us for a bigger impact and amplify your presence at the core hub of the offshore energy community!

The Camp Snap 2 ($69.95) is the follow-up to theeponymousscreen-freecamerathat launched the brand, a digital version of an old-school disposable 35mm compact. Like many sequels, it's more of a retread than a reimagining, with some refinements and flashier looks, but the same plot. That's not a bad thing—the Camp Snap 2 is just as affordable and easy to use as its forebear, and its display-free design continues, so kids can use it to preserve memories at summer camps and school events where smartphones and screen time are verboten. The company adds some new translucent colorways, a tripod socket, and a half-dozen image filters, and slims down the body, but aside from that, it stays true to the original. Even with some flaws, the Camp Snap 2 just might be the perfect camera for older elementary students and tweens, and earns our Editors' Choice award for its simplicity, low cost, and fun factor. It's not fair to compare the Camp Snap 2 with pricey digital compacts like thePanasonic ZS99andRicoh GR IV; it doesn't pretend to compete with superzooms or high-end pocket cameras. It's more like a disposable 35mm camera, an item many '90s kids would pick up at the drug store or airport before a school trip, vacation, or another occasion they wanted to document. You can still buy adisposable cameratoday for just under $20, but it doesn't include film processing or scanning, and it only yields about 27 snapshots. The Camp Snap 2 comes preloaded with a 4GB microSD card, large enough to hold around 800 photos, so the value proposition is obvious. The Camp Snap 2 shares some of its design DNA with disposable cameras, too. It's purely a one-button camera, so you just press the shutter and it takes a photo. The aperture and focus distance are fixed, and you put the camera to your eye and peer through an optical viewfinder to frame your shot. The viewfinder isn't exactly accurate, though. Its angle of view is narrower than what the lens sees, another trait it shares with disposable film cams and the original Camp Snap. The second-gen model is just about the same size as its predecessor, about 2.5 by 4.5 by 1.3 inches (HWD), but its rounded edges and slimmer body design give it a sleeker look. Not taking the lens into account, it's about a quarter inch shallower than the first-gen model. The Camp Snap 2 is a little heavier (3.8 ounces) than the original (3.4 ounces). The new camera's plastics feel a little more sturdy to me, and it adds a metal tripod socket, two factors that no doubt add a few grams. The original Camp Snap was available in a rainbow of colors, and that trend continues with the second gen. I received the Camp Snap 2 in Forest Green, but you can also get it in Arctic White, Chestnut Brown, Stealth Black, or Sunbeam Yellow. Fans of Y2K-era tech may prefer the Jelly Edition, a special edition with translucent plastic and bright colors. The Jelly version is available in Blue Rush, Strawberry Splash, Tangerine Drift, or Twisted Lime. I haven't seen the Jelly version yet, but it's meant to evoke the look of transparent tech products that were popular around the turn of the century. In an era when pro digicams have so many buttons, dials, and menu pages that you practically need a study guide to use them, the Camp Snap 2's simplicity is a breath of fresh air. There's not much to taking a photo—just press the shutter on the top plate, and it snaps a picture. The shutter release is rounded and concave, versus the oval convex button from the original Camp Snap. It's a little less clicky than the original Camp Snap's button, which makes it a little bit more comfortable to operate, and its matte finish matches the body better than the original's glossy shutter button. The rear panel nearly matches the original. It has a three-stage power switch (Off, On, Flash), an optical viewfinder, a digital watch-style monochrome information display, an indented thumb rest, and one new control: the filter button. This button lets you switch between the six built-in image profiles (Analog, Black & White, Standard, Vintage 1, Vintage 2, Vintage 3). It's possible to lock the filter selection: Hold the button down for ten seconds, and the camera will beep and prevent you (or your kid) from changing it by accident. Just hold it for another ten seconds to unlock it. The rear info LCD shows both the frame counter (in a large, easy-to-read font) and the active filter, but the latter is a little hard to see. The filter icons are super small and hard for my aging eyes to read, even with progressive eyeglasses. I think that Camp Snap should have dropped the frame counter in favor of a display that shows the selected filter in big type. The frame counter isn't nearly as important. The camera has the aforementioned tripod socket on the bottom, along with a USB-C port for charging the internal battery and for connecting the camera to a computer, phone, or tablet to offload images. The USB port is protected by a rubber flap that provides some protection against dust and splashes of water, but note that the Camp Snap 2 is not weather-sealed. A recessed button to reset the camera to factory defaults is nearby. There's no chance of pressing the reset button accidentally; you need to use a paper clip, SIM card remover, toothpick, or similarly pointy instrument to do so. Despite adding a tripod socket, the Camp Snap 2 doesn't include a self-timer. To be fair, I wasn't expecting one. Kids and teens are more into snapping quick selfies than setting up a camera on a tripod and then racing against a 10-second timer to get into a group photo—that seems like something that's nostalgic for Gen X and millennials. There's also a hinged door with the microSD slot and three buttons hidden underneath. It's locked with a Philips-head screw by default, so parents won't have to worry about kids opening it and losing the memory card, but it latches shut, so you can skip using the screw if you're buying it for an adult or an older, more responsible child. The camera comes with a 4GB card, which is big enough to hold around 5,000 photos, but you can upgrade to a larger card if you prefer. The three buttons are used to set the date and time. Hold down the M button and use the up and down keys to switch through months, days, hours, and minutes. Setting the date isn't a hard requirement, but it's a good idea if you want to log when photos were taken—that can be handy if you want to look back at a picture years after it was snapped to help remember when a special moment was captured. The Camp Snap 2 matches the original in resolution, sensor size, and general image quality. Its sensor captures photos at 8MP in a 4:3 aspect ratio, with an angle of view that just about matches that of a 32mm full-frame lens. This is a common choice for fixed-lens cams, both consumer and pro. It's a moderately wide view, similar to what you get with theFujifilm X100VIdigital camera and most disposable film cameras. It's a useful angle for everyday slice-of-life photography, arm's-length selfies with two or three people, and landscape scenes. The fixed-focus lens renders everything that's three feet or more from the camera crisply, and blurs closer objects, with no way to adjust it. Focus control is one thing you give up with the basic camera, and the 3-foot focus distance can be limiting creatively. TheCamp Snap Pro($99) focuses at around half the distance (1.5 feet), but it has a much wider-angle lens (around 22mm, which is appreciably wider than the main lens on most smartphones), so it's not good for macros or detail shots either. If you want that kind of creative control, you'll simply need to step up to a camera with autofocus—the aforementioned Panasonic ZS99 is a good option if you want one with a big zoom, while theSony ZV-1is a standout for low-light and shallow-depth-of-field imaging. The Camp Snap 2 supports 30.5mm screw-in lens filters, so you can use a creative filter or a conversion lens if you'd like. Camp doesn't make its own filters, but suggests trying wide-angle conversion lenses, macro diopters, and diffusion and color effects filters. Neutral density filters aren't on the list, though they should be. While you can't use the camera for very long exposures that smooth out waterfalls or blur pedestrians moving through a scene (in very dim conditions, the shutter fires at around 1/20-second), cutting out a little bit of light is a good idea when using the camera in very bright sunlight, as it can overexpose highlights when there's too much light. A one-stop ND (also called ND3), a type of filter that cuts out half the incoming light, is a smart add-on if you want to use the camera to catch memories on bright summer days. There's no change in picture quality versus the original Camp Snap—the second edition uses the same sensor and lens. They work together to catch images with a lo-fi look. I like to describe them as a digital version of a disposable camera, but it's just as appropriate to liken the pictures to those from very early smartphones, like the iPhone 3GS. Details are fuzzy, and the dynamic range is very narrow, which means you can't get an image that shows detail in bright highlights and dark shadows as you can with newer HDR-capable phones. I don't think that matters for the target audience and typical use cases for the Camp Snap 2—pros may turn their noses up, but kids will have fun getting started taking photos, and artsy photogs who appreciate toy cameras and lo-fi optics will also enjoy it. The built-in filters are fun, too. The original Camp Snap let you load one custom filter at a time, but this version includes six preloaded options. Standard renders images naturally with accurate colors. It's joined by a trio of vintage filters with stronger contrast, cooler tones, and warmer tones (respectively), a black-and-white option, and an analog filter with faded colors and a very slight sepia tint. I tried each filter across several scenes for this review, and I like Vintage 1 most of all, but that's just a matter of taste. What if you aren't satisfied with the built-in filters? That's no problem—Camp Snap has a web app that lets you create your own looks and load them into the camera. You can get super creative here and recreate the color-shifted looks of cross-processed or special-edition film like LomoChrome Turquoise, play around with deeply saturated or pale colors, or make a black-and-white look with extremely low or high contrast. It's a great feature, and since the Camp Snap 2 has six filter slots, you can load several into the camera. The custom filter system elevates things above "just a fun kids' cam" to something that artistic photographers can add to their toolkit to craft images with a signature look. The camera has an LED flash, the same type used in smartphones. It's good for brightening a subject at close range and can fill in some shadows, but can't handle a really strong backlight or freeze motion like the xenon flashes typically found in more expensive compacts and entry-level mirrorless cameras. If you're interested in flash photography, you might want to upgrade to the Camp Snap Pro—its extra-wide 22mm lens is a little broad for everyday snaps, but its photos are 16MP and stand up to a little bit of cropping while still looking good on social media feeds. All of Camp Snap's cameras suffer from shutter lag, though. The original, Camp Snap 2, and Pro all take about a quarter-second to take a photo after pressing the shutter. The delay is enough to make you miss some truly candid moments and catch friends and pets in awkward poses. The Camp Snap 2 wakes up from sleep faster than the other cameras, but doesn't fix the shutter lag. The Camp Snap 2 is one of the most affordable and simple digital cameras you can get. It's a great starter model for kids and a fun, compact option for artsy photogs chasing a lo-fi look.

There is a long line at the ticket kiosk for the world-famous ruins of Ephesus when I arrive with a group of about 30 tour-goers to see it. But thankfully, we won't be losing any time waiting in it. Our guide, Nevin, already has our tickets in hand. Purchased in advance and good for immediate, skip-the-line entry, they let us breeze past the hundreds of other visitors waiting to get into the iconic Greco-Roman site near Kusadasi, Turkey, and we soon make our way down its marble-lined main boulevard to the soaring Library of Celsus — one of the architectural marvels of ancient times. Such speedy access to one of the world's most visited sites is one of the most appealing perks of the three-hour tour of Ephesus and the surrounding area. But, to me, there is one perk that is even more alluring: The tour isn't costing us a thing. It's included in the fare for theVikingEastern Mediterranean cruise we are on. Unlike most other cruise lines that operate ocean voyages, Viking includes tours in every port in its fares. And it's not the only thing that Viking includes in its pricing. From meals in every onboard restaurant and beer and wine with lunch and dinner, to internet access and spa access, Viking includes an unusually high number of things in its fares that often come with an extra charge at other cruise brands. It's all part of a 'no-nickel-and-diming' philosophy that has been one of the core principles of the brand since its founding nearly 25 years ago — and that, in my opinion, makes Viking trips a particularly good value. It's a value that can be hard to appreciate until you compare what Viking includes against what other cruise lines charge extra for. By signing up, you will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to ourTerms of Useand acknowledge the data practices in ourPrivacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. Among all the inclusions that you'll get when booking a Viking cruise, tours in every port stand out the most. In the world of ocean cruising, it's quite rare — and something that I have always loved about the line. As regular readers know, I'm a big fan of cruising. It's a mode of travel thatmakes it easy to explore the worldin a way that many travelers — particularly older travelers — might not be able to do on their own. But aftermore than 200 sailings on 41 different brandsover a three-decade career writing about ships and ship-based trips, I have developed one big criticism of many cruise lines: They take you all over the world to wonderful places and then just sort of drop you in each place to fend for yourself. Unless you buy an expensive ship-sold tour at any given port, you're on your own. Viking is one of the rare ocean cruise lines that identifies the best experiences in each port so you don't have to, and then delivers them to you at no extra charge. On aseven-night "Ancient Mediterranean Treasures" voyagefrom Athens to Istanbul, such as the one I recently sailed, that means an included visit to the world-class Heraklion Archaeological Museum during a stop at the Greek island of Crete followed by a walking tour of the main town of Heraklion. Related:The ultimate guide to Viking ships and itineraries During a stop at Cannakale, Turkey, it means an included visit to the ancient ruins of Troy — the legendary setting for the Trojan War of Greek mythology made famous in Homer'sThe IliadandThe Odyssey. During an overnight visit to Istanbul, it means an included tour that kicks off with a drive along the city's ancient walls to the nearly 500-year-old Rustem Pasha Mosque, known for its blue tiles, followed by the city's bustling Spice Bazaar. These tours would cost $100 to $200 per person if purchased separately, as you do when sailing most other cruise brands. That's a significant value that many prospective cruisers don't consider when comparing Viking's pricing against competitors. But to me, just as valuable as the cost savings that come with the included tours is the added value of having all the logistics of touring in any given port figured out by someone else. Related:The ultimate guide to Viking cabins and suites It makes for a seamless travel experience, which is a big focus at Viking. Other Viking offerings that are aimed at creating a seamless travel experience for its customers include optional discounted airfare to get you to and from Viking ships. Round-trip flights between North America and Europe are available for as little as $700 per person on sailings like the one I was on. For those who book air through the line using these add-on fares, the seamless experience at Viking extends to included ground transfers between the airports in destination cities and the ship. The inclusions continue when you're onboard a Viking ship. The most notable onboard inclusion, to me, is that you can dine at any restaurant on a Viking vessel for no extra charge. That's relatively uncommon in the cruise business, with only a handful of luxury lines offering something similar. Related:Why I love Viking ocean ships for cruising around the world On most cruise ships, there are large main restaurants and quick-bite eateries available to every passenger at no extra charge. But you'll pay extra for more intimate, higher-end eateries, known in cruise industry lingo as "specialty restaurants" — either with a flat-fee cover charge or a la carte pricing. On every Viking ocean ship there are two such specialty restaurants, an upscale Italian eatery called Manfredi's and a rotating-cuisine eatery called The Chef's Table that serves five-course tasting menus with featured wine pairings. Both are open to everyone on board for no extra charge. I love sitting down at Manfredi's for an elegant Italian meal of fresh, handmade pastas and lovely main courses like the melt-in-your-mouth, signature porcini-rubbed Bistecca Fiorentina (I order this almost every time) and walking away without a bill. On most cruise ships, an eatery of this quality would cost at least $50 to $75 per person, not including automatic gratuities. Viking also includes beer, wine and soft drinks with lunch and dinner at every onboard restaurant. Related:The 5 best destinations you can visit on a Viking cruise That's no small thing — on many cruise ships, bar bills accumulate quickly at dinner even when food is included. In the realm of dining and drinks, Viking also provides specialty coffees, teas and bottled water at all hours at every venue. Sit down at a bar on any Viking ship, and you can order a cappuccino or latte, for instance, at no extra charge. Around-the-clock room service — increasingly a paid add-on at other cruise lines — also is included on Viking ships. Related:Why Viking's 'quiet season' cruises may be the best way to see the Mediterranean In addition, passengers in higher-level cabins will find minibars stocked with alcoholic drinks (vodka, gin, whiskey, etc.) and snacks that are all complimentary — something that is in sharp contrast to the exorbitant minibar pricing common on most ships and land-based hotels and resorts. One of the most unusual onboard inclusions on Viking ships (and one of my personal favorites) is the complimentary spa access. Even on many of the most luxurious, highest-priced cruise vessels operated by rival brands, the spa area on ships typically is only accessible to passengers who are getting a treatment or willing to pay a day-use fee of $50 or more. But on Viking vessels, you can walk into The Nordic Spa at any time, no fee or reservation required. The Nordic Spa on each Viking ship features a Scandinavian-inspired thermal suite built around a traditional hot-cold bathing ritual. In each of these thermal suites you'll find a large mineral-infused hydrotherapy pool surrounded by heated loungers, a sauna, a steam room, a cold plunge pool and — my favorite feature, though I can't take staying in it too long — a snow-filled Snow Grotto. There's also a cold-water "dump bucket" experience that, I admit, I have to force myself to endure. They say it's great for reducing muscle soreness, decreasing inflammation and enhancing mood through a temporary shock response, so ... why not, I say. Meanwhile, yoga and Pilates classes at the well-equipped fitness center next to the spa are also included. You'll pay as much as $30 a class on some ships for these sorts of classes. Rounding out all of the inclusions you'll find on Viking ships that I find so wonderful are several relatively little things including free use of the self-serve launderettes in cabin areas. Even the detergent in these launderettes is free. By comparison, a growing number of cruise ships don't even have launderettes on board, and those that do often charge passengers for use. The top three cabin categories on every Viking ocean ship also come with complimentary shoeshine and pressing service. Complimentary dry cleaning and laundry service is available to customers in the top two cabin categories. Related:I extended my Viking cruise with a pre-cruise land tour — here's why you should, too Plus, and this could be considered a small thing or something big, depending on your point of view: Passengers on Viking ships aren't charged for internet access, as is common on most other cruise lines. It's not the fastest internet at sea, and streaming videos from Netflix and other sites isn't allowed as it is on most other lines that charge for internet access. But ... it's complimentary. If you want to watch a movie while on a Viking ship, you'll also find movies and television shows on your in-room TV at no extra charge. Yet another item other lines often charge for, included at no cost on Viking. Viking's all-inclusive approach covers more ground than most competing lines — from shore excursions and specialty dining to spa access and internet. As a result, the true value of a Viking sailing can be easy to underestimate when comparing sticker prices alone. Indeed, if you add it all up, the inclusions can amount to hundreds of dollars per person per day in value for the typical Viking cruiser. Having sailed with Viking multiple times and with every other major cruise brand in both ocean and river categories, I'd argue the inclusions are one of the strongest cases for choosing Viking over its competitors. Planning a cruise? Start with these stories:

