Free Republic

The tides are turning. After Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit, Panama has AGREED to: 🔴 Grant U.S. Navy ships FREE passage through the Panama Canal. 🔴 TERMINATE its canal deal with China—cutting Beijing’s grip on global trade. 🔴 EXIT China’s 2017 ‘Belt and Road Initiative’—ending CCP influence in the region. This is a MAJOR blow to China’s expansionist agenda and a massive WIN for American dominance. The globalist order is crumbling, and the U.S. is BACK.

MASSIVE win for @SecRubio Following his meeting with the Panamanians, the country’s president announced that it will not be renewing its deal with China’s Belt and Road ... If people don’t know anything about the historic Silk Road and China’s Belt and Road initiative, it’s time to learn. ... Ahhhh HA! Trump is right! The Chinese has been using the Panama Canal and Panama has been profiting… .... the last admin was working for the CCP ... Now let's do Cuba. Let's get rid of the Communist regime in Cuba once and for all. There should not be a communist...

In November 1906, Theodore Roosevelt became the first sitting U.S. president to make a diplomatic visit outside the continental United States, sailing to Panama to view the construction of the Panama Canal. In September 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty that would ultimately give Panama full control and operation over the canal in 2000. And in December 2024, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump threatened to retake the canal from Panama. The chances of this happening are slim, of course. But like most political rhetoric, his comments denote larger goals and aspirations – in this case, Trump’s domestic agenda, which likely...

As usual, President Trump has a way of talking about things and walking a few steps ahead of us. Enter Panama and all the talk about Canada. In this case, the issue is China in Panama is a problem, to say the least, given the commercial and military traffic that goes through there.Honestly, it's about time that we start pushing back on the role of China. According to Cristina Guevara, a Latin America policy analyst and writer, the time is now. This is how she put it:Chinese investments, such as the $3.5 billion Chancay Port project, address concrete needs in...

Trump made an economic argument along with his geopolitical one: “We’re being ripped off at the Panama Canal like we’re being ripped off everywhere else,” he told the audience as he denounced the increased fees billed to American shippers by the canal’s operators. ... The first treaty obliged Panama to operate the canal neutrally, with nondiscriminatory pricing, and allowed the United States to defend it from any threat that might interfere with its neutrality. The second treaty transferred full control to Panama effective on Dec. 31, 1999, without superseding the first treaty’s broad provision allowing for US defense of this...

The Panama Canal is considered a VITAL National Asset for the United States, due to its critical role to America’s Economy and National Security. A secure Panama Canal is crucial for U.S. Commerce, and rapid deployment of the Navy, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and drastically cuts shipping times to U.S. ports. The United States is the Number One user of the Canal, with over 70 percent of all transits heading to, or from, U.S. ports. Considered one of the Wonders of the Modern World, the Panama Canal opened for business 110 years ago, and was built at HUGE...

Israel will build a railway between Ashdod and Eilat, allowing ships that dock at the Red Sea port to transfer goods to the ports of Ashdod and Haifa and from there to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea, in an attempt to compete with the Suez Canal, Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Sunday. Speaking to investors at the fifth Go4Europe business conference at Tel Aviv's Hilton Hotel, organized by investment bank Cukierman & Co., Netanyahu said that big ships arriving from the Far East are now forced to transfer their goods by land to an Egyptian port on the Mediterranean from...

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Maher was quoted as saying on Wednesday that press reports over Israel's plans to build a canal linking the Aqaba Bay with the Mediterranean as an alternative to the Suez Canal were a mere "illusion." Maher told the Syrian daily Tishreen "We've heard this many many times and it's a mere illusion." He stressed that the Suez Canal "has and will always be historic and serves the world economy." "If some do not like this ... that's their business, but I affirm that the (Suez) Canal is bigger than being played down by anyone," Maher said....

Israel Is Planning an ‘Inland Suez Canal’ Across Its Desert. At What Cost? Israel's planned high-speed train to Eilat: dream or potential environmental train wreck? In theory, it sounds amazing: a high-speed train to Eilat, the country’s southernmost city on the shores of the Red Sea. This was attested to by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his recent Knesset speech enumerating the new government’s goals, in which he described it as a major national project: “The mission is to develop the country’s infrastructures, including developing a high-speed rail that will travel hundreds of kilometers per hour and connect the country...

#Czechia looks to dig a new canal to connect three peripheral seas: the #BlackSea, the #BalticSea, and the #NorthSea. #European commerce and trade would flow uninterrupted from one end to the other.

