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The City of San Jose is moving forward with a plan to use shipping containers to house some of its homeless population. The project will sit on city-owned property southeast of Willow Glen.  The project was to initially put temporary manufactured home on Evans Lane. After pushback from neighbors, it's now evolved into permanent shipping container-sized apartments for the homeless. It’s the City of San Jose’s latest answer to help get its 4,000 homeless people off the streets, converting recycled shipping containers-into studio apartments. “This is a type of modular construction that is an emerging market right now,” said Rachel...

For $37,000 you can live in what used to serve as a shipping container. Steve Harrigan reported today on a new out-of-the-box idea that could solve several problems at once. Florida-based New Generation Builders is taking old cargo shipping containers and retrofitting them into dwellings. To look at one, you might think of a mobile home, but the company’s owner, Steven Sawyer, resents the comparison. He notes that when a hurricane comes through, it levels mobile homes. But Sawyer says by using corrugated steel and concrete pilings to anchor down each side, his homes will be totally undamaged. …

Paper no. 3068 Admiral Sureesh Mehta, the Chief of the Naval Staff sounded a stern warning on 18th February 2009, about the possibility of nuclear weapons being smuggled in to the country through the ever increasing container traffic. The warning was issued at a seminar to discuss Port Development and related security issues. At one level, there is nothing new in the warning. Similar warnings were issued post 9/11 by US and other maritime analysts who expected the seas to be the next medium for transportation and manifestation of terror. It is this fear that prompted the US to examine...

A collapsible container designed by two professors from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, India, could revolutionize the marine cargo sector. In less than four minutes, the container is collapsed hydraulically to one-quarter its original size. Kept together with a self-locking mechanism, four vertically stacked containers take up exactly the same space as a regular TEU. More than 52 years ago, Malcom McLean, a North Carolina trucking entrepreneur, originally hatched the idea of using containers to carry cargo. He loaded 58 containers onto his ship, Ideal X, in Newark, N.J., and once the vessel reached Houston the uncrated containers...

The television advertisement starts with an ominous warning about 9/11. Then it shows a nuclear explosion, followed by a photo of Osama bin Laden and a ship loaded with cargo containers. "Since 9/11, it is one of the greatest threats we face, a nuclear weapon in the hands of Osama bin Laden shipped through an American port," says the voice-over. Finally, the ad reveals its villain: an outfit based in Arkansas that has a network of 1.8 million workers around the world who operate at 3,900 locations in the United States. Its corporate name is Wal-Mart Stores Inc. What's the...

ROME, Oct 25 (AFP) - An Egyptian man arrested last week in the southern Italian port of Gioia Tauro accused of having links with terrorists was carrying sophisticated communication equipment, Italian police said Thursday. Rizk Amid Farid, 43, had with him a portable computer, three mobile telephones including one with satellite link-up, and a Thai Airways identity pass giving him access to airports and credit at various banks. He was discovered hiding in a container at the port last Thursday. All the explanations given to Italian anti-terrorist police for his possession of such items have so far rung false. He ...

OTTAWA (CP) - Canadian diplomatic officials in Rome are scheduled to visit a man Italian police charged with terrorism after he was found comfortably camped out in a cargo container. Rizk Amid Farid, 43, is being held in the southern Italian town of Palmi on international terrorism charges. Police found Rizk dressed in a suit and set up with a cellphone, cameras, a laptop computer and a variety of documents, inside a shipping container from Egypt. He is a Canadian citizen, and holds a legitimately issued passport. Reynald Doiron, a spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs, said two consular ...

THURSDAY OCTOBER 25 2001 Business-class suspect caught in container BY RICHARD OWEN IN ROME AND DANIEL MCGRORY ITALIAN police were investigating last night why a suspected al-Qaeda hijacker would smuggle himself halfway around the world locked inside a shipping container with its own bed and toilet. The bizarre discovery of an Egyptian carrying a Canadian passport was made on the dockside in Gioia Tauro in southern Italy, where detectives believe they may have foiled another hijacking. They were questioning Rizik Amid Farid, 43, about his choice of travel and why he was carrying airport maps and airside security passes for ...