Dzierwa, Aron Estrada, and Boston Bateman were among the Orioles farm’s standout players this week. This time a year ago, there was essentially no joy to be found in following the Orioles unless you were looking down to the farm. The 2026 Orioles have avoided reaching that point before the calendar turned to June and hopefully they will continue to do so. One reason I hope this is because I want them to win. The other is that there’s not a ton of joy going on in this farm system performance right now. These weekly updates focus on the team’s top prospects, particularly those onCamden Chat’s composite top 20 Orioles prospect listfrom before the season. They also include other guys who interest me who might develop into prospects over time. I do not tend to spend much time on non-prospect journeymen. Here’s how things went this week: Depending on who is playing and who is resting on a given night, the Norfolk lineup can look awfully barren. Tommy Pham is on this team now, for crying out loud. He went 5-24 this week. I hope there’s no need to see him with the Orioles. Not everything is sad. Catcher-ish prospect Creed Willems played in four of the five Tides games, homering twice and driving in nine runs across the rain-interrupted series. He’s got 47 games for Norfolk and is batting .272/.358/.488. I don’t know what would have to happen for him to end up on the major league roster this season, but that’s mighty interesting hitting. Willems has 11 homers. Only two MLB Orioles are in double digits, and the team leader, Gunnar Henderson, isn’t even hitting well in spite of the homers. Heston Kjerstad is no longer a rehabbing big leaguer but instead something of an erstwhile one. Maybe more of a Once and Future Oriole, one of the lesser known T.H. White works. He went 6-17 across four games played, with three doubles. Let’s see some more and go from there. The season began with a trio of pitching prospects worth following here. Trey Gibson spent time in Baltimore this week and didn’t pitch for Norfolk. Levi Wells is now on the injured list after needing core muscle surgery. That leaves Nestor German. He blanked the Bulls across six innings, allowing just a hit and two walks. As I just wrote for Kjerstad, let’s see some more and go from there. Others of interest Tides season-to-date stats. All my returning readers, who are we looking at first here? That’s right, it’s my guy Aron Estrada! In this week’s instance, Estrada is a fun first guy to look at, because he smashed two dingers and hit three doubles as part of an 8-26 week at the plate. That’s a good series. It’s got his season OPS up to .751. I’d like to see a good June from him to get actually excited instead of just “for the bit” excited. The Chesapeake lineup is now the home of two-thirds of the cursed top of the 2024 draft class. Ethan Anderson did not do very well this week, batting just 4-21. His OPS remains over .800, so hopefully it’s just one tough week. No-power prospect Griff O’Ferrall went 5-20, but he also drew four walks for a nice OBP for the week. O’Ferrall’s batting line of .179/.317/.305 is not good. If he found a way to bat like .250… but he probably won’t. As you may recall, Chesapeake is now the home of early-season exciting pitching prospect Joseph Dzierwa. Now one level higher, Dzierwa is still racking up the strikeouts, grabbing nine in a 4.2 inning outing. I’d like to see these guys at least finishing five, but man, there’s something interesting going on there. He gave up two runs while allowing four hits and a walk. Others of interest Baysox season-to-date stats. Let’s go down the checklist. Can I say something about Vance Honeycutt other than that he struck out a bunch of times? No, he struck out seven times in 14 AB. Can I say something fun about Wehiwa Aloy? No, he went 2-19. Okay, then what about Ike Irish? 3-17 with no extra-base hits. Yeah, but what about Nate George? No, remember, he’s on the injured list with an undisclosed illness. (sweating) Early-season sensation Victor Figueroa? 2-17 with nine strikeouts. Fine, then Braylin Tavera? 4-18. Hey, at least he stole three bases, giving him 16 on the season. That was a depressing paragraph. On the plus side, I can say some nicer things about pitchers here, starting with the big man, Boston Bateman, from last July’s Padres trade. He’s been on a solid run since battling some command problems in early outings, and this past week notched a five inning start with two runs (one earned), striking out seven while walking two and giving up two hits. Just in his age 20 season, this lefty with an 11.1 K/9 through nine games is worth remembering. Others of interest Keys season-to-date stats. The records of the minor league affiliates don’treallymatter, but I don’t enjoy how many times I type “last place” each time I do one of these weekly recaps. 75% of the full-season farm teams are in the cellar of their leagues. Norfolk’s Enrique Bradfield Jr. was rehabbing with the Shorebirds this week. He would have fit right in with that bit about Frederick’s hitters: He went 1-13, though he did manage to walk six times and steal three bases. The one player who is both of an age where it’s interesting if he performs well at this level and actually performing well is shortstop DJ Layton, whose five games saw him go 5-16 with a homer, triple, double, five walks, and three stolen bases. It’s an .826 OPS so far this season, which is excellent for an age 19 player at this level. There was some preseason hype about Esteban Mejia, a hard-throwing 19-year-old. Mejia is, currently, the #6 prospect on MLB Pipeline’s rankings. I’m going to guess he will dive in midseason updates; this past week saw him walk five guys in less than an inning of work and he’s somehow managed to walk more guys than he’s struck out (39-37) over ten starts. Shorebirds season-to-date stats. ** Your choice last week in the minor league player of the week poll was Eeles, who narrowly edged out Dzierwa. The week before that, we had a tie. Margins are slim. Make your vote count! Our winners so far this season are Eeles, Tavera, Hunter, Irish, and Aloy. There has yet to be a repeat winner. This week will not change that, because none of the previous winners are on the poll. Vote here: Camden Chat Minor league player of the week (6/2) Which Orioles prospect had the best performance over the past week? This is the title for the native ad

London-based Ineos Energy has shaken hands with Marubeni Corporation, a Japanese integrated trading and investment business conglomerate, on a liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply deal, which enriches the Asian LNG arsenal. Ineos Energy has signed an LNG supply agreement with Marubeni Corporation for delivery into Asia from 2029, said to mark the company’s first LNG deliveries to the Pacific Basin. Masahiro Yamazaki, Chief Operating Officer, Energy & Chemicals Div of Marubeni Corporation, emphasized:“We are grateful to conclude this agreement with INEOS Energy and looking forward for the collaboration in the global LNG sector.” The London-based firm, which will supply LNG on a delivered ex-ship (DES) basis, claims this deal provides reliable and flexible access to LNG for key Asian markets, supporting continued access to secure flexible LNG supply in the region. The agreement is interpreted to represent an important milestone in Ineos’ LNG growth strategy, extending its portfolio beyond the Atlantic Basin into one of the world’s most dynamic LNG demand regions. The transaction reinforces the company’s strategy to develop a globally diversified LNG portfolio, spanning Atlantic and Pacific Basin markets, and provide reliable energy solutions to customers worldwide. David Bucknall, CEO of Ineos Energy, commented:“This agreement with Marubeni marks an important milestone for INEOS as we expand our LNG activities into Asia. The Pacific Basin is a key growth market for LNG and this deal provides a platform for growth in the region. “We continue to build a diversified and flexible LNG portfolio and are delighted to have Marubeni as a strong and established partner.” According to Ineos, Asia continues to be a key global LNG demand center, underpinned by structurally growing energy requirements and fuel switching across the power and industrial sectors. The firmbroughtCNOOC’s U.S. Gulf business into its fold last year andinkeda deal with Kinetik Holdings for natural gas supply to Europe. Take the spotlight and anchor your brand in the heart of the offshore world! Join us for a bigger impact and amplify your presence at the core hub of the offshore energy community!

Covenant Logistics, one of the largest trucking companies in the US with a fleet of over 2,600 tractors, completed a two-week evaluation of the Tesla Semi in California — including a loaded run over the notorious Grapevine pass on I-5. The company’s VP of Sustainability and Innovation, Matt McLelland, said the driver “was amazed at the performance of the Tesla Semi and felt a level of confidence that was hard to match in a diesel truck.” McLelland shared the results in aLinkedIn poston Sunday, revealing that Covenant had been testing the 500-mile long-range Tesla Semi with one of its larger customers in California for the past two weeks. The evaluation culminated in one of the most demanding real-world tests you could design for any truck: a loaded run over the Tejon Pass on I-5 between Santa Clarita and the San Joaquin Valley — commonly known as “the Grapevine.” The Grapevine sits at an elevation of 4,160 feet and represents the highest point on I-5 in California. It’s a critical freight corridor for trucks hauling cargo from the ports in Oakland, Los Angeles, and Long Beach. The northbound descent from Tejon Summit drops 2,613 feet over 11.6 miles, with the steepest section — the Grapevine Hill — running about 6% grade for 5 miles. If you ever go through it, you will see plenty of semi trucks in the right lane slowly climbing the hill while getting passed by lighter vehicles. McLelland described the challenge in both directions. Running northbound with a loaded trailer, losing momentum on a steep grade means speed drops fast and recovering is difficult. Running southbound requires constant attention to braking and heat management — though as McLelland pointed out, “that isn’t a problem for an EV when you’ve got regenerative braking doing most of the work.” That last point is significant. Regenerative braking on steep descents is one of the Tesla Semi’s structural advantages over diesel, the truck recovers energy instead of burning through brake pads, and there’s no risk of brake fade on long downhill stretches. For a fleet operator running the Grapevine regularly, that’s a real operational benefit. McLelland teased that a full summary of the evaluation is “coming soon.” Covenant is the latest in a growing list of major fleet operators to put the Tesla Semi through structured evaluations sinceTesla started volume production at its Nevada Gigafactory on April 29— and the feedback has been consistently positive. ArcBest logged 4,494 miles over three weeks andaveraged 1.55 kWh per mileon typical dispatch lanes. DHL Supply Chain completed a 3,000-mile trial out of Livermore, California, averaging 1.72 kWh per mile at full load, and has sincetaken delivery of its first Semi. CEVA Logistics ran a West Coast trial and reported avoiding 4.38 metric tons of CO₂ emissions.MDB Transportationand AiLO Logistics both launched three-week pilots in late April focused on port drayage operations. The consistency across different operators, routes, and cargo types is what makes this accumulating evidence compelling. These aren’t marketing partnerships — they’re procurement evaluations. Covenant Logistics Group (CVLG) reported $1.16 billion in revenue for 2025 and operates one of the larger truckload fleets in the country. A positive evaluation from a fleet of this scale carries weight in the industry. I’m looking forward to the full report here, but routes with elevation are certainly a great use case for electric trucks. Fleet adoption of new truck technology often stalls not on economics but on driver resistance. If drivers actively prefer operating the Tesla Semi over a diesel equivalent, particularly on demanding routes like the Grapevine, that removes one of the biggest friction points in transitioning a commercial fleet. Electrical trucks are much nicer for drivers. Less noise, less vibration, less toxic exhaust fumes, etc. All of that helps with fatigue and reducing long term career/life shortening health issues. Performance and torque are basically excellent in exactly the areas where diesel struggles the most (low speed, up hill, down hill). This shouldn't be news to people who follow the news around electrical trucks. The economics are basically there as well. Especially now that diesel prices are going through the roof. What resistance are we talking here about exactly? Is that a real thing? I think so far the economics in the US are a bit murky with a lot of complex incentives, tariffs, and poor availability of electrical trucks. But that should be changing rapidly. Truckers and trucking companies will figure out what works and what doesn't. Economic Darwinism will do the rest. Fleet adoption of new truck technology often stalls not on economics but on driver resistance. If drivers actively prefer operating the Tesla Semi over a diesel equivalent, particularly on demanding routes like the Grapevine, that removes one of the biggest friction points in transitioning a commercial fleet. We’ve now seen structured evaluations from ArcBest, DHL, CEVA, MDB, AiLO, and now Covenant — all with positive results. That’s a broad cross-section of the industry: long-haul, regional, and port drayage operations. TheTesla Semi’s total cost of ownership advantage over dieselis becoming harder to dismiss as more real-world data rolls in. The remaining question is production. Tesla’s Nevada factory is ramping, and the company has already landed a60-truck order from port drayage fleets. McLelland’s promise of a detailed summary “coming soon” should add even more data to the picture. At some point, the bottleneck shifts from “does the truck work” to “can Tesla build them fast enough”, and based on what fleet operators are saying, we might already be there. If you’re a fleet operator evaluating electric trucks, locking in low energy costs is critical to maximizing your savings. With electricity rates climbing nearly 10% last year, home solar protects you against future rate increases. And with lease and PPA options, you can go solar with zero upfront cost and start saving immediately. If you want to find the best deal, check outEnergySage. It’s a free service with hundreds of pre-vetted installers competing for your business, so you save 20 to 30% compared to going it alone. No sales calls until you pick an installer.Get your free quotes here. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links.More.

BANGALORE, India,June 2, 2026/PRNewswire/ -- What is the Market Size of Alternative Fuel Vehicle and New Energy Vehicle? The global market for Alternative Fuel Vehicle and New Energy Vehicle was valued at USD 181970 Million in the year 2024 and is projected to reach a revised size of USD 246570 Million by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 4.5% during the forecast period. Report Coverage Details Base Year 2024 Forecast Period 2025-2031 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 4.5% Market Growth 2025-2031 USD 246570 Million Regional Analysis North America, APAC, Europe, South America, and Middle East and Africa Key Companies Covered Toyota Motor Corporation, Mitsubishi Motors, Daimler AG., HYUNDAI Motor, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, General Motors, Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., Volkswagen, Tesla Motors, Inc., Beiqi Foton Motor Co., Ltd., Honda Motor Co., Ltd, BMW Group, Ford Motor Company, BYD Auto Get Free Sample Report:https://reports.valuates.com/request/sample/QYRE-Auto-10N7444/Global_Alternative_Fuel_Vehicle_and_New_Energy_Vehicle_Market What are the key factors driving the growth of the Alternative fuel vehicle and new energy vehicle market? Source from Valuates Reports:https://reports.valuates.com/market-reports/QYRE-Auto-10N7444/global-alternative-fuel-vehicle-and-new-energy-vehicle TRENDS INFLUENCING THE GROWTH OF THE ALTERNATIVE FUEL VEHICLE AND NEW ENERGY VEHICLE MARKET: Electric vehicles are driving the Alternative Fuel Vehicle and New Energy Vehicle Market by giving fleet operators a cleaner and more predictable operating model for urban routes, commercial deliveries, industrial campuses, and controlled-duty transport. Their appeal is strongest where vehicles return to fixed depots, allowing charging schedules to be planned around daily operations. Electric platforms also support quieter operation, reduced tailpipe emissions, and easier compliance with city-level low-emission rules. As charging networks expand and fleet managers gain confidence in vehicle uptime, electric models are becoming a preferred option for short-haul transport, municipal fleets, service vehicles, and controlled logistics corridors. Natural gas vehicles support market growth by serving applications where buyers need lower-emission alternatives but still depend on familiar refueling behavior, longer duty cycles, and heavier payload operations. Natural gas remains relevant for commercial fleets, industrial transport, buses, refuse vehicles, and regional logistics where depot-based fueling can be organized efficiently. It also helps operators reduce exposure to conventional fuel volatility while maintaining operational continuity during transition phases. In markets where gas supply infrastructure is already established, natural gas vehicles act as a practical bridge for organizations that are not yet ready to shift fully toward electric platforms. Commercial applications are a major growth driver because fleet owners evaluate vehicles through operating cost, uptime, route reliability, fuel access, and compliance benefits rather than only purchase price. Delivery fleets, ride services, public transport operators, utility service providers, and logistics companies are adopting alternative fuel vehicles to meet customer sustainability expectations and regulatory fleet standards. Commercial use also creates repeat demand for charging, maintenance, leasing, financing, fleet software, and depot infrastructure. As vehicle utilization rises, the economic case becomes stronger, making commercial fleets a central demand base for both electric and natural gas vehicle adoption. Fleet operators are shifting toward alternative fuel and new energy vehicles because fuel expenditure, maintenance planning, and lifecycle cost control are becoming central procurement priorities. Electric vehicles reduce dependence on conventional fuel procurement, while natural gas vehicles provide an alternative for duty cycles requiring longer operating continuity. The market benefits when buyers can link vehicle adoption with predictable energy sourcing, lower service complexity, and better cost visibility across the fleet lifecycle. This factor is especially important in commercial and industrial segments, where small efficiency improvements across high-usage vehicles can influence operating margins. Transport decarbonization policies are pushing public and private fleets toward cleaner vehicle categories, creating demand for electric and natural gas models across regulated mobility segments. Urban clean-air programs, fleet emission targets, public procurement rules, and corporate sustainability commitments are strengthening replacement demand. Buyers are also preparing for stricter future compliance by selecting vehicle platforms that can operate in low-emission zones and environmentally sensitive locations. This policy-led pressure supports sustained demand across commercial distribution, municipal transport, industrial logistics, and defense support fleets, where long-term vehicle planning must align with regulatory direction. Alternative fuel vehicles gain traction where routes are predictable, vehicles return to centralized depots, and energy infrastructure can be installed or managed at fixed locations. This makes electric and natural gas vehicles especially suitable for last-mile delivery, staff transport, warehouse movement, port operations, airport logistics, public buses, and utility fleets. Route predictability reduces range uncertainty and supports planned refueling or charging cycles. As fleet managers map duty cycles more carefully, vehicle selection becomes more data-driven, allowing alternative fuel platforms to be deployed first in operations where performance risk is lower and cost recovery is clearer. Claim Yours Now!https://reports.valuates.com/api/directpaytoken?rcode=QYRE-Auto-10N7444&lic=single-user What are the major product types in the Alternative fuel vehicle new energy vehicle market? What are the main applications of the Alternative fuel vehicle new energy vehicle market? Who are the Key Players in the Alternative fuel vehicle new energy vehicle market? Purchase Regional Report:https://reports.valuates.com/request/regional/QYRE-Auto-10N7444/Global_Alternative_Fuel_Vehicle_and_New_Energy_Vehicle_Market Which region dominates theAlternative fuel vehicle new energy vehicle market? Asia Pacific is driving strong demand through urban electrification, domestic vehicle production, public fleet programs, and rapid adoption in commercial mobility. North America is seeing growth through commercial fleet electrification, charging expansion, logistics modernization, and natural gas use in heavier fleet segments. 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El pabellón de Barraña, en Boiro, acogió este fin de semana dos de las citas del calendario autonómico de artes marciales organizadas por el Club Malamía. La actividad comenzó el sábado con elCampeonato Gallego de Hapkidoy continuó el domingo con elCampeonato Gallego Escolar de Combate de Taekwondo, reuniendo entre ambas jornadas a más de 500 deportistas llegados desde distintos puntos de la comunidad, además de entrenadores, árbitros, familiares y aficionados. El impacto para el municipio se dejó sentir durante todo el fin de semana, convirtiendo a la localidad en un punto de encuentro para cientos de familias. Las gradas registraron afluencia de público durante ambas competiciones, donde los asistentes aplaudieron el nivel técnico, los combates y el esfuerzo de los participantes. Más allá de los resultados deportivos, el club recibió felicitaciones por parte de participantes, entrenadores, el alcalde, José Ramón Romero, el concejal, Marcos Fajardo, y el público asistente, quienes apuntaron a la organización, la imagen ofrecida por la entidad boirense y el ambiente vivido. En el autonómico de hapkido, elMalamíaconsiguió proclamarsecampeón gallego por equipos. Los resultados individuales dejaron varias medallas de oro para la entidad: Rubén David Piñeiro Outeiral y Rivas en pareja máster 2; Noemí Gil Santos en individual máster 1; Luisa Iglesias Villanueva y Jacobo González en pareja máster 1; Daniel Torrado García en individual sénior 2; Luis Silva Carollo en individual sénior 1; Daniella Torrado Martínez en infantil individual; Begoña Pouso Pérez en cadete individual; Lara Muñiz Lijo y Meghan Torrado Martínez en infantil pareja; Gael Ferreiros y Manuel Hermo Outeiral en infantil trío; Daniella Torrado Martínez, Inés Lorenzo y sus compañeras en grupo infantil; y Mateo Muñiz Lijo, Mateo Calo Rial y sus compañeros en grupo cadete. Belén Dieste Piñeiro y Effren Fajardo sumaron un oro en pareja sénior 2 y una plata en grupo adultos. Las medallas de plata fueron para Álvaro Paz Gil y Mateo Leite Abalo en pareja sénior 1; Mateo Muñiz Lijo en júnior individual; y Mateo Calo Rial junto a Roi Magán Sieira en pareja júnior. Los bronces correspondieron a Andrea España Tubio en individual sénior 1; Antón España Tubío y Roi del Río Piñeiro en cadete pareja; e Inés Lorenzo Durán junto a Aitana Míguez en cadete pareja. También participaron en esta modalidad Adriana Almeida Fernández en infantil individual; Melissa Figueira Teira y Nahia Laiño Torrado en infantil pareja; Pablo Torrado Porto y Jimena Rodríguez Giráldez en cadete individual; Roi Filgueira Caramés y Kira Paz Gil en júnior individual; y Nahia Laiño Torrado junto a Melissa Figueira en grupo infantil, quienes obtuvieron un bronce. Por su parte, en elgallego escolar de combate, el Malamía sumó nuevas posiciones de podio. Las medallas de plata fueron para Daniella Torrado y Jimena Rodríguez, ambas tras realizar tres combates y caer únicamente en la final. Las medallas de bronce fueron conseguidas por Alejandro Vilaboa, Antón España, Joy Lorenzo, Mateo Rodríguez, Pablo Pouso y Gael Ferreiros, tras superar las eliminatorias para alcanzar el podio autonómico. También representaron al club Inés Lorenzo, Lía Maldonado, Aitana Míguez, Xabi Otero, Mael Filgueira, Magali Forján, Thiago Lamas y Vera Pouso, que no lograron superar las rondas necesarias para alcanzar las posiciones de medalla. La entidad acusó dos bajas de última hora por lesión y enfermedad: Lara Muñiz y Manuel Hermo, que no pudieron participar en la cita dominical. Desde la organización destacaron el compromiso de los deportistas, ya que muchos de ellos participaron el sábado y volvieron a competir el domingo, afrontando dos modalidades diferentes en apenas unas horas. Los entrenadores Javier Delgado, responsable del área de hapkido, junto a Dani Torrado y Luis Silva, responsables del área de taekuondo, se mostraron satisfechos con el rendimiento general de los deportistas y con la actitud demostrada. El Malamía trasladó su agradecimiento al apoyo del Concello de Boiro, patrocinadores, colaboradores, voluntarios y familias para el desarrollo de competiciones de esta magnitud.