Henry Bicker Gibson was cashier of the Ontario Bank, director of multiple financial ventures, president of a canal company, and president of two railroads, the latter of which was merged with others to form the New York Central.

A large liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Grace Emilia ran aground in Egypt’s Suez Canal on Wednesday. Local media reports the shipping traffic is unaffected as the incident took place in a southern section of the canal where a second channel allows for ships to bypass the blockage. AIS data from Vesselfinder (below) showed four tugboats working to move the 293-m-long vessel. Equasis lists the 2021-built 174,000 cu m ship, which entered the canal early Wednesday morning, as owned by Japan’s NYK. The latest incident comes just three weeks after the bulker Glory bound for China carrying 66,000 mt of...

The Corinth Canal is a waterway that crosses the narrow isthmus of Corinth to link the Gulf of Corinth to the Saronic Gulf...It is believed that Periander, the tyrant of Corinth (602 BC), was the first to conceive of the idea of digging the Corinth Canal. As the project was too complicated given the limited technical capabilities of the times, Periander constructed the diolkós, a stone road which allowed ships to be transferred on wheeled platforms.Later on, Macedonian king Dimitrios Poliorkitis (c. 300 BC) tried to dig the canal, but his team of engineers warned him that if a connection...

A Florida port authority is inviting steamships waiting to dock in California to divert via the Panama Canal to the sunshine state, where there are no backlogs. The Jacksonville Port Authority said it’s the solution to an unprecedented logjam at The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where weeks-long queues are slowing commerce ahead of the year’s busiest shopping season. It’s a sharp contrast from the scene in Jacksonville, which officials said has maintained terminal fluidity – and set a new container volume record - despite market disruptions. Florida ports council president Michael Rubin said they can expedite cargo...

The Megaship which blocked the Suez Canal for six days in March set sail Wednesday following a compensation deal between Egypt and the vessel's Japanese owner. The ship, MV Ever Given, started to move north from the central canal city of Ismailia towards the Mediterranean Wednesday morning after having been impounded for more than 100 days. The nearly 200,000-tonne container vessel was wedged in the canal during a sandstorm on March 23, blocking a passage from Asia to Europe that carries 10% of global maritime trade and pumps vital revenues into Egyptian state coffers. Egypt seized the ship after an...

ISMAILIA, Egypt, July 7 (Reuters) - The Ever Given, one of the world's largest container ships, resumed its journey to leave the Suez Canal on Wednesday, 106 days after becoming wedged across a southern section of the waterway for nearly a week and disrupting global trade. The Ever Given started to head north in the late morningacross the Great Bitter Lake, which separates two sections of the canal and where it had been moored with its Indian crew since being refloated on March 29. It then joined the back of a northbound convoy, passing the site of a ceremony where...

We previewed last week to readers that port congestion wasn’t just observed across US West Coast ports, such as Los Angeles/Long Beach, but also severe congestion was developing in southern China. At the time, we called it a “perfect storm” ahead of the peak shipping season. Now the world’s largest container line, Maersk, calls the port congestion at Yantian International Container Terminal, a deepwater port in Shenzhen, Guangdong, in southern China, a much more significant disruption to its operations than the shutdown of the Suez Canal in March. Ditlev Blicher, Maersk Asia Pacific Managing Director, was quoted by Seatrade Maritime,...

The canal director and a judicial official said Tuesday that Egyptian authorities had impounded a giant container ship that had blocked the Suez Canal last month due to a financial dispute with its owner. According to Lt. Gen. Osama Rabie, the hulking Ever Given would not be able to leave the country until a settlement is reached with the vessel's Japanese owner, Shoei Kisen Kaisha Ltd. “The vessel has now been legally impounded,” he said late Monday on Egypt's state-run television. “They refuse to pay anything.” The vessel's owner made no immediate comment.

Supply chain issues and the popularity of garden centres during lockdown are causing a shortage of garden gnomes. The ornaments are in short supply with raw materials hard to come by and the recent blockage of the Suez Canal contributing to the national shortage. Ian Byrne, assistant manager of Highfield Garden World in Whitminster, said there had been a "massive upswing" in the sales of garden gnomes. "There aren't any [gnomes]. There's definitely a shortage. It's a combined thing with garden centres being so busy, I looked at some figures based on March which said garden centres were 97% busier...

At the time of the Suez blockage, Ms Elselehdar was working as a first mate, in command of the Aida IV, hundreds of miles away in Alexandria.