Wire Services News

A Chinese shipbuilding company has broken ground on what it says will be the world's biggest shipyard, a high-tech facility capable of producing cruise ships and natural gas tankers, sources inside China and wire services reported Monday. The yard, being built on an island at the mouth of the Yangtze river, will reportedly eature seven construction docks along a five-mile stretch of coastline, the Shanghai Daily reported. Due for completion in 2015, the yard will be designed to produce a total of 12 million dwt of ships per year. The new yard is being built by the China State Shipbuilding Corp., which incorporates 25 large- and medium-sized shipyards. The group currently produces tankers and container ships, as well as warships and submarines for China's navy, according to its Web site.

According to a report in the NY Times and circulated by the major wire services, the U.S. Navy's proposed DD- 21 class of destroyers may be endangered. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that the Pentagon budget will have to grow by as much as $70 billion a year to maintain existing weapons systems while moving ahead with new ones such as the DD-21, while President-elect George Bush has proposed increasing military spending by $4.5 billion a year over the next decade, the Times said. The Times said the new administration likely will have to cancel or postpone some major defense programs in development, such as the Air Force's F-22 stealth fighter, made by Lockheed- Martin Corp., the Marine Corp's V-22 Osprey aircraft, a joint project of Textron Inc.

The entire Port of Oakland shipping operation remains shut down, idling hundreds of port workers and truck drivers, while an investigation continues of the accidental death of an ILWU Longshoreman aboard a ship at the Port Monday afternoon. The Alameda County Coroner's office said the worker was apparently struck by a shipping container as he worked aboard the Stutgard, a Hapag-Lloyd container ship. No one apparently witnessed the accident. Many customs and security offices were also closed. The backup will not only mean congested terminals when the port operations resume, but the shutdown will be felt in distribution centers in the San Joaquin Valley and elsewhere, where warehousing facilities continue to operate, Taylor said.

In what would on first appearance be a stupid New Year joke is indeed reality. A tanker carrying 70,000 tons of flammable kerosene, travelling in one of the world’s busiest waterways, inexplicably missed several warning signs and hit a ship dubbed Tricolor, a ship which was sunk with its cargo of 3,000 luxury cars in mid-December in the English Channel following its collision with a containership. In a vast understatement, a British Coast Guard official was quoted by one of the wire services as saying: This accident should not have happened. Really? Warnings of the sunken ship, which is submerged in about 75 ft. of water and apparently visible only at low tide, include half-hour warnings broadcast in the area, fluorescent buoys and a radar beacon.