Through the close integration of theory and practice, as well as collaborations with leading universities and research institutions in Greece and abroad, the company develops and supports innovative solutions and research initiatives that contribute to shaping the future of shipping. Through Laskaridis Shipping Co. Ltd., Lavinia Corporation has established eight active Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) with higher education institutions in Greece and internationally, including the National Technical University of Athens, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, the University of Piraeus, the Technical University of Crete, the University of Nicosia, Aalto University, Liverpool John Moores University, and The American College of Greece. In parallel, the company’s scientific collaborations extend to internationally recognized research organizations and academic institutions, including the Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore (CARES), the Hellenic Naval Academy, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Chalmers University of Technology, and the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). The tangible outcome of these collaborations is reflected in the research projects in which the company actively participates, its publications in leading scientific journals, and its presentations at major international conferences.Currently, fourteen research projects are underway. These include the Horizon Europe projects “RETROFIT55” and “FIT-HORIZON”, the “SMARTSHIP” project focusing on advanced class notations, the design, development, and operational testing of a sustainable underwater ROV, the creation of a full lifecycle digital twin of a Newcastlemax bulk carrier under the “RELIFE” project, as well as research initiatives exploring the potential use of nuclear energy in commercial shipping, including “HAZID Analysis for Nuclear Power Plant” and “NZCLEAR Feasibility of Small Nuclear Reactors for Zero-Emission Ships and Ports”. A particularly noteworthy initiative is the recent “Synopsis Project”, developed in collaboration with the National Technical University of Athens, which focuses on the pioneering analysis of high-frequency data using the Advanced Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (APOD) methodology. During the same period, the company produced thirty-eight publications, conference papers, and presentations, further strengthening its scientific and research footprint. A particular source of pride was the recognition of two scientific papers submitted to major international conferences in 2024, both of which received the Best Paper Award. The establishment of the Lavinia Innovation Centre represents the culmination of a long-term strategic investment in research, innovation, and collaboration with the academic community. By providing open access to research projects, scientific publications, and technical knowledge, the Centre aims to serve as a reference point for the maritime and research communities, fostering knowledge sharing and contributing actively to the future of shipping. Για να εμφανίζονται περισσότερα άρθρα τηςΝαυτεμπορικήςστις αναζητήσεις σας εύκολα και γρήγορα, πρέπει να προσθέσετε το site στις προτιμώμενες πηγές σας. Μπορείτε να το κάνετε πηγαίνονταςεδώ.

Multiple offshore members employed by Bilfinger are set to kick off multi-day industrial action due to a dispute over pay, which will lead to an eight-day stoppage at a floating storage unit (FSU) and a floating production facility (FPF) on the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS). Britain’s Unite the union has confirmed that around 20 of its members employed by Bilfinger on the Ithaca Energy-operatedFSU AlbaandFPF-1assets in the North Sea are going to begin eight days of disruption this month. The strike action, prompted by a dispute over the operator’s refusal to extend a retention bonus to offshore workers, will last from June 4 until the end of June 7, 2026, on the Alba unit, followed by four days of action on the FPF1 from June 9 to close of play on June 12. Sharon Graham, Unite’s General Secretary, commented:“Ithaca Energy and Bilfinger are incredibly wealthy companies that can fully afford to pay the retention bonus to our members. “The payment is a drop in the North Sea to Ithaca Energy which is making billions. Our members have been left with no option by these greedy companies but to take strike action to get what they deserve.” After the previous industrial action was postponed to allow talks to take place with Bilfinger, the union emphasized that there was minimal progress from the company or Ithaca Energy on the payment to the workers. Unite claims that Ithaca Energy excluded the Bilfinger employees, who include scaffolders, engineers, deck, and rope access workers, from the bonus scheme, with workers of other companies on the same assets in receipt of the bonus payment. The operator’s trading update in February 2026 highlighted $2 billion profit before tax, up from $1.4 billion in 2024, while Bilfinger UK further posted profits of £17.7 million ($23.8 million) in 2024, an uptick from £14 million ($18.8 million) in 2023. Paula Buchan, Unite’s Industrial Officer, underlined:“Unite has tried to get Ithaca Energy as the ultimate paymasters and Bilfinger around the table to get a positive resolution to this dispute. It’s unacceptable that our members are being denied a payment which other companies are paying to workers on these assets. “Strikes on the Alba FSU and FPF1 will have a significant impact on the day-to-day operations of these assets. We will also escalate this action if Ithaca Energy and Bilfinger refuse to see sense.” This comes after Uniteannouncedan industrial action ballot for offshore workers on Neo Next + Energy’s Elgin Franklin and North Alwyn platforms. Take the spotlight and anchor your brand in the heart of the offshore world! Join us for a bigger impact and amplify your presence at the core hub of the offshore energy community!

Los puertos de todo el mundo se enfrentan a un mandato urgente e ineludible: descarbonizarse. La exigencia pasa por apagar los enormes motores diésel de los buques comerciales y de cruceros una vez que atracan, conectándolos a la red eléctrica local. Sin embargo, en la práctica, las ciudades portuarias se han topado con un muro de hormigón: no hay suficiente capacidad en la red terrestre para enchufar a estos gigantes del mar. Ante este cuello de botella, la respuesta de la ingeniería ha sido sacar el problema de la tierra firme. Un consorcio respaldado por el Reino Unido y liderado por la firma ELIRE Maritime ha validado con éxito lo que definen como "el primer centro de energía de hidrógeno flotante e independiente de la red del mundo". ¿El fin de las interminables obras portuarias? Para entender el impacto de este desarrollo, hay que mirar el calvario logístico actual. Tal y como subraya Enlit, instalar sistemas tradicionales de suministro eléctrico en tierra (conocidos en la industria como shore power) es una auténtica pesadilla. El proceso puede tardar entre tres y siete años, ya que requiere refuerzos masivos de la red, mejoras en las subestaciones, complejas obras civiles y unos plazos de concesión de permisos que paralizan cualquier avance. Todo ello consumiendo un espacio terrestre del que la mayoría de los puertos carecen. Al colocar la infraestructura energética directamente en el agua, se sortea de un plumazo este obstáculo. Además, desde ELIRE Maritime destacan una ventaja financiera crucial: el sistema evita el riesgo de crear "activos varados". A diferencia de una subestación de hormigón que no puede moverse si cambian las rutas marítimas, esta megacentral flotante puede reubicarse según dicte la demanda del mercado, otorgando a las autoridades portuarias una independencia total de la red. Radiografía tecnológica. Lejos de ser un mero concepto sobre el papel, la tecnología acaba de superar un riguroso programa de validación de seis meses. El diseño físico, del que se hacen eco todos los medios, consta de tres plataformas flotantes hexagonales interconectadas que ocupan unos 1.200 metros cuadrados. Pero, ¿cómo suministra energía sin colapsar? El sistema no utiliza generadores descomunales para inyectar energía de golpe al barco, sino que funciona bajo la premisa de una "batería flotante gigante". A través de pilas de combustible modulares de 1,3 MW que operan continuamente (apoyadas por hasta 146 kW de paneles solares a bordo), el sistema carga poco a poco un enorme banco de baterías de 45 MWh durante toda la semana. Cuando un barco atraca, esta batería libera la energía rápidamente, entregando 5 MW de potencia limpia y continua sin inmutarse. Para alimentar este proceso, el sistema consume entre 7.500 y 8.000 kilos de hidrógeno a la semana. Cuenta con siete tanques a bordo integrados en contenedores de baja presión, que requieren repostaje un par de veces por semana. Esto permite a los puertos adoptar el hidrógeno gradualmente sin tener que acometer faraónicas obras para construir tuberías o instalaciones de almacenamiento permanentes en tierra. ⌛️ SORTEO ACTIVO EN XATAKA XTRA Esta Nintendo Switch 2 podría ser tuya Suscríbete por solo 2€/mes hasta el 19 de junio y entra en el sorteo El impacto real. Para garantizar su viabilidad en el mundo real, la plataforma ha sido sometida a pruebas de estabilidad y oleaje en los tanques de la Universidad de Strathclyde, mientras que gigantes de la industria como Schneider Electric y Ricardo UK han validado con éxito toda su compleja arquitectura eléctrica. Las luces medioambientales: Según los análisis de viabilidad de la consultora Ricardo, el sistema puede reducir las emisiones de los buques atracados en un 77% frente a la generación tradicional con diésel. En cifras tangibles, esto supone un ahorro de unas 47 toneladas de CO₂ por barco cada semana (casi 2.450 toneladas anuales), además de erradicar por completo las emisiones de partículas tóxicas, óxidos de nitrógeno (NOx) y azufre (SOx) que envenenan el aire de las ciudades costeras. La sombra del coste: Hoy por hoy, esta solución es más cara que enchufarse a la red convencional. El coste estimado de la energía de este centro de hidrógeno ronda entre las 0,25 y 0,50 libras por kWh, frente a las 0,15 - 0,25 libras del sistema terrestre tradicional. No obstante, el consorcio argumenta que este sobrecoste inicial se compensa por la asombrosa rapidez de despliegue y prevén que la estandarización y la futura caída del precio del hidrógeno igualen la balanza comercial. El potencial es inmenso. El consorcio estima un mercado global de 62 TWh anuales para soluciones marítimas independientes de la red, con el potencial de evitar la emisión de 500.000 toneladas de CO₂ en la próxima década. Próximas paradas. Como detalla ELIRE Maritime, el consorcio ya está en conversaciones comerciales para iniciar los primeros despliegues reales en puertos de primer nivel como Londres, Singapur, Hamburgo, Brisbane y Riga. El futuro de la descarbonización marítima parece haber encontrado un atajo. No se trata de inventar tecnologías exóticas desde cero, sino de integrar lo que ya sabemos que funciona (hidrógeno, baterías y sistemas eléctricos de potencia) de una manera mucho más inteligente. Si la tierra firme no tiene suficiente electricidad para alimentar a los gigantes de los océanos, la solución, irónicamente, siempre estuvo en volver a echarse al mar. Imagen | ELIRE Maritime Xataka | El gran reto de los drones era transportar cargas durante kilómetros. Una empresa china lo ha resuelto con hidrógeno

Preface. This is a book review of Urbina’s “The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier.” So many fishermen are enslaved for years, yet another reason to pay more for local fish at higher prices. Globally, so many fish have been caught that fishing boats have to venture farther to break even. Fuel costs typically eat up at least 60% of a long-haul vessel’s earnings, double what it did two decades ago. Until oil declines, factory ships will continue to go to the ends of the earth to get the last schools of fish. Crude oil production has been on a plateau since 2005, raised slightly by fracked shale oil to a slightly plateau, so the decline is likely within 10 years. Since it makes all of the polycrisis and boundary issues possible, this will dramatically reduce climate change, warming oceans, acidification, declining oxygenation, and toxins which harm fish so much thatjellyfish may someday take over the oceans. This book is about much more than fishery depletion. It’s also about the hard life and culture of the poor men on fishing boats, the corruption and bribery at ports, stolen ships and those who try to find and take them back, the many ways cruise lines pollute oceans, and massive amounts of nuclear and other toxic wastes are secretly dumped. How whales are now outsmarting fishing boats and taking fish off of their long-lines, while ships take so much krill it is decimating their populations and the food whales eat. And much more. Some material I found interesting: Fishery destruction in the news: Peak fish happened in 1996 at 130 million tonnes a year. Pauly D, Zeller D (2016)Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining. Nature communications. Podcast: 2022 Daniel Pauly: “Peak Fish and Other Ocean Realities” Korten T (2020)The hunt for the modern-day pirates who steal millions of tons of fish from the seas. Smithsonian. Collyns D (2020)They just pull up everything!’ Chinese fleet raises fears for Galápagos sea life. A vast fishing armada off Ecuador’s biodiverse Pacific islands has stirred alarm over ‘indiscriminate’ fishing practices. TheGuardian. Alice Friedemannwww.energyskeptic.com Author ofLife After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy;When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”,Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.Women in ecologyPodcasts:WGBH,Planet: Critical,Crazy Town,Collapse Chronicles,Derrick Jensen,Practical Prepping, Kunstler253&278,Peak Prosperity,Index of best energyskeptic posts *** The Thunder was among the best at this trade and, in the eyes of conservationists, the worst of the Bandit 6, a reputation earned over decades of poaching the ghastly-looking toothfish, a species found only in the earth’s coldest waters. The fish is also a favorite entrée in upscale restaurants in the United States and Europe, costing about $30 a fillet. But diners won’t find “toothfish” on menus. There, it is sold under a more palatable name: Chilean sea bass. The oily fish, rich in omega 3, soon came to be known on docks worldwide as white gold. Most scientists now agree that the toothfish population is dwindling at an unsustainable rate. In December 2013, Interpol issued an all-points bulletin for police worldwide to arrest the Thunder. This Purple Notice hardly mattered, though, if the Thunder was able to avoid notice.Finding a single ship in the millions of square miles of open sea was hard enough. Scofflaw ships like the Thunder deftly used the tangled skein of confusing, conflicting maritime laws, difficult-to-enforce treaties, and deliberately lax national regulations to evade the law and shed their identities. With a couple of phone calls, payoffs of a few thousand dollars, and a can of paint, the ship could, as it had in the past, take a new name and register with a new flag as it steamed to its next fishing grounds.The 2,200-horsepower trawler changed names more than a dozen times in its 45-year career. During that time, it flew nearly as many flags, including the colors of the U.K., Mongolia, the Seychelles, Belize, and Togo. The Thunder’s name and port registry were not painted on its hull. Instead, they were painted on a metal sign hung from its stern, to be swapped out quickly if needed. Sailors called these signs “James Bond license plates. By keeping its locational transponder, or AIS, turned off, the Thunder could avoid being tracked. It was a simple drill. Time and again, it slipped into port, off-loaded its catch to complicit or unwitting buyers, refueled, and was on its way before anyone noticed. Unless, of course, there was someone like Hammarstedt tailing it, watching its every move, and calling ahead to alert local officials and Interpol. *** To avoid frostbite while working on deck, the Sea Shepherd crews often wore survival suits. Weighing nearly ten pounds, the suits were made of neoprene, a type of rubber that is completely waterproof and designed to withstand extreme cold. Awkwardly puffy and usually bright orange to attract the attention of passing ships if a person fell overboard, the suits were nicknamed Gumbies, after the famous clay animation character. The suits also caused severe chafing and stank of dried sweat. “Bleed or freeze,” one deckhand said to me as he helped me put mine on at one point. “Those are your options. Gill nets are banned because they are particularly blunt instruments. The bottom of the nets are weighted to drop to the seafloor. Buoys hold up the tops, creating an imperceptible mesh wall that can stretch seven miles across and twenty feet high. Forming an inescapable maze, the Thunder set up dozens of these walls to zigzag the underwater plateaus where toothfish congregate. The buoys at the tops of the nets helped the fishing boats find them later when they returned to pull the mesh back on board, usually loaded with catch. Hauling in the net from the frigid water was a dangerous and brutally arduous task. The net was 45 miles long, triple the length of Manhattan, and Antarctica is among the coldest and windiest places on earth. The deck of the Sam Simon was partially frozen and cluttered. The crew’s spit froze before landing. The ship’s railings were low. Tripping was easy. Marbled with slush, the polar water below dipped in some places to ninety degrees Fahrenheit below freezing. Falling overboard would have meant almost certain death within a couple of minutes, most likely from cardiac arrest, unless quickly rescued. When the sway was severe, deckhands wore harnesses and latched themselves to the ship to avoid getting swept away. For every four sea creatures netted, one was a toothfish; the rest were bycatch that nobody would want even if they were alive. Virtually all of Sea Shepherd’s crew were vegetarian or vegan, many of them motivated by a concern for animal rights. Untangling the dead and dying wildlife from those nets, including rays, giant octopuses, dragonfish, and large crabs, was difficult work, emotionally and physically. In this famously rough stretch of the Southern Ocean, storms gather force for tens of thousands of miles as they travel east across open water, technically called the fetch, unimpeded by land except for South America’s lower tip. Winds can top two hundred miles per hour. Waves reach ninety feet tall. Polar fronts and trade winds generate an average of one angry storm per week. To pass through this region, ships typically wait on the periphery to slip between these storms. The Thunder did not. As the wider, heavier Thunder held steady over the next two days in the storm, the Bob Barker swayed back and forth, listing 40 degrees and battered by 50-foot waves. Below deck, fuel sloshed in the Barker’s tanks, splashing through ceiling crevices and filling the ship with diesel fumes. In the galley, a plastic drum tethered to the wall broke free, coating the floor in vegetable oil that bled into the cabins below. Half the crew was seasick. “It was like working on an elevator that suddenly dropped and climbed six stories every ten seconds, As much as it was a test of wills and daring, the chase of the Thunder was a game of endurance. In prior weeks, the Thunder had done everything in its power to prevent its adversaries from replenishing themselves. The Bob Barker and the Sam Simon typically sailed parallel to each other, spread apart by about half a mile. When they moved near each other, the Thunder’s captain assumed they were trying to exchange supplies or top up the other’s fuel tank so he swung his ship around and wedged it between his adversaries. The Sea Shepherd captains laughed at the move because they were stocked well enough not to need resupplying for at least a couple months more. I never got a straight answer from the Sea Shepherd captains as to why they kept moving their ships near each other. I suspected it was simply to play head games with their opponent. Today, many countries, including landlocked ones such as Mongolia and Bolivia, sell the right to fly their flag. Some of the biggest registries are run by overseas businesses, like the Liberian registry that is overseen by a firm based in Virginia. The company collecting fees for the right to fly a certain flag is also responsible for policing its customers, ensuring they abide by safety, labor, and environmental rules, and conducting investigations when things go wrong. But in practice, flags of convenience double as cloaks of misconduct, creating a perverse incentive for ship operators to shop around for the most lax registries with the lowest prices and fewest regulations. This regulatory regime was quite decidedly designed not to provide true oversight but to provide the illusion of oversight. And the way it functions is akin to being allowed to slap a license plate from any country on your car, regardless of where you live or intend to drive, and the police in charge of inspecting the vehicles and investigating accidents are paid by the drivers themselves. While some countries will fight over inches of dirt on either side of a border, ocean boundaries are less clear, which makes chasing poachers seemingly futile. This is why one of every five fish on dinner plates is caught illegally and the global black market for seafood is worth more than $20 billion. Most of the world’s fish stocks are in crisis from overfishing. To offset poverty wages, ship captains typically allow their crews to supplement their income by keeping the fins to sell at port. The bodies of the sharks take up valuable space in the hold of smaller ships. When they decompose, the carcasses produce ammonia that contaminates the other catch. I’d encountered this pungent odor before on a fishing ship in the Philippines that had a stack of the carcasses in its hold, and it smelled like cat urine. To avoid wasting space and contaminating more valuable catch, deckhands usually throw the rest of the shark back into the water after they cut off the fins, which can sell for a hundred times the cost of the rest of the meat. It is a slow death: the sharks, alive but unable to swim without their fins, sink to the seafloor, where they starve, drown, or are slowly eaten by other fish. Scientists estimate that more than ninety million sharks are killed every year for their fins. By 2017, roughly a third of all shark species were nearing extinction. Sharks are keystone species: a reduction in their population can collapse an entire food web all the way down to reef habitats. Without the apex predator, too many smaller fish survive and eat too many of the microorganisms that sustain the reefs. Enforcing rules against shark poaching doesn’t just protect the sharks; it gives the reefs a fighting chance at survival. Over the past century, however, technology has transformed fishing from a type of hunting into something more akin to farming. With highly mechanized ships that operate more like floating factories, the industry became brutally efficient at stripping the seas of virtually everything in them. By 2015, about 94 million tons of fish were caught each year, more than the weight of the entire human population. Much of the credit and blame goes to the building boom in the 1930s of purse seiners. These ships surround an entire school of fish with a deep curtain of netting, sometimes nearly a mile around, with a thick wire that runs through rings along the bottom of the mesh. After setting the net, the ship hauls in the bottom wire, and the net is pursed, or cinched, like a laundry bag. A crane lifts the net out of the water, the fish are dumped into a gaping funnel, sorted (often by conveyor belt), and swallowed into the ship hold. World War II spurred engineers to develop lighter, faster, more durable ships that could travel farther on less fuel. Submarine combat propelled innovation in sonar, helping illuminate the dark fathoms. Finding fish became more a science of spreadsheets than an art of dead reckoning. Subzero onboard freezers freed fishermen from their race against melting refrigerator ice. Innovations in plastics and monofilaments lengthened fishing lines from feet to miles. Lightweight polymer-based nets enabled super-trawlers to rake the ocean with the ruthlessness of two tanks rolling through a rain forest, a mesh of steel cables strung between them. As the size and strength of nets increased, so too did the amount of bycatch that was inadvertently killed and thrown back. More than half the global catch is now tossed overboard dead, or it is ground up and pelletized to feed pigs, poultry, and farmed fish. For instance, feeding a single “ranched” tuna can require catching and pelletizing over thirty times the weight of that tuna in fish pulled from the sea. These technological advances, as well as the industrialization of fishing, are a big reason why catches from the high seas rose 700 percent in the last half a century. They also partly explain why many of the world’s fish stocks are at the brink of collapse. Since the 1990s, ships had been able to deploy the automatic identification system, or AIS, a collision-avoidance system. AIS has its shortcomings: Captains could and were allowed to turn the transponders off when they feared being tracked by pirates or competitors. The system could be hacked to give false locations. Many of the boats involved in the worst crimes, like the Shin Jyi, were smaller than 300 tons. More sea-traffic data would become available as countries deployed sonar and camera buoys as well as low-cost floating hydrophones to catch boats approaching restricted areas. Satellites, mostly used by governments and armed with synthetic-aperture radar, could also detect a vessel’s position regardless of weather conditions. As the 2015 capture of the Shin Jyi proved, all this information became especially powerful when coupled with sophisticated monitoring software that triggered alerts if, for instance, a vessel went “dark” by turning off its transponder or if a poacher entered a no-fishing area. Now, instead of blindly patrolling broad swaths of ocean, police had, in effect, eyes in the sky. Still, this new technology was not a panacea. Popular television shows like Homeland and Person of Interest make aerial surveillance seem as reliable as Google Maps, but capturing this detailed imagery from the sky depends largely on military-grade drones. Taking high-resolution photographs from space is extremely costly (often over $3,500 per picture), and requests for images have to be made a week in advance so that the companies or governments operating the satellites know to aim their lens at the precise spot as they hurtle around the earth. — The vastness of the ocean also complicates surveillance efforts, even by sophisticated satellite tracking used by the likes of SkyTruth’s Bergman in West Virginia. Seen from above, the world’s largest fishing trawler, the Dutch-flagged Annelies Ilena, has a surface area of about thirty-five hundred square meters—equivalent to eight NBA courts. Even if a satellite were scanning just 1 percent of the Atlantic Ocean, the Annelies Ilena would take up only three-billionths of that swath. If a ship turns off its transmitter, any knowledge of its whereabouts can quickly evaporate. · · · For centuries, local fishermen have taken advantage of fish’s instinct to huddle near floating objects for protection and mating. By building special buoys with plastic and bamboo flotsam strung together with old nets, these fishermen attract fish to one spot, making them easier to catch and greatly cutting the time required to keep their boats at sea. The buoys, which modern researchers began calling “fish aggregating devices,” or FADs, have had a particularly powerful impact on the seas near Palau. To attract species like tuna and blue marlin, fishing companies are increasingly using “smart” FADs equipped with Sonar and GPS, which let boat captains sit back and wait on land to be alerted when it’s time to gather up their haul. They’re so effective, in fact, that in some places in the world fishermen hire armed guards to sit on or near the FADs to ensure that competitors don’t destroy them or steal the fish around them. In Indonesia, fishermen told me about villagers hired to stand guard on floating tarp-covered platforms alongside FADs, dozens of miles from shore. Usually these guards were supplied with several jugs of water, salted fish, a gun, and promises that someone would visit them in a week or so to provide new supplies or to take them back to shore. Sometimes, those promises were not kept or a storm killed the men, washing their bodies ashore. I heard similar stories in the Philippines, where FAD guards had been killed in firefights with other fishermen. The absence of fish near the FADs served as a reminder that the seas, though vast, were inextricably linked and by no means inexhaustible. The success of Palau’s reserve depended in part on other countries creating their own. “They’re getting taken before they get here,” Baiei said about the missing fish. Tuna, like many large ocean fish, are migratory. Near Palau, populations of yellowfin, bigeye, and skipjack are in sharp decline, partly because they never make it to Palau’s reserve. They are being picked off beforehand in a number of ways, including being netted at one of the more than fifty thousand floating FADs in the western and central Pacific Ocean, most of which are perfectly legal. In its grand fight to safeguard its waters, Palau was doing many of the right things, including having created a marine reserve that protected nearly 80 percent of its territorial waters from industrial fishing. But for the country’s conservation efforts to succeed, Palau needed other governments and industries to follow suit. Palau could not succeed on its own. Palau’s unfettered tourism. More than half of the country’s gross domestic product was based on ecotourism, mostly because of people drawn to the world-class snorkeling and scuba diving. In 2015, the average number of tourists per month coming from China soared to nearly 11,000 from about 2,000 the year prior. It turned out, though, that many of these tourists were as eager to eat the fish as they were to see them. Not coincidentally, the variety of exotic seafood appearing on local restaurant menus in Palau grew as well, including banned fish like Napoleon wrasse, hump-head parrot fish, and hawksbill turtles that were mostly caught by local fishermen. Even as the Palauans tried to keep foreign poachers from entering their waters, they struggled to stop local fishermen from supplying protected fish to their own restaurants. For Palau’s marine officers, catching poachers was just the first step. After they brought them to shore, there was no guarantee that Palau would have the translators to communicate with the foreign crews, jail space to hold them, or even the laws to effectively prosecute them. Most of the poachers they arrested were from small boats owned by family businesses. These operators typically had nowhere near the $500,000 to pay some of the tougher fines, much less the expense of repatriating their crews. When these boats were seized, Palau was stuck with the cost of feeding, housing, and flying the crews home. I left Palau less with hope than with a painful sense of the barriers to marine preservation. The threats facing the oceans were far bigger and more complex than criminality. Palau’s true adversaries were not best understood as legal or illegal. They were bigger: climate change, unchecked tourism, a vastly untamed geography, and a level of poverty that filled boats with men who cared more about survival than about laws. I had done some reading about the rich and fanciful history of aquatic micronations. At least since Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was first published in 1870, people have dreamed of creating permanent colonies on or under the ocean. Many of these projects might have made sense in theory, but they never accounted for the harsh reality of ocean life. At sea, there is plenty of wind, wave, and solar energy to provide power, but building renewable-energy systems that could survive the weather and the corrosive seawater was difficult and costly. Communication options remain limited: satellite-based connections were prohibitively expensive, as was laying a fiber-optic cable or relying on point-to-point lasers or microwaves that tethered the offshore installation to land. Traveling to and from seasteads was challenging. Waves and storms could be especially disruptive. “Rogue” waves occur when smaller waves, sometimes traveling in different directions, meet and combine. They can be taller than 110 feet—almost twice the height of Sealand. Running a country—even a pint-sized one—isn’t free. Who, for example, would subsidize basic services (the ones usually provided by the tax-funded government that seasteading libertarians sought to escape)? Keeping the lights on and protecting against piracy would be expensive. In 2008, these visionaries united around a nonprofit organization called the Seasteading Institute. Based in San Francisco, the organization was founded by Patri Friedman, a Google software engineer and grandson of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist best known for his ideas about the limitations of government. The institute’s primary benefactor was Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and the co-founder of PayPal who donated more than $1.25 million to the organization and related projects. Thiel also invested in a start-up venture called Blueseed. Its purpose was to solve a thorny problem affecting many Silicon Valley companies: how to attract engineers and entrepreneurs who lacked American work permits or visas. Blueseed planned to anchor a floating residential barge in international waters off the coast of Northern California. Never getting beyond the drawing-board phase, Blueseed failed to raise the money necessary to sustain itself. Michael grinned unexpectedly. He seemed as proud of the convoluted story behind his family’s bizarre creation as he was of Sealand’s resilience. Taking advantage of a gap in international law, Sealand had grown old while other attempts at seasteads never made it far beyond what-if imaginings. The Bates family was certainly daring, but the secret to Sealand’s survival was its limited ambitions. Irreverent but inconsequential, Sealand was not Al-Qaeda or ISIS seeking to create a grand caliphate. In the view of its powerful neighbors, Sealand was merely a rusty kingdom, easier to ignore than to eradicate. August 14, 2010, the captain of a South Korean trawler, the Oyang 70, left Port Chalmers, New Zealand, for what would be his final journey. The ship was bound for fishing grounds about four hundred miles east in the South Pacific Ocean. When the ship arrived three days later, the captain, a 42-year-old man named Hyonki Shin, ordered his crew to cast the net over the vessel’s rusty stern. As the men worked furiously on the illuminated deck, the ship soon began hoisting in thousands of pounds of a lithe, slender fish called southern blue whiting, which writhed and flapped across the deck. With each haul, the silvery mound of fish grew. A type of cod, blue whiting was sometimes ground up into fish sticks or imitation lobster. More often it was pelletized and sold as protein-rich food for farmed carnivorous fish like salmon. At about nine cents per pound, blue whiting was a low-price catch, which meant the Oyang 70 had to catch a lot to make a profit. As the crew pulled in the net, ton after ton of the fish slid to the deck—eighty-six thousand pounds in all, a decent haul. The battered 242-foot ship was long past its prime. The average age for distant-water fishing boats in the South Korean fleet was 29, and the Oyang 70 was 38 years old. Port captains called the Oyang 70 “tender,” a euphemism for unstable. A month before it set sail, a New Zealand inspector ranked the ship as “high risk,” citing over a dozen safety violations, including one of the ship’s main doors below deck that was not watertight. Shin drove his men hard. As the first net was pulled that night, they sorted the squirming, oily mound on the aft deck, quickly heaving the fish down a chute to the ship’s interior to make space for the next haul. One floor down, in the ship’s factory, over a dozen men stood cramped before the “slime line,” a conveyor belt, wielding knives and operating circular saws. Their job was to remove heads, guts, and bycatch, while the valuable part of the fish continued down the line for packing and freezing. The men needed roughly half a day to fully process the first catch. But before they made it through the load, Shin ordered the men on deck to put the net back in the water. Work continued virtually nonstop over the next twenty-four hours. Around 3:00 a.m. on August 18, 2010, the ship’s first mate, Minsu Park, frantically roused Shin from his sleep. The net was too full, Park told him. It was pulling the boat under. Water in the engine room was already several feet deep. The crew on deck was begging to cut the net. The captain jumped from his bunk and raced to the bridge. But instead of ordering the net cut, he demanded that the bosun, the man in charge of the deckhands, command them to keep hoisting. That order would be Shin’s last. For the Sajo Oyang Corporation, which operated the vessel, the poor treatment of workers and the dismal condition of its ship was nothing unusual. Time and again, Sajo Oyang abused its crew members, often treating them with the same disregard as it treated the bycatch in its nets—as a distraction and annoyance. Sometimes, that disregard cost men their lives. The infamy of the Sajo Oyang fleet, as well as the fate that befell its captain and crew, was well-known in maritime circles. What stood out about the story of the Oyang ships was that safety risks and violations, and the persistent mistreatment of workers, were hiding in plain sight. But at every turn, inspectors and regulators largely shrugged off their responsibilities, often with a crass disdain for the lives at stake. Aside from the eight Korean officers, the crew of the Oyang 70 consisted of 36 Indonesians, six Filipinos, and one Chinese. On average, the Indonesians earned $180 per month. The officers derided the Muslims on board as “dogs” or “monkeys.” The drinking water was often brown and tasted of metal, workers would later tell investigators and lawyers. After a certain point, the only food on board for the crew was rice and the fish they caught. Men were docked pay if they ate too slowly. The crew described the ship as “a floating freezer”; the heater on board barely worked. The shared toilet lacked running water. There were so many roaches that a crew member later said he could smell roaches cooking as they fell onto the hot engine block. The Oyang 70 was known as a stern trawler, towing a long, cylindrical net from behind. The ship’s most intense work happened in the dark because blue whiting is a schooling fish that lives near the seabed, more easily caught at night when it feeds on plankton, small shrimp, and krill closer to the surface. As the crew struggled with the net on August 18, everyone on board knew it was more fish than the boat could handle. No one knew by how much, though, because there were no batteries in the net’s weight sensors. The cost of replacing the ship’s trawl net was more than $150,000. The price of losing a net full of fish would be the captain’s job. A typical captain would have immediately identified how dangerous the situation aboard the Oyang 70 had become. Like fighter pilots, deep-sea fishing captains are as much born as made. It takes a rare, almost instinctual calm and spatial acuity to steady a 1,870-ton ship while reading the tides, countering gusts, and directing a dozen men scrambling on deck. This is especially true when hoisting a hundred-ton net, which has to be carefully centered behind the ship. the Indonesians had snuck off the ship while the captain was still asleep. Because they were Muslim, the men had wandered the streets looking for a mosque; finding none, they took refuge in the church instead. One by one, the men described to church officials and later to government investigators their captivity on a ship of horrors. A chief engineer broke a deckhand’s nose for inadvertently bumping into him. Another officer punched a crew member in the head so often that he lost part of his vision.Insubordinate crew were sometimes locked in the refrigerator. Others were forced to eat rotten fish bait.On good days, shifts lasted 20 hours. Sometimes they worked for 48 hours straight. “I often thought about asking for help,” Andi Sukendar, one of the Indonesian deckhands, said in court papers. “But I didn’t know who to ask.”The worst part, the men said, was the sexual assaults, mostly at the hands of a sadistic bosun named Wongeun Kang. The 42-year-old Korean stole their clothing as they bathed so that he could chase them as they ran naked back to their bunks. In the galley, he approached the men from behind and jabbed them with his exposed erection. When they passed him in the halls, he grabbed their genitals. Other Korean officers made advances, the crewmen said, but none were as aggressive as the bosun. He assaulted deckhands while they showered. He climbed into their bunks at night when they were sleeping. “The bosun tried to teach me how to have sex with him but I refused,” one crew member recounted. Others were not able to stave him off. I wish I could say I was surprised by these reports. But what I read was sickeningly familiar. The expanse of the sea and the dictatorial power of officers over crews allow cruel and abusive behavior that is often only uncovered when a ship sinks.Workers on Sajo Oyang ships described meals speckled with dead bugs and mattresses riddled with biting mites, men hiding in closets from violent officers, and rapes that occurred in nearby bunks that they felt powerless to stop. Crewmen recounted being issued torn hand-me-downs and ill-fitting boots, tattered jackets and gloves. Captains kept the sailors’ passports and certification papers to ensure they could not leave. To get the jobs, the men often had paid over $175 in fees—more than a month’s salary for some.And as collateral, they often handed over their most prized possessions to ensure the completion of their two-year contracts: home deeds, car registrations, and in one case the land grant certificate for a community mosque. I knew that fleet owners exploited their crews, but the stories of these deckhands offered an unusually clear distillation of how they exert control, including blacklisting threats, cultural shame, and leveraging through property liens. Breaching the contracts would bring economic ruin to their families. Susanto, a deckhand on the Oyang 77, put up his elementary and junior high school graduation certificates. In his small village, such records are irreplaceable. If he failed to get the papers back, he would be unemployable. The documents were “the only things of value he had,” one affidavit said. News of the scams and abuse in this work rarely made it back to the small villages where new crew members were recruited because those who had been tricked were too ashamed to talk about it and to warn others. Even those who knew the risks were willing to try their luck because they were desperate for work. The 501 had embarked from Busan, South Korea’s southernmost port. Under a fisheries deal with Russia, it was one of six South Korean trawlers allowed to catch pollack, best known as the main ingredient of the McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich. Pollack is also a popular dish in South Korea, which has at least twenty-eight names for the fish depending on its age, size, and location. South Korea began trawling for pollack in the Bering Sea in the late 1970s and early 1980s after depleting the stocks in its own waters. Even though I had reported on quite a few grim industries over the years (coal mining, long-haul trucking, sex work, garment and glue factories), I was still stunned by the conditions on fishing boats. There were some obvious explanations—the lack of unions, the confining and transient nature of the job, and the vast distance from shore and from government oversight. Culture certainly plays a role as well. Ships are masculine and military-like arenas. There is honor in hardship and the ability to endure it without complaint. Governance on board is rigidly hierarchical and decidedly undemocratic. Feedback from the rank and file is generally unwelcome. Silence is core to the way of life on ships, and breaking it can be a dangerous crime. Perhaps the best advice I heard early during my reporting came from a British first mate. “You want to fit in?” he said as we left port. “Take up as little space as possible.” His counsel was less about the cramped living quarters than about the social risk of idle chatter. A respect for this silence, a comfort with it, the ability to use it at the right moments, was possibly the single most valuable tool I picked up during my reporting, because it was the key that allowed me to access people and places. I came to admire mariners’ quiet self-possession and their comfort with these long silences, some of which seemed to last for days. Over time, I also came to respect the silence itself, particularly in contrast to the world back home, where so much of my life was online, a place prone to oversharing and immediate gratification. Life on these ships, on the other hand, was so utterly off-line and defined by privacy, quiet, and waiting. And yet I also wondered if this silence was what made mariners so famously gruff and frequently ill-suited for life back onshore. If nothing else, this silence was the backdrop for an almost theological resignation that many seafarers had about their fate. Many deckhands, especially in Indonesia, knew about what happened to the Oyang crew, and it seemed almost to bolster the grim inevitability that many of them perceived in this profession. Abortion ships Determining whether activity at sea constitutes a crime often depends, in a sense, on where in the water it happens. A provision in maritime law treats a ship in international waters like a floating embassy, in effect a detached chunk of the land whose flag it flies. That means the laws that apply on board are only those from the country where the ship is registered. Few people are as adept at capitalizing on such loopholes in maritime law as Rebecca Gomperts. The Dutch doctor and founder of Women on Waves traverses the globe in a converted medical ship carrying an international team of volunteer doctors that provides abortions in places where it has been criminalized. Running these often-clandestine missions since the early years of the twenty-first century, Gomperts has repeatedly visited the coasts of Guatemala, Ireland, Poland, Morocco, and a half dozen other countries, dangerously skating the edge of federal and international law. Where a country’s federal law may forbid abortions, the jurisdiction of that law only reaches the limits of national waters or, twelve miles from shore. At the thirteen-mile mark, where international waters begin, abortion is legal on Gomperts’s ship because it flies the flag of Austria, where the procedure is permitted. Mexico has for centuries been a Roman Catholic stronghold. Since late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, dozens of Mexican women have been reported by family, hospital staff, or others for having an abortion and were later prosecuted for the crime. Abortion remains illegal, but an estimated one million women find clandestine ways to undergo the procedure each year. More than a third of those typically lead to complications, including infection, tearing of the uterus, hemorrhaging, or cervical perforation, according to research by the Guttmacher Institute, Hundreds of women have been jailed after seeking medical care due to botched abortions. Hospitals were expected to report suspicious miscarriages to the police just as they would gunshot wounds. In April 2007, Mexico City decriminalized abortion, allowing the termination of pregnancies without restriction during the first 12 weeks of gestation. That triggered a backlash across the country. At least half of the country’s 31 states passed constitutional amendments declaring that life begins at conception. Globally, more than twenty million women annually have “unsafe” abortions, and about 47,000 of them die each year as a result, according to the World Health Organization Stowaways Over a thousand stowaways are caught each year hiding on ships. Hundreds of thousands more are sea migrants, like those desperately fleeing North Africa and the Middle East on boats crossing the Mediterranean. For the people making these crossings, few routes are as perilous. In interviews, half a dozen stowaways compared their experience to hiding in the trunk of a car for days, weeks, or months traveling to an unknown place across the most brutal of terrains. Temperatures are extreme. It is impossible to bring enough food or water. To get on board, some stowaways posed as stevedores or deck cleaners. Others swam under the stern and squeezed through a space where the rudder meets the ship. Many brought “stowaway poles”—long bamboo sticks with toeholds and a hook—that they used to scale the sides of ships. Supply boats bringing fuel or food to anchored vessels also sometimes carried uninvited passengers. After sneaking on board, they would hide in hulls or shipping containers, crane cabs or tool trunks. Refrigerated fishing holds became uninhabitable, exhaust pipes heated up, shipping containers were sealed and fumigated. Maritime newsletters and shipping insurance reports offered a macabre accounting of the victims: “crushed in the chain locker,” “asphyxiated by bunker fumes,” “found under a retracted anchor.” Most often, though, death came more slowly. Vomiting from seasickness led to dehydration. People passed out from exhaustion or starvation. I contacted Edward Carlson, a maritime and trade lawyer based in New York, who worked on many cases involving stowaways. He added that stowaways are often savvy and skilled adversaries to captains or the shipping companies left with figuring out how to handle them. Many stowaways know, for example, that if they allege that they were assaulted by the crew, they can tie up a ship with a long investigation in port, leading to delays costing millions of dollars, Carlson said. “You have a tanker carrying $200 million worth of crude for Exxon or Mobil, tugs, supply boats, dock agents, an entire port refinery scene waiting to unload it in an extremely tight window of time before that ship needs to clear the berth,” Carlson said. “Then you have a fifteen-year-old kid who could delay the entire thing. Some stowaways are “frequent fliers,” who are caught multiple times, Rabitz explained. To pin down their nationality, Rabitz’s staff consists of speakers of nearly a dozen languages, including an array of Arabic and African dialects. The stowaway’s accent, word choice, and facial features usually give away his home country, he said. Once the stowaway acquiesces in leaving, he is usually escorted on the flight home. A guard or two are also often sent on the flight. I got in touch with Mansoor Adayfi, a former terrorism suspect and detainee from the Guantánamo Bay prison. He knew and had written about many of the other people held there, and I wanted his opinion about the use of the high seas for interrogation. He explained that many of the Afghans held at Guantánamo Bay had no knowledge of the ocean. To them, the sea was a fearsome beast, he said. “All that the Afghans knew was that it was a lot of water that killed and ate people,” he told me, adding that American interrogators took advantage of this. “?‘When we finish with you here, you will be taken to the sea and you all will be thrown there,’?” he recounted them saying. I believed the anecdote if only because it was, after all, the job of these interrogators to instill fear in their detainees so as to leverage them for information. The ocean was not just a convenient location for holding suspects, Adayfi said. “It was also a powerful psychological tool for getting information from these same suspects.” Most of the detainees at Guantánamo were held in outdoor cells, which happened to be only a couple hundred yards from the water’s edge, but none of the detainees could see the ocean fully because the surrounding fences were covered in tarps. They stole glimpses, though, through the slivers of openings at the bottom of the tarps. Time and again, I had stumbled across men on broken ships anchored far from shore. These men were abandoned but unable to leave their ships. The backstory was usually the same: Having stretched their resources to the limit, cash-strapped shipowners declared bankruptcy. Cutting their losses, they disavowed their ships, stranding crew members who were usually still on board the ship far off at sea or anchored in a foreign port. Like the Flying Dutchman, these men were left to roam or sit and wait, sometimes for years. Usually, they lacked the immigration papers to come ashore and the resources to get home. Annually, there were thousands of these men globally languishing at sea, slowly falling apart, physically and mentally. Some of these men died, typically while trying to swim to shore. In Athens, Greece, while exploring how ships are stolen by maritime repo men and corrupt port officials, I came across the crew of the Sofia—ten desperate Filipinos, marooned on an asphalt tanker, anchored half a dozen miles from shore, and unpaid for over five months. *** In 1898, the wooden, 118-foot ship became stuck in a pack of Antarctic ice in the Bellingshausen Sea. On board were 19 men: nine sailors, two engineers, and an international team of eight officers and scientists, including a geologist, meteorologist, and anthropologist. As the sun disappeared for two months, the group hunkered down for a brutal winter. With no hope of being rescued, their true enemy was not the cold but madness. Within weeks, a crewman became paranoid and hid at night. Another announced plans to walk home to Belgium. The Belgica broke free from the ice and made it back to the port of Antwerp nearly a year later. The remaining crew members were haggard and thin, but their faculties were largely intact because the captain had imposed a rigorous regimen meant to maintain their mental health. This regimen included a “baking treatment” in which the men were required to sit in front of a warming stove for half an hour and eat a diet of foul-tasting but vitamin-rich penguin meat. There was also mandatory participation in routine exercise outside on the ice and in social gatherings, including a beauty contest between images of women torn from the ship’s magazines. News of the Belgica’s survival tactics spread among ship captains. The lesson that many of them took from the incident was that it is sometimes as important to take psychological precautions as meteorological ones. Ship captains on subsequent Antarctic excursions began packing straitjackets. Later in the twentieth century, infirmaries on many ships destined for the North or South Pole or any other long journeys also began stocking antipsychotic drugs. In 1996, an anthropologist named Jack Stuster used the journals written on the Belgica to help design the space stations. If astronauts were to survive, Stuster suggested, they would need to prepare for the melancholy and disorientation from spending long periods in extreme isolation. There was a lot to be learned from the men who had made similarly grueling voyages at sea. I was intrigued by the psychological challenges faced by the millions of other seafarers who go offshore willingly. Even under normal circumstances, the loneliness and boredom of long voyages at sea can be emotionally brutal. One study by the ITF found that over half of the six hundred mariners interviewed reported feeling depressed during their time at sea. Another study published in the journal International Maritime Health found the global percentage of suicides among seafarers while at sea was more than three times higher than that of land-based suicides in the U.K. or Australia. Seafaring has always been an isolating profession. This intensified, though, after the September 11 attacks, when antiterrorism laws in the United States and much of Europe restricted crews’ access to ports. Crews were required to park no closer than half a mile from shore as they waited for a call from ship operators informing them of their next destination. On board, a crewman can sit, sometimes for months, within sight but out of reach of sending his wife an email, eating a decent meal, having a doctor check the toothache that keeps him up at night, or hearing his daughter’s voice on her birthday. In many ports, dockside brothels adjusted their business models to these new norms. “Love boats,” or floating bordellos, began shuttling women or girls, along with drugs and alcohol, out to the parked ships. But the longer the men were stuck, the less such boats came calling. Everyone knew that a stranded seafarer is soon a penniless seafarer. And yet for all the homesickness involved in this work, most of the mariners I interviewed said they were reluctant to leave their ships, even in the face of abuse or abandonment. Often, there was shame in returning home unpaid. On land, these men were spouses, fathers, and sons. At sea, they had a rank that carried status. With this status came strict rules, and abandoning their post was a violation of the highest order. Seafarers were overwhelmingly male, and their ship, almost always called “she,” had a distinct emotional hold over them. They loved her as much as they resented her. Having traveled together, grown annoyed with each other, protected each other, these men often said their ship was as much a wife as a workplace to them. Virtually all of the stranded men said that once they found their way home, they hoped to go back to sea. This seemed puzzling in light of what they’d been through. Obviously, necessity was driving them: it’s a decent-paying job where options are few. But there is also a pull to life offshore. For all the suffering I heard about from these men, this pull seemed closer to resignation than enchantment, though powerful nonetheless. Spend enough time away from land, I was told, and you rarely come out the other side the same. “It changes you,” one of the stranded men said. After stints at sea, I sensed in myself subtle changes in how I related to sleep, conversation, and food. On trips, I grew accustomed to extremely tight bunks, long and extreme silence, and eating whatever was put in front of me, most often half-cooked fish and barely boiled rice. When I got home, I noticed I ate faster, more dutifully than for enjoyment. I snuggled with my wife tighter in bed, uncomfortable with the extra space. I tired faster of talking, wanting more often to withdraw behind my headphones. A grumpier version of my former self returned to shore each time. The biggest change, though, I felt in my stomach. During several years of reporting at sea, I grappled with a worsening case of what some mariners called sway. Others referred to it as dock rock, land sickness, reverse seasickness, or mal de débarquement (French for “disembarkation sickness”). As important as it was to get your sea legs when adjusting to life on a ship, it was equally essential to restore your land legs when you returned to shore. Sometimes, though, re-acclimating was difficult, and the result was as bizarre as it was nauseating. The minute I stepped back on land, I started feeling sick. The experience was akin to drunken bed spins. My head felt like a bobbing buoy as my body’s vestibular system, the internal gyroscope for balancing, created a persistent rocking sensation. In a spatial equivalent of jet lag, my body clung to the memory of a place it had already left. Usually people who are least susceptible to seasickness are most vulnerable to land sickness. I never once threw up on a ship due to seasickness, but I twice vomited after stepping on land. The longer the stay offshore and the rougher the waters, the more stubborn the sway was when I got home. Sometimes it lasted days. Working at sea was not my lifelong profession, of course; I was a mere visitor, a land creature passing through. Unlike many of the men I interviewed, I always had the option to leave. Still, this strange disorder instilled in me a respect for the sea’s grasp. It changed me—not just psychologically, but also physiologically. I had to imagine it also changed the many mariners I’d met. If insurance fraud was the goal, the glossary offered a tried-and-true tactic. A corrupt operator hired a crew to take the ship to sea, where the ship would ostensibly break down. The operator then arranged for the vessel to hire a mechanic who was in on the scheme and deemed scuttling as the only affordable option. The mechanic and the ship operator then split the insurance money from the scuttling, and the operator re-flagged and renamed The glossary also provided some helpful guidance for changing a pilfered ship’s identity. To sever ties between a ship and its past, the document suggested removing all tracking devices that might be built into the ship’s console or hull. Get rid of anything on the vessel with its name written on it, including life jackets, bridge paperwork, buoys, stationery, and lifeboats, the glossary advised. “Replace the ship’s first or build name,” it said, which is usually welded onto both sides of the bow and on the stern in foot-high, raised steel letters. “Don’t forget the serial plate on the ship’s main engine,” the document added, because it’s a favorite way for investigators to trace a stolen ship’s original identity. Most of Zolotas’s fleet of half a dozen ships, including the Sofia, were tankers carryingbitumen, or liquefied asphalt. Bitumen, which looks like thick black paint, is used primarily to build roads, so the market for this product is global. But the ships that carry it are expensive to maintain, because the bitumen has to be kept heated at all times or else it solidifies. TCA was not the only one to pounce on Zolotas’s assets. In Savannah, Georgia, U.S. marshals stormed one of his sugar freighters called the Castellano, ordering it to stay put due to unpaid debt. In Baltimore, the U.S. Coast Guard detained one of his asphalt tankers called the Granadino, ostensibly because it had stranded a dozen of its crew. Another Zolotas tanker called the Iola sat in the port of Drammen in Norway as creditors argued over it. The crew on the Katarina, also a bitumen carrier, had taken matters into their own hands, seizing control of the ship to demand back wages. The net around Zolotas’s properties was tightening fast, and if the Sofia was arrested in Greek waters, neither the bankers nor the unpaid Filipino crew on the ship could expect to see their money anytime soon. The Greek legal system was not known for its efficiency or for being sympathetic to foreign lenders or crews. I learned that over the prior two decades Hardberger had seized more than two dozen ships and he had a reputation for taking on the toughest of grab-and-dash jobs, usually on behalf of banks, insurers, or shipowners. I asked him to describe the ruses he had used over the years for boarding ships. “Let’s see here,” he responded, his face lighting up as if I’d asked a grandfather to show me photographs of his grandchildren. Most often, he explained, he posed as an interested buyer, a port official, or a charterer. He plied guards with booze and distracted them with prostitutes; spooked port police with witch doctors; and duped night watchmen into leaving their posts by lying to them about a relative being hospitalized. People often took ships to Miragoane to give them new identities. The port was remote and relatively unpatrolled, its waters deep and ideal for bigger vessels. Someone who wanted a fast makeover and new paperwork for a stolen boat could have it done in under two days—removing all names, prying loose the serial plate from the engine, and welding off the original metal name. As we wound our way down Miragoane’s narrow boulevards choked with motorbike traffic and lined with food stalls selling griyo (fried pork) and lambi an sòs kreyol (conch in creole sauce), Hardberger explained the simple math of giving a ship a new identity. “All you need is about $300, four welders, and a fax machine,” he said. “But especially the $300. Bribery is ubiquitous in many developing-world countries, but nowhere is it more pervasive than at their ports. Harbormasters wield unusual power. Inspectors can detain a ship for any number of reasons, including the condition of the hull, the size of the sleeping quarters, and the legibility of the logbooks. In poorer countries, keeping a ship in port as long as possible is an easy way to boost the local economy. Even if an inspector does not directly profit by detaining a ship, his relatives and friends will, selling fuel, food, repairs, and booze to the crew stranded in port. The port of Lagos in Nigeria has one of the worst reputations for bribery, perhaps because for many years a ship required more than 130 signatures from inspectors before it could off-load any international cargo. Although stealing a ship is sometimes the goal of maritime scams, most port corruption consists of “squeeze and release” bilking schemes. Corrupt local authorities typically used this tactic to detain a ship just long enough to extort fees. And their pretexts varied: from inflated repair bills and fake docking charges to bogus liens, or trumped-up environmental violations. “But squeeze long enough and you strangle,” Lindsay added. Even an idle cargo ship can cost up to $10,000 per day to support. Shipping businesses go bankrupt as waiting cargo spoils, delivery deadlines pass, and owed wages accumulate. Sometimes these detentions are part of a broader plot to take ownership of the vessel through a hastily convened public auction or judicial sale. More than 90% of the world’s goods, from fuel to food to merchandise, is carried to market by sea, and bribery in ports adds hundreds of millions of dollars each year in unofficial import taxes and added costs of cargo and ship fuel, which in turn raise transport costs, insurance rates, and sticker prices by more than 10 percent. There are also geopolitical costs to the world’s vast “phantom fleet” of purloined ships, which are virtually impossible to track as they are used to carry out a broad array of crimes. In Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan, for example, phantom vessels are used to transport fighters tied to Islamic militant groups, and they were used in 2012 by the terrorists who attacked Mumbai. In Iran and Iraq, phantom ships have been popular for circumventing international oil or weapons embargoes. Elsewhere they are typically used for other purposes: in Southeast Asia, human trafficking, piracy, and illegal fishing; in the Caribbean, smuggling guns and drugs; and off the coast of West Africa, transporting illegal bunker. Ship sales are also more anonymous and final than sales of other types of property. This is one reason why ship purchases are a popular method for laundering money and dumping assets that corrupt individuals or corporations don’t want governments to find and tax. Because a ship may be bought in one country, flagged to another, and parked in a third, it becomes difficult for countries to trace the origins of the money invested in a ship. The anonymity of ship trading also makes stealing easier. If the rightful owner can catch up with a stolen painting, car, or artifact at an auction, he can make a claim and, in many cases, repossess his property. Such redress is far more difficult under international maritime law. A vessel sold at a judicial auction is deemed in industry parlance to have had its “face washed” clean of liens and other previous debts, including mortgages. Police struggle to chase stolen ships. In most cases, marine authorities can pursue, intercept, board, and seize a foreign-flagged ship on the high seas only if the pursuit started in the authorities’ territorial waters and they kept the fleeing vessel in visual contact the entire time. In many courts of law, visual contact means neither satellite nor radar observation but actual line of sight with the human eye. From the bridge of a ship, that’s usually about seven miles in clear weather. If a chase starts on the high seas, it’s even more fraught. Except under special circumstances, a ship may only be stopped in international waters by a warship of its own flag or with permission granted from the fleeing ship’s flag state. Liberia, the country with the most vessels sailing under its flag—more than 4100—has no warships. The country with the second most, Panama, does not routinely operate warships beyond its own coast. Therein lies the beauty of international ship thievery: crooks only have to run if someone’s chasing them, and that’s rarely the case. Tens of thousands of vessels, from minuscule to massive, are stolen around the world each year. Finding them is far more difficult than it might seem. Once it’s on the move, a stolen ship can travel thousands of miles in under a week. Investigators post reward notices, comb sale listings, and contact port officials. Seeking clues, they publish fake job advertisements and call on the relatives, ex-wives, or jilted girlfriends of the ship’s former crew. Sometimes, they send up planes, hire speedboats, and alert shipping companies to keep watch. These tactics rarely work. Unlike pilfered cars, which tend to stay in the country where they’re taken, and planes, which are tracked more closely because of terrorism fears,stolen ships are among the toughest types of property to recover. Even domestic recoveries of boats in the United States are difficult because the relevant databases are not well connected across states and they have less information than the ones dedicated to automobiles. he tried to avoid recovering stolen vessels while they were in “unfriendly” ports because the criminals who took them tended to have friends in the local government. As an alternative, he cited an example where his men posed as drug enforcement agents to board a suspect ship on the high seas. Dalby’s team secretly placed a tracker on the vessel and, after disembarking, waited for it to enter Indonesian waters, where he had friends in law enforcement who were willing to arrest it. Devising a plan for sneaking a ship out of port typically starts with surveillance, several repo men told me. Watch long enough and there is almost always a thirty-minute block each day, typically during the guards’ shift change, when the vessel is unmanned. Most extraction teams need less than fifteen minutes to board a vessel, the repo men said. But getting it out of port takes longer because larger ships have engines that need half an hour or more to warm up. For surreptitious boarding, repo men said that they need little more than a headlamp and a knotted rope attached to a grappling hook. It’s helpful to wrap this metal hook with a cloth to muffle the clank when it lands on the ship’s metal railing, one of the repo men added. Whenever possible, Hardberger preferred to talk his way on board, using the collection of fake uniforms and official-sounding business cards he maintains. Among them: “Port Inspector,” “Proctor in Admiralty,” “Marine Surveyor,” “Internal Auditor,” and “Buyer’s Representative.” If he could win himself a formal tour from the ship’s crew, Hardberger wears glasses with a built-in video camera. He also leaves a tape recorder on the bridge in some corner where it will go unnoticed so he can capture what officers say when he is not in the room, and then he picks it up at the end of his tour. To verify the identity of the ship, he checks the engine serial number, which thieves often forget to remove. If he can get private access to the engine room, Hardberger carries a glass vial of magnetic powder to sprinkle on the hull where the ship’s original or “build” name has often been pried off. The shadow of the name still shows up because welding it off changes the metal’s valence, which makes the magnetic powder adhere differently. Sometimes getting a ship out of port requires a clever diversion. Repo men hire local politicians to close nearby roads, street youth to set alley fires, or bar owners to host grand parties on the opposite side of town. Hardberger said the worst thing he had ever done to get a guard off a ship was to pay someone to lie to him, saying the guard’s mother had just been hospitalized. More often, he said, he preferred to hire prostitutes. “They’re the best actors because they have a lifetime of practice,” he observed. Manning agencies like Step Up Marine handle everything from paychecks and plane tickets to port fees and passports. These agencies are also poorly regulated and frequently abusive. When mariners get trafficked—transported from job to job against their will, often driven by debt, coercion, or scams—manning agencies are often to blame. Taking that blame is part of their job, in fact. These firms provide ship operators plausible deniability and easy deflection of responsibility—an even more valuable role than the logistical support they offer. Indeed, manning agencies take the blame but are rarely held accountable because they tend to be in places far away from where the workers live and from where the abuses occur. If Andrade’s experience was like that of the other Filipino men from his village whom I interviewed, he was probably told when he arrived at the Step Up Marine office in Singapore that a mistake had been made and that his pay would be less than half of what he had been promised. Forget that original quote of $500 per month. The new salary was $200 per month, which would shrink even further when the company factored in “necessary deductions. Half a dozen other men from Andrade’s village—who prosecutors said were also recruited by Step Up Marine—described how they were required to sign a new contract, which typically stipulated a three-year binding commitment. The contract also specified that there would be no overtime, no sick leave, eighteen- to twenty-hour workdays, six-day workweeks, and a $50 monthly food deduction and that captains were granted full discretion over reassigning crew members to alternate ships. Wages were to be paid not monthly to families but in full only after completion of the contract, a practice that is illegal in most countries. The document noted that to collect their wages, crew members had to fly back to Singapore at their own expense. Over the past decade, no country has exported more seafarers annually than the Philippines, which provided roughly a quarter of the crews on merchant ships globally, despite comprising less than 2 percent of the world’s population. By 2017, the Philippines was sending roughly a million workers—about 10 percent of its population—abroad annually. These workers, who collectively sent more than $20 billion a year on average back home, were in high demand because many spoke English, they tended to be better educated than workers from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India, and they had a reputation for being compliant. if a Filipino housekeeper in Kuwait was raped by her employer, she could go to the Philippine embassy for help. “At sea, on the other hand,” he said, “there are no embassies. the Obama administration realized that the U.S. government had no central governing body to make decisions about how to chart and manage this offshore territory. Altering this reality posed a threat to the drilling and fishing industries, which lobbied aggressively against the federal efforts to exert more control over this region, as they had in the past. These industries viewed mapping the oceans as a precursor to zoning them, which would likely lead to greater limits on the industries’ reach. In April 2017, President Trump revoked Obama’s executive order. Over the past decade, roughly half the murders of environmentalists worldwide took place in Brazil. Further destruction awaits the bycatch in trawling. Fishing crews discard much of what they net because there’s no market for the fish or because the fish are simply too small or too squashed. In 2008, Greenpeace set up its sites on the North Sea. To stop a fleet of German trawlers, Greenpeace spent months strategically placing more than a hundred stone boulders on the ocean floor near Germany around the perimeter of the Sylt Outer Reef, which the fishermen were rapidly leveling. In port, everyone knew what Greenpeace was up to (it’s tough to hide objects that huge), but as is often the case with maritime matters, it wasn’t clear whether its actions were illegal. So, no one knew whether and how to intervene and stop it. Weighing a little over three tons each, the boulders were roughly the size of a two-door refrigerator—big enough to destroy trawlers’ nets if they were dragged over the boulders. Using cranes, Greenpeace lifted each, one by one, and dropped them to the seafloor in designated spots. Hoping to stop the trawling, not to destroy the fishermen’s expensive nets, Greenpeace provided local authorities and fishing boat captains with updated charts, showing where it was placing the boulders. By 2011, Greenpeace was using the same tactic in the North Sea off the coast of Sweden. Advances in drilling technology have made previously untouchable Arctic reserves accessible, and countries are fighting over rights to tap these resources. Drilling occurs now so far offshore that rigs can no longer be anchored to the seabed because it is too deep to be practical. Instead, they are held in place by propellers, each as big as a school bus. Their locations far from shore mean these drilling rigs are no longer fully subject to the territorial laws of the countries for which they’re drilling. Barents Sea, off the north coast of Russia and Finland. Statoil, the partly state-run Norwegian oil company, had parked a drilling rig called the Songa Enabler in the Korpfjell oil field there. Like the drilling planned off the coast of Brazil at the mouth of the Amazon River, the project near Norway represented a new level of risk-taking by the oil industry. No company had ever tried to drill this far north into the Arctic. Statoil’s well was even more controversial because it was located in international waters, over 258 miles north of mainland Norway. Located in the Barents Sea off the north coast of Russia and Finland, an oil-drilling rig called the Songa Enabler sits in international waters, the farthest north incursion into Arctic waters by a drilling company. Despite its reputation for having especially protective environmental policies, Norway depended on oil and gas production for roughly 40 percent of its export revenue, and it wasn’t about to give up a significant portion of that to placate some pesky environmental group. Stella Maris offers social services to seafarers and their families. I was in Songkhla because the social workers at Stella Maris said they would help me meet victims of trafficking and introduce me to the officials charged with investigating those abuses. As I waited to meet Long, I spent hours at the Stella Maris office poring through a binder full of case files. It was a horrifying catalog of cruel abuses, torture, and murder at sea. In page after page, in photographs and scribbled notes, the documents described the sick being cast overboard, the defiant beheaded, and the insubordinate sealed for days below deck in a dark, fetid fishing hold. Surviving these ordeals often depended upon chance encounters with altruistic strangers who contacted Stella Maris or other groups involved in the clandestine rescue of sea slaves, part of a mariners’ underground railroad stretching through Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Thailand. Som Nang had worked on a type of boat known as a mother ship. Carrying everything from fuel and extra food to spare nets and replacement labor, these lumbering vessels, often over a hundred feet long, functioned as the Walmarts of the ocean—floating, all-purpose resupply stores. The same kind of boat delivered Long to captivity and subsequently rescued him as well. Mother ships were the reason slow-moving trawlers could fish more than fifteen hundred miles from land. They allowed fishermen to stay out at sea for months or years and still get their catch cleaned, canned, and shipped to American shelves less than a week after netting. Once a load of fish was transferred to a mother ship, it was combined with other catch below deck in cavernous refrigerators, and there was almost no way for port authorities to determine its provenance. It became virtually impossible to know whether it was caught legally by paid fishermen or poached illegally by shackled migrants. During his several years of captivity in the Thai fishing fleet, Lang Long was shackled by the neck and sold between fishing boats. the catch per unit effort, or CPUE, is an indirect measure of the abundance or scarcity of a target species. In both the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea, on Thailand’s western side, the CPUE on fishing boats fell by more than 86 percent between the mid-1960s and the early years of the twenty-first century, making Thai waters among the most overfished on the planet. Even though there were fewer fish to catch, Thai boats were catching more, partly by traveling to more distant waters. Globally, fishing boats had to venture farther just to break even. Fuel costs typically eat up at least 60% of a long-haul vessel’s earnings, double what it did two decades ago. Most deep-sea fishing ships around the world work on commission. “Crews only get paid if we catch enough,” Tang explained. This means tensions run high on the boats, and captains fear their crews as intensely as they drive them. Language and cultural barriers add further divisions; most boats have three Thai officers (the captain, the engineer, and the first mate), while the rest are foreign migrants Shorthanded at the eleventh hour, captains sometimes took desperate measures. “That’s when they just snatch people,” one captain explained to me with remarkable candor, referring to cases where workers were drugged or kidnapped and forcefully put on boats. Of all the evil things I saw while reporting for this book, the karaoke bars in Ranong were perhaps the most sinister. Not only did these brokers and bar owners use one type of trafficked migrant to entrap another type of trafficked migrant, but the sex workers and their indebted clients were both, quite often, children. When I finally left Ranong, I hoped never to return. In Kota Kinabalu, I met a thirty-eight-year-old Cambodian deckhand named Pak who said that during his year of captivity on a fishing boat he had been temporarily dropped off for several weeks on what he and other migrants called a “prison island.” One of thousands of mostly uninhabited atolls in the South China Sea, it was a place where fishing captains routinely disembarked captive workers, sometimes for weeks, while their vessels were taken to port for repair. Typically, the captain would leave the crew with a guard who was equipped with water, canned goods, and means to fish. The guard ensured that the men were fed and that none of them tried to leave with another boat. Pak did not know the name of the atoll where he was left, but he said there were other crews there, being sold between boats or waiting for their next deployment. A Thai man whom she helped return home from an Indonesian island called Ambon. He had fled a ship and survived in the woods for nearly a year by eating dogs and cats that he captured at night from villages. Cruise liner pollution Keays was on his second stint on the ship, which was 23 miles from its destination in Southampton, England, when he went exploring in the engine room. A cavernous three-story maze of tangled metal with massive shiny pipes big enough that a small child could crawl through them, the engine room was located in the bowels of the ship and staffed by four dozen men who were surrounded by dozens of pulsing machines and glowing monitors. Venturing into an unfamiliar section where he did not typically work,Keays saw something that swiftly soured his exuberance over his new job: an illegal device known in the industry as a magic pipe. From his marine studies in Glasgow, Keays knew exactly what he was looking at. Several feet long, the pipe stretched from a nozzle on a carbon filter pump to a water tank. Its magic trick? Making the ship’s used oil and other nasty liquids disappear. Rather than storing the highly toxic effluent and unloading it at port, as the ship was legally required to do, the pipe was secretly flushing the waste into the ocean, saving the ship’s owner, Carnival Corporation, millions of dollars in disposal fees and port delays. Cruise liners also produce millions of gallons of oily water. This is the runoff of lubricants and leaks that drip from the ship’s many diesel generators, air compressors, main propulsion engines, and other machines and that drain into the ship’s bilge tanks. Other liquid wastes accumulate, too. “Black water” refers to sewage from hundreds of toilets flushing day in and day out. “Gray water” comes from washing dishes and clothing for the thousands of passengers aboard, or from the slimy food scraps and grease from the ship galleys and restaurants. Some of these liquids can be released into the ocean after light treatment, but ship engineers are responsible for ensuring that none of the nastiest fluids get discharged. Sometimes, though, these engineers and their companies resort to magic pipes to make those fluids disappear. In subsequent court papers, Carnival called the Caribbean Princess an isolated case. But oil logs from the company’s other ships, also disclosed in court records, indicated that oil dumping was a widespread practice and that on occasion engineers on other Carnival ships tricked the monitoring equipment by pulling in the same volume of salt water to replace the liquids they dumped. On the Caribbean Princess, the company had installed three separate machines to monitor and collect waste oil, well beyond what was required by law. Carnival often pointed to the additional machines as proof of its commitment to environmental stewardship. Meanwhile, onboard engineers had devised systems to bypass each of the three monitors. After discovering these ruses, federal prosecutors wrote that Carnival, whose income in 2016 was roughly $2.7 billion, had a “high consciousness of guilt.” In 2016, a federal judge levied a $40 million fine against the company, the largest penalty of its type in nautical history. A hundred years ago, what happened on the Caribbean Princess would have been a nonissue, and the idea of fines might have been laughable. The practice of ships dumping oil and other waste at sea was perfectly legal for most of maritime history. And dump we did. After World War II, Russia, the U.K., and the United States loaded about a million tons of unexploded mustard gas bombs and other chemical munitions onto ships, which were dispatched offshore to scuttle the matériel overboard. Other waste disposal More than a dozen countries, including the United States, the U.K., and the Soviet Union, dumped nuclear sludge and unwanted reactors, several still containing their radioactive fuel, into the Arctic, the North Atlantic, and the Pacific Oceans. The practice was only banned in 1993, at which point the remaining business shifted to an underworld of global waste traders operating in the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, and off the coast of Africa. The most infamous of these syndicates was the ‘Ndrangheta, a criminal organization from Calabria, Italy, which sank hundreds of drums of radioactive waste in the Mediterranean and off the coast of Somalia, according to criminal prosecutors and journalists who investigated the matter. Airborne pollution is a less visible but even more destructive form of ocean dumping. Over the past two centuries, the concentration of mercury in the top three hundred feet of the oceans has tripled because of human activity, especially the burning of coal. Likewise, carbon dioxide levels in the air have risen about 25% since 1958. A great deal of this extra carbon dioxide has dissolved in the oceans, thereby dangerously spiking carbon levels. Carbon dioxide dissolves in water to create carbonic acid and perilously high acidity levels across the world’s oceans. Many governments give big industries permission to use the ocean for waste disposal on a grand scale. Off the southwest coast of Indonesia’s West Nusa Tenggara province near Bali, for example, a four-foot-diameter pipe runs from the Batu Hijau copper and gold mine into the Indian Ocean. The pipe spews 160,000 tons a day of a toxic sludge, consisting of heavy metals and pulverized mine cuttings, called tailings, into the ocean. At least sixteen mines in eight countries, including Papua New Guinea and Norway, also get rid of mine waste by dumping it offshore. Ships also dump inordinate amounts of human sewage. In small quantities, dilution does indeed work. But some modern cruise ships now carry thousands of people and flush more untreated waste into the sea than is handled by small-town sewage plants. In addition to this nitrogen-rich sludge from ships, urban sewers spew even larger amounts of toxic runoff into the sea, and farms produce still more in the form of animal manure and chemical fertilizers. Together, this fecund waste spawns red tides and other harmful algal blooms, some larger than California, which rob oxygen from the water, kill sea life, and sicken seafood consumers. Consider the fate of offshore oil platforms once they reach retirement age. By 2020, thousands of these platforms, many of them constructed during a global building boom in the 1980s, will have to be decommissioned. Countries will have to decide whether to sink, remove, or repurpose them. Some ideas of how to use these aging behemoths include high-security super-max prisons accessible only by boat, private luxury homes with 360-degree ocean views, deepwater scuba schools, fish farms, and windmill stations. The option that oil and gas companies generally prefer, because it’s cheapest, is to sink the platforms. Many scientists back this approach, too, arguing that it creates underwater marine habitats where fish can hide and mate and provides a foundation for the growth of coral reefs. Scientists also argue this solution is less expensive and carbon intensive than removing the platforms. Just renting the tugboat to tow a rig to shore for scrapping can cost more than $500,000 a day. The argument against repurposing the platforms—for scuba hotels, fish farms, solar platforms, or anything else—was thatthe metal on these structures, some as long and wide as a football field, corrodes and leaches dangerous pollution over time. Sinking the rigs so that they could become scaffolding for reefs was an equally bad idea, he contended. Collapsing the rigs onto the seafloor does not actually promote aquatic life; it just attracts fish, which makes them easier capture, he said. Renewable-energy firms have started planning wind farms, wave-energy converters, and floating solar panels in international waters. Who will be responsible for cleaning up the contraptions if they do not work, if their companies go bankrupt, or when they become obsolete, like the oil platforms in Malaysia? there will likely be more controversial technological experiments at sea beyond the reach of most governments The ocean may be vast, blue, and deep, but it’s still being used as a junkyard. For larger cruise ships, the cost of properly disposing waste onshore can be more than $150,000 per year. The cruise industry is a lucrative business. With more than 450 large ships globally, the international cruise line industry generates roughly $117 billion of revenue annually. It employs more than a million workers, who cater to nearly twenty-five million customers a year. With any enterprise on that scale, lawbreaking is inevitable. Dumping oil is by no means the only crime that occurs on these ships. I interviewed a former firefighter who used to work on large cruise liners. He recounted how eastern European women, hired to be servers in the ship’s restaurants, were often expected to double as prostitutes for passengers and staff. If these women wanted to switch shifts or bump up to a restaurant with better tips, they had to have sex with certain managers or officers, he said. The ships had strict dress codes for staff, and the in-house laundering services functioned like an extortion racket, he explained. If you didn’t pay dues to a certain someone, parts of your uniform went missing or came back with mysterious stains on them, which would get you docked or reprimanded. Such black-market services and payoffs are standard fare in prisons, I was curious about the country’s rare no-tolerance policy that banned all foreign boats from fishing in its waters. Other countries like New Zealand banned foreign boats from fishing in their national waters, but Indonesia was taking the extra step of sinking or blowing up the ones that it caught breaking this law. Having arrested and sunk dozens of illegal ships since he started working with the ministry in 2000, Samson was a legend among the several hundred marine officers who worked on the thirty ships in Indonesia’s fisheries fleet. Samson patrolled the most crime-ridden outer edge of Indonesian waters, an area with bigger and more violent poacher ships than those encountered nearer to the Indonesian coast. Built in 2005, the Macan was 117 feet long and relatively fast for its size, with a maximum speed of twenty-five knots. Most of the fishing boats Samson chased had a top speed of about eighteen knots. The Chinese boats were the exception. Not only could the bigger ones reach thirty knots, but their captains were more aggressive and known to ram their adversaries, including foreign military or police ships. This was especially worrisome for Samson because the Macan was fiberglass, rather than having a steel hull, and therefore easier to sink. The Macan tried to make up for this Achilles’ heel by being better armed than most other Indonesian fishery boats. Its forward deck had a mount for a formidable 12.7 mm deck gun, and its crew carried submachine guns. The one big difference was that Palau’s fisheries force had one patrol boat; Indonesia had thirty. The size of Indonesia’s enforcement effort meant that Pudjiastuti’s forces were making a lot of arrests—several hundred boats per year, which was creating logistical difficulties, like how to handle the thousands of men being removed from these boats. Not unlike frontiers on land, border zones at sea were notoriously dodgy places. The ones with three-way intersections were especially attractive to fish poachers, human smugglers, gunrunners, and sellers of illegal bunker fuel because they knew that if they were chased by authorities from one country, they could flee in two other directions—a pickpocket’s hideout with easy exits. Far from comprehensive, the database offered a cursory snapshot of lawlessness at sea.Typically, the death tolls captured in the records were murky because follow-up investigations were rare and reports often lacked details. On land, police can dig up graves to investigate murders. Offshore, “the dead stay gone,” as one investigator said. The database showed, however, that in 2014, the latest year for which data was available, more than 5,200 seafarers were attacked by pirates and robbers, and more than five hundred were taken hostage in three regions alone—the western Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Guinea, and Southeast Asia. The culprits were a diverse cast of characters: rubber-skiff pirates armed with rocket-propelled grenades, night-stalking fuel thieves, and slash-and-dash bandits wielding machetes. Others used deception. Hijackers masqueraded as marine police, human traffickers posed as fishermen, and security guards moonlighted as arms dealers. I could wrap my head around most of these accounts, but some were more difficult to parse. Victims The “team leaders” on the Resolution—most of them American, British, or South African military veterans—explained to me why more seasoned guards were important and what made gun battles at sea so different from those on land. Maritime fighting was tactically different from land combat and experience was crucial. “Between fight or flight, out here there’s just fight,” said Cameron Mouat, a guard working aboard the Resolution. There was no place to hide, no falling back, no air support, no ammunition drops. Targets were almost always fast moving. Aim was shifty because of waves. Some ships were the length of several football fields—too big, these guards contended, for a two- or three-man security detail to handle, especially when attackers arrived in multiple boats and from different directions. It had also become extremely difficult to discern what was a threat and what was not. Automatic weapons—formerly a pirates’ telltale sign—were now commonplace at sea, found on virtually all boats traversing dangerous waters, they said. Smugglers, with no intention of attacking, routinely nestled close to larger merchant ships to hide in their radar shadow and avoid being detected by coastal authorities. Innocent fishing boats also sometimes tucked behind larger ships because they churned up sea-bottom sediment that attracted fish. “The concern isn’t just whether a new guard will misjudge or panic and fire too soon,” explained a South African guard. “It’s also whether he will shoot soon enough.” If guards hesitate too long, he said, they miss the chance to fire warning shots, flares, or water cannons or incapacitate an approaching boat’s engine. By the time you shoot in such cases, he said, the only option left is “kill shots. Mostly, the guards complained of boredom. Though intangible, this boredom had weight, and the longer it sat on the men, the more it crushed them. Nowhere was it heavier than on these armories. Partly that was because these ships were anchored. Having a destination and being in motion lightens the pressure of time and waiting. There was also less social cohesion among armory guards compared with most ship crews. The guards came from different security teams, countries, and cultures, which heightened their skepticism of each other and led to testosterone-steeped displays of macho gruffness. Complicating matters further, the shipping industry reacted in its own way, and the economics of that response was at times perverse. For example, freight companies and their insurers began imposing piracy fees—upwards of $23 per standard shipping container—to cover additional security costs, which on bigger ships could mean a quarter of a million dollars per trip. Even factoring in the cost of private guards and the occasional multimillion-dollar ransom payouts exacted by pirates, shipping companies and crews were sometimes profiting from the threat of Somali piracy. In the several years after Thailand imposed stricter rules on its overseas fleet, every one of the country’s fifty-four long-haul fishing ships dropped its Thai flag, and most of them switched to Oman, Iran, Myanmar, or elsewhere. After World War II, the country was struggling through postwar poverty, and whale meat became a crucial part of the Japanese diet, including as a staple in school lunch programs, because it was a cheap source of protein. By 1958, whaling supplied a third of all meat consumed in Japan. I pointed out that Norway annually catches more whales than Iceland and Japan combined. “Why not focus on them?” I asked. Sea Shepherd does not interfere with other countries because they whale only in their national waters, Meyerson said. The Japanese are the only ones who still whale in distant, international waters. “And that’s where no one is policing but us,” he added. Antarctica is also a feeding ground where everyone seems to be chasing someone else’s meal. While the Japanese hunt the whales and Sea Shepherd tries to block them, the whales track the ships hunting longline toothfish. In a phenomenon known as depredation, whales routinely shadow these boats, sometimes for hundreds of miles, waiting for their lines to fill with fish. When captains begin retrieving their catch, the churning of the winch motor that tugs the fishing line makes a distinctive sound. This sound serves as an underwater dinner bell for the whales. Before crews can pull the fish on board, the whales attack the lines, stripping them clean. On a clear day, when sound underwater travels farthest, whales can hear this dinner bell from more than fifteen miles away. Whales stalk long-liners elsewhere, too, including off the coasts of Alaska, Washington, Chile, Australia, and Hawaii. In the western Gulf of Alaska in 2011 and 2012, killer whale depredation cost each vessel $980 per day in terms of additional fuel, crew food, and the opportunity cost of lost time, according to a study of six longline boats. The problem got worse in Alaska in the 1990s, after fishery authorities lengthened the fishing season from two weeks to eight months. The authorities’ goal in extending the fishing season had been to discourage boat captains from taking dangerous risks as they tried to beat the weather and race the clock. But an unintended consequence of the policy was that by having boats in the water for longer, the likelihood of overlap between the whales and these boats went up. It also gave whales the time to hone their skills and pin down exactly when and how to best hijack the long-liners. “So far,” Tixier said, “we haven’t found an effective way to outsmart the whales. A grown whale can scrape all the fish from a five-mile line in under an hour. To avoid snaring their own mouths, the whales bite off the fish just below the hooks. Sometimes all that’s left behind, he said, are fish lips dangling from the lines. More experienced whales bite the line, shaking loose the fish so they can eat them whole. On an unlucky day, a single toothfish boat can be “assaulted” by a pack with as many as a dozen sperm whales and twenty killer whales. There are no clear rules on how fishing boats are supposed to handle depredation. Some companies have used decoy boats to trick the whales. Others blast heavy metal music to annoy them. Some fishing captains have tried waiting the whales out, not pulling in their lines until the whales decide to leave. Other captains attach satellite devices to serial offenders to avoid them. Attempting to outrun the attackers tends to be futile because they’re too fast. When pursued by whales, some fishermen deliberately go near other boats, hoping to divert their pursuers. Orcas are by far the worst, Infante told me, explaining that they are smarter and more persistent. Also known as killer whales, orcas are the largest apex predators on earth, Toro-Cortés explained that in the past fishing boat captains repelled depredating whales using rifles, harpoons, and dynamite, as well as “cracker shells” and “seal bombs,” which resemble M-80 firecrackers. One study estimated that lethal responses to the whales were so common in the mid-1990s near the Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean that it led to a near 70 percent reduction in the size of the killer whale population there. Over the past decade, the krill-fishing industry has begun intensively targeting the exact locations where whales migrate to eat these animals—near the ice and continental shelves along the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Over the past forty years, populations of adult Antarctic krill have declined by 70 to 80 percent in those areas, studies have shown. Climate change is shrinking the pack ice where krill hide from predators and feed on plankton. Demand for krill has increased over the past decade, with catches growing 40 percent between 2010 and 2016, as the creatures are ground into fish meal to provide protein for pigs and chickens. Oils squeezed from krill are also popular as nutritional supplements, though their health benefits are still in question. Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise hoped to gather evidence that the Chilean and Argentinian governments needed to support their application to create a 172,000-square-mile protected area in these waters. To create the Antarctic marine protected area, the team of scientists would have to sway the countries that fish most heavily for krill—especially Norway, China, Russia, and South Korea. In recent years, these krill ships have drastically improved their efficiency using a newly developed method called “continuous fishing,” which uses long, cylindrical nets attached to underwater vacuums that suck the massive swarms on board. The Australians argued that Japan’s so-called scientific whaling program was an unlawful ruse. Among the pieces of evidence the Australians presented supporting their allegation was that large amounts of the meat from the whales ended up in Japanese restaurants

