Avondale board accepts Litton bid but Litton offer for NNS is in trouble Avondale's Board of Directors is set to accept Litton's revised acquisition proposal, but Litton may have to reformulate its separate bid for Newport News to gain Pentagon acceptance
Seamen's Church Institute announces that crewmen held in Nigeria are free The Seamen's Church Institute (SCI) of New York & New Jersey says that the four remaining Ukrainian crewmen of the M/V Dubai Valour, held hostage for two years, have been freed by Chief Humphrey Idisi of Sapele, Nigeria
Golden Ocean sues Safmarine FRED Cheng's Golden Ocean Group has made a dramatic intervention in the disposal of Safmarine by taking legal action to have the South African company wound-up in a bid to protect its extensive charter exposure.
ITF vessel cook claims