ALMERÍA 2 Jun. (EUROPA PRESS) - La Autoridad Portuaria de Almería (APA) ha instalado una planta de energía solar fotovoltaica para autoconsumo de 660 kilovatios sobre las naves situadas en el Muelle de Ribera II del Puerto de Almería, una actuación con la que avanza en su estrategia de descarbonización y que supondrá una reducción anual de 247 toneladas de emisiones de CO2 a la atmósfera. La actuación, recogida en el Plan Estratégico de Sostenibilidad 2024-2030, equivale a la absorción de dióxido de carbono de 25 hectáreas de bosque, según ha trasladado la entidad portuaria en una nota. La APA ha invertido 615.108 euros en esta instalación, cofinanciada en un 85 por ciento con fondos europeos Feder 4. La nueva planta se suma a la de 80 kilovatios ejecutada en 2025 en el Puesto de Control Fronterizo y a la de 98 kilovatios situada en la Estación Marítima. Con estas actuaciones, la autoridad portuaria generará una cantidad de energía limpia, en términos de balance neto, similar a la que consume de manera directa en el Puerto de Almería. La planta de Ribera II acerca a la APA a su objetivo de cero emisiones de CO2, es decir, de huella de carbono cero, en cuanto al consumo directo de energía eléctrica. Este objetivo se alcanzará con la planta fotovoltaica de autoconsumo proyectada en el Muelle de Ribera I sobre una superficie de más de una hectárea y una potencia nominal de 855 kilovatios, cuya licitación está prevista para las próximas semanas. Con esta última instalación, el cien por ciento de la energía eléctrica consumida directamente por la APA en el Puerto de Almería procederá de energía renovable. El Gobierno de Ayuso lamenta que Sánchez "no esté a la altura" al ir al Primavera Sound durante visita del Papa Irán lanza varios proyectiles sobre territorio de Israel La salida de España de la OTAN y el cierre de las bases estadounidenses, a votación en el Congreso Cerca de 2.000 aspirantes se presentan este sábado en Sevilla a las pruebas de acceso para operador comercial de Renfe Alcaldesa de San Sebastián de los Reyes pone el foco en mejorar servicios para "frenar el éxodo" y "crecer con cabeza"

Offshore Energy Amsterdam 2026 has officially opened its Early Bird ticket sales. Industry professionals can now secure their place at Europe’s leading event for the offshore energy and maritime sectors with an exclusive 25% discount, available until 30 June 2026. Taking place on24 and 25 November 2026in Amsterdam, Offshore Energy Amsterdam brings together the international offshore energy and maritime community to connect, share knowledge, showcase innovations, and accelerate the energy transition. For nearly two decades, Offshore Energy has served as a key meeting place for decision-makers, innovators, policymakers, investors, and industry leaders from across the offshore energy value chain. The event offers a unique platform to explore opportunities in offshore wind, hydrogen, maritime innovation, carbon capture and storage (CCS), and other emerging technologies driving the future of sustainable energy. Visitors can expect: With the offshore energy industry continuing to evolve at a rapid pace, Offshore Energy Amsterdam 2026 provides a platform where innovation, collaboration, and business come together to shape the future of energy. The Early Bird offer provides a 25% discount on visitor tickets and is available until30 June 2026. Professionals interested in attending are encouraged to register early and take advantage of the discounted rate. Event dates:24–25 November 2026Location:Amsterdam, The Netherlands For more information and ticket registration, visit:Get your Tickets | Offshore Energy Exhibition & Conference NOTE: This article is a press release from Navingo BV, the organiser of Offshore Energy Amsterdam.

JGC Fluor BC LNG II joint venture (JV), composed of Japan’s JGC Holdings Corporation and Fluor Corporation, has been given the go-ahead to move forward with early activities for the expansion of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal in Kitimat, Canada’s British Columbia, which is operated by LNG Canada, a joint venture company encompassing Shell, Petronas, PetroChina, KOGAS, and Mitsubishi. JGC Fluor BC LNG II joint venture has received a limited notice to proceed (LNTP) for the proposed Phase 2 expansion of theLNG Canadaexport facility in Kitimat. The same joint venture partners (JFJV) played a central role in deliveringPhase 1 of the Shell-led project, providing engineering, procurement, fabrication management, construction and commissioning services. Pierre Bechelany, Fluor’s Business Group President of Energy Solutions, commented:“Our long‑standing partnership with LNG Canada is a point of pride for us, and we look forward to advancing the next phase of this world‑class project to help connect Canadian natural gas to global markets. “The LNTP enables us to initiate early planning and move forward with key activities to support a proposed Phase 2 final investment decision by LNG Canada.” The joint venture delivered the project’s twoprocessing units, known as trains, and supporting infrastructure last year, including storage tanks, rail yard, water treatment facility, flare stacks, and marine terminal. This content is available after accepting the cookies. JGC and Fluor cheer handover of second train at Canada’s mega LNG export project Located on Canada’s west coast, the LNG Canada facility is described as the first-of-its-kind in the country with an annual production capacity of approximately 14 million tonnes of LNG. This project is said to position the nation as a major supplier of lower-carbon natural gas to global markets and will operate under a 40-year license. The Phase 2 expansion is expected to double the facility’s production capacity if a final investment decision (FID) is achieved. Take the spotlight and anchor your brand in the heart of the offshore world! Join us for a bigger impact and amplify your presence at the core hub of the offshore energy community!

Amazon Prime Day 2026officially starts on Jun. 23, butPrime membersdon’t have to wait to shop. Some of the best early Prime Day Deals are already live, including a handful that are currently at their lowest price ever, like theBissell CleanView Upright Vacuum,Shark FlexStyleandLevi’s 94 Baggy Jean Shorts. I frequently cover shopping events like Prime Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday as a reporter for NBC Select, so I know how to find deals that are actually worth buying. I spend weeks preparing for Amazon’s biggest sale of the year, which includes combing through thousands of discounts to find the best early Prime Day deals. Each one I recommend below is highly rated, as well as at its lowest price in at least three months, with discounts up to 63 percent off. I’ll frequently update this list prior to Prime Day. Want more from NBC Select?Sign upfor our newsletter, The Selection, and shop smarter. Bissell’s cordedvacuumhas powerful suction to pick up debris on all types of floors, and a large 2-liter container that holds multiple days of dirt. It comes with four attachments you can add to the end of the hose to access all the corners of your home, including hard-to-reach spaces like under furniture. You get a crevice tool, TurboBrush Tool for upholstery, dusting brush and extension wand with your purchase. Waterpik’swater flossersare some of our all-time favoriteoral care products, and this cordless model earned the American Dental Association’s Seal of Acceptance. It has two pressure settings, comes with two tips and is water-resistant so you can use it in the shower. There’s a built-in reservoir on the tool’s handle that holds enough water for up to 45 seconds of use, and its battery gives you up to four weeks of use per charge, according to the brand. This dailymoisturizeris formulated with triple collagenpeptide,niacinamideand pro-vitamin B5, which are ingredients that target signs of aging — they help reduce the appearance of wrinkles, strengthen and hydrate the skin barrier, brighten skin tone, make the skin feel firmer and plumper, and smooth out texture over time, according to the brand. The cream is fragrance-free, making it suitable for sensitive-skin. It also absorbs quickly and has a non-oily feel, according to reviewers. This 8-inchnonstick panhas a textured interior that helps you brown and sear food. It’s made from anodized aluminum, a material that helps it heat up quickly and distribute heat evenly, according to the brand. It’s compatible with all stovetops, oven-safe up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit, dishwasher-safe and works with metal utensils. Instead of plugging these chargers into your device’s port, they magnetically attach to the back of compatible iPhones andAirPodcases, which prevents them from getting in the way while you’re using the device. They also have long 5-foot cables and come with cable ties so you can neatly wrap up the cords when you’re traveling with or storing them. Paula’s Choice formulated this cleanser for those withacne-prone skin. It’s made withsalicylic acid, a chemicalexfoliantthat unclogs pores and reduces redness from breakouts, as well as pro-vitamin B5, which softens skin, according to the brand. The face wash helps remove dirt, makeup and excess oil, and Paula’s Choice recommends using it twice a day. Upgrade your home’s security system with theseindoor camerasthat let you livestream footage through the Ring app — you can evenly see clearly in the dark thanks to Color Night Vision. You’re able to hear and speak to people (orpets) with the app and get real-time alerts, plus the cameras respond to Amazon Alexa voice commands. They have privacy covers and mics that shut-off when you want, and you can mount them or stand them up. Cooking experts we’ve talked to aboutkitchen knivessay Wüsthof’s have fantastic craftsmanship and will last you forever. This set comes with three types: an 8-inch chef’s knife, a 2.75-inch paring knife and a 4.5-inch utility knife. You also get a knife sharpener. The lightweight knives are made with sharp stainless steel blades and have easy-grip molded handles with built-in hand guards for safer cutting and chopping. If you’re an over-packer, this hard-shellcarry-on suitcase’s expandable interior is exactly what you need. It has two compartments for all your stuff, as well as elastic steps and a mesh divider to help keep you organized. It’s designed with spinner wheels, top and bottom carrying handles, a built-in TSA-approved lock and a dedicated sleeve that you can add your own power bank and charging cord to. Monitor what’s going on outside your home with Blink’s Outdoor Camera System, which comes with five cameras that are designed to withstand inclement weather. They run on AA batteries that last up to two years, according to the brand, and you can livestream footage, hear, speak to and zoom in on visitors using the Blink app. The cameras have color vision in low light, and each one comes with its own mounting kit. I bought thesejeanshorts during Prime Day 2025, and because I wear them so much, I’m buying a pair in every color this year. They’re loose enough that I’m always comfortable, but not so much that they look too casual, and I swear they get softer every time I wear them. They have a somewhat high waistband, which I prefer, and hit in the mid-thigh area. I wear a medium and find that they fit true to size. Belkin’s Charging Station lets you repower your iPhone,Apple Watchand AirPods simultaneously. Each device magnetically attaches to its spot on the stand, and it folds flat when you’re not using it, making it travel-friendly. The Shark FlexStyle acts as ahair dryerand styler. You can swap between modes by twisting the top of the tool and adding interchangeable attachments: auto-wrap curlers, an oval brush and a concentrator. The tool works on all hair types and its built-in sensors constantly measure heat to maintain consistent air temperatures and reduce hair damage, according to the brand. The FlexStyle is only 1.5 pounds, making it convenient to hold for long periods of time and travel with. Ultimate Ears’ Wonderboom 4Bluetooth Speakeris water-resistant and floats, which NBC Select reporterHarry Rabinowitzcan attest to, making the ideal choice for anyone who plans to use it outside for pool days, camping trips or rounds of golf. Rabinowitz has used the speaker for years and says despite its compact size, it can get very loud. There’s a built-in fabric loop on the top of the device, which you can connect a carabiner clip to. A full battery gives you about 14 hours of use, according to the brand. A digital thermometer like this one is especially useful while grilling meat, but you can also use it for indoor cooking and baking. It gives you accurate temperature readings in about one second, according to the brand, and it has a bright LED display that automatically rotates depending on how you hold it. The thermometer is water-resistant, so you can rinse it off after use, and it has a built-in magnet, letting you stick it on appliances. It’s also motion-activated — you lift it to wake it up and fold the probe in to put it to sleep. Keep in mind, not every item from a brand is discounted as described below. Amazon Prime Day historically offers Prime members some of the lowest prices of the year on products across categories. These limited-time early deals give you the opportunity to shop when inventory is the highest, before the sale officially begins on Jun. 23. All of my recommendations above are based on NBC Select’s previous coverage and reporting. I also included products the NBC Select staff tested. I evaluated the quality of these deals by running them through price trackers like CamelCamelCamel, and I only included those that: I’m areporter for NBC Selectwho has covered Amazon Prime Day for six years. I frequently write about thehistory of Amazon Prime Day, what’s included in a Prime membership, what to buy and skip during Amazon’s major sales and more. I also appear in related broadcast segments on NBC News NOW and TODAY. For this story, I previewed a list of early deals from Amazon and sorted through them to find worthwhile sales you should know about. This article has been updated with new deals. It reflects the most accurate pricing and product availability at the time of publication. Catch up on NBC Select’s in-depth coverage oftech and tools,wellnessand more, and follow us onFacebook,Instagram,TwitterandTikTokto stay up to date. Bogg Bag Original Bogg Bag Original

For the first time since 1999, the New York Knicks will appear in the NBA Finals. It’s a momentous occasion for a city and fan base starved for basketball success. President Trump, never missing an opportunity to insert himself into the discourse, has suggested that he’ll attend a game in Madison Square Garden. When asked about the president’s ambitions to attend a game, New York Governor Kathy Hochulchallengedhim to name the starting lineup of the “1993 championship team.” But the Knicks didn’t win the championship in 1993. They did make the finals in 1994, but lost to the Houston Rockets. The most recent Knicks championship was, in fact, in 1973. Hochul’s press office has sincesaid on Xthat Hochul slipped up on purpose: She “was baiting Trump into pretending that team won the finals. A classic 4D chess move.” The likelier explanation is that the Democratic governor, presented with the opportunity to score a couple of easy political points, had missed the layup. That would certainly fit the pattern. Democratic politicians are decades into an authenticity problem. Fairly or not, voters—especially men—tend to perceive Democrats as unrelatable, scripted, and disconnected from the population they seek to govern. The solution seemingly favored by Democratic consultants is for anyone with presidential aspirations to appear on as many manosphere podcasts as possible or play footsie with edgy streamers. But appearing on this or that platform is not really what matters. Rather, the game is to get as much attention as possible, as frequently as possible, while seeming as relatable as possible. A cheat code exists to hit all three objectives: sports talk. The contemporary sports-media landscape is designed to take ruthless advantage of the fact that nothing generates attention more reliably than controversy. Personalities such as Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless have made fortunes because they understand that sparking disagreement equals clicks and attention. Their debates may be contrived, inconsequential, and moronic. Their arguments may be made in bad faith. Yet they and other talking heads play on an endless loop on screens across the country. An entire genre of sports podcasts, meanwhile, seems to exist only to generate clips of the most outrageous opinions and post them to TikTok and YouTube. As Democratic politicians scramble to seem in touch and ensure that their faces appear on our phones as much as possible, they are neglecting the free real estate offered by sports talk. Apopular mememocks men for being content to sit and name obscure athletes to one another for hours. It’s popular because it isn’t far from the truth. The politically disengaged male voters whom Democrats are so desperate to reach aren’t at bars arguing about Medicare funding. They are arguing about a roughing-the-passer penalty. Bettors on Polymarket give Stephen A. Smith higher odds of winning the 2028 Democratic presidential primary than Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, and Ruben Gallego. Nothing gets attention like sports takes. Chris Murphy: My son’s hockey team and the crisis of American resentment Trump seems to understand this. He takes controversial positions on sports and talks about them in words that sound sincere. The NFL’s kickoff rules, recently changed to reduce injuries during returns, are a particular passion of his. After attending the 2025 Super Bowl, the presidentpostedon Truth Social: “The worst part of the Super Bowl, by far, was watching the Kickoff where, as the ball is sailing through the air, the entire field is frozen, stiff. College Football does not do it, and won’t! Whose idea was it to ruin the Game?” How much Trump personally cares about sports other than golf is unclear, but he knows which buttons to press. He goes to UFC fights; he goes to the Super Bowl; he has pro athletes—most recently the Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart—speak at his rallies. Sports fans can relate, because this is how many of us would abuse our power if we were president. Some other politicians are getting it. Ron DeSantis, who was widely mocked during the 2024 primaries for his robot-like demeanor, is happy to go on podcasts to discuss how the transfer portal and name, image, and likeness payments are ruining college football. DeSantis even remarked at a recent press conference that, although the University of Florida’s basketball team was the defending NCAA champion at the time, the fans weren’t happy, because the football team was bad. He understands his audience. Zohran Mamdani, the rare Democrat who seems fluent in sports, has made a point of showing off his extensive knowledge of the English Premier League and has made his fandom of the Knicks and Mets apparent. After the Knicks swept the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA playoffs, Mamdaniwent on Xto troll the Ohio Republican candidate for governor Vivek Ramaswamy. Compare these examples with the way in which the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign tried to channel some of sports talk’s power after selecting Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a former high-school-football coach, as Harris’s running mate. “Coach Walz,” as Harris called him at the event announcing his candidacy, seemed more content to let people writeabouthis sports identity than to demonstrate it. On October 27, the nation found out why. After Walz joined Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a Twitch livestream to playMadden, the über-popular football video game, his campaign’s X account posted that “@AOC can run a mean pick 6.” A pick-six (when an interception is returned for a touchdown) is an outcome, not a play. The gaffe was probably the fault of a social-media staffer, not Walz himself. Even so, it went viral in sports group chats across the country. But the more telling moment had actually come a week earlier, when Walz appeared onThe Rich Eisen Show. During his 15-minute segment, Walz went out of his way to compliment the University of Michigan’s football fans, Lambeau Field in Wisconsin, and the coach of the Detroit Lions (also in Michigan). The appearance didn’t generate the kind of viral contempt that greeted the pick-six post. Indeed, the YouTube excerpt of Walz’s appearance on Eisen’s show has just 50,000 views. (By contrast, Trump’s appearance on the sports-and-entertainment podcastBussin’ With the Boys, which was released just a few days earlier, has nearly 10 times as many.) And that’s exactly the problem: Walz avoided controversy by saying nice things about everyone, thus defeating the purpose of talking sports. In the realm of sports talk, kindness is unrelatable; it’s alien, even. What’s relatable is irrationally caring for your team and irrationally hating its rivals—not pandering by saying that you happen to like all of the teams in key Rust Belt swing states. If Democrats want to defeat authoritarianism, they need to win the trust of people who are not necessarily politically engaged. To do that, they could do worse than to start expressing their own hot takes on sports. These shouldn’t repeat already-popular opinions as a way to seem relatable. The perfect take should be actuallyunpopular, counter to the consensus, and specific. The Senate candidate James Talarico doesn’t need to run away from his meatless-taco order. Instead, he could prove that he’s a regular guy by calling into ESPN Austin to accuse the University of Texas quarterback Arch Manning of being a nepo baby who got millions of dollars just for his name. Or perhaps he could compare Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys’ imperious owner, to Trump: an egotistical old man destroying a once-proud institution. Indeed, the sports world offers fertile terrain for class politics. Progressive Democrats have been trying, with limited success, to convince Americans that billionaires are their true enemy. Well, guess who loves to hate billionaires: aggrieved sports fans. Why not take a break from complaining that billionaires don’t pay their fair share ofincometaxes to focus instead on team owners’ obsession with avoiding theluxurytax by trading away their best players? Perhaps AOC could earn some support in Staten Island if she hammered Hal Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees, for letting Juan Soto go to the crosstown Mets to save on his tax bill. Dan Moore: Taxpayers are about to subsidize a lot more sports stadiums Josh Shapiro, of Pennsylvania, is one of the most popular Democratic governors in the country. Is it any coincidence that he drew headlines last year by complaining about the NFL’s attempts to ban the Philadelphia Eagles’ famed “tush push”? If he runs for president, he could go further still: Insinuate that the Eagles lost the 2023 Super Bowldue to sabotageby a groundskeeper with suspiciously close ties to the Kansas City Chiefs. He’s going to lose in Missouri regardless, so he might as well shore up those Pennsylvania votes while proving that he’s just as deranged as the rest of us sports fans. The point isn’t the substance of the opinion—it’s the willingness to defend it. Sports takes are a simple way to show that you have the backbone to stand for something unpopular because you believe in it. The counterargument to all of this is that politicians, especially dorky Democratic politicians, simply don’t have hot sports takes to offer, because they aren’t actually fans. But if you can’t relate to something that resonates so strongly with American people, then you need to reevaluate your role as a politician in an electoral democracy. Aspiring leaders who aren’t up on sports would do well to set aside some time to at least watch the highlights. They will find that sports opinions have a key advantage over policy arguments: If elected, politicians can never be held accountable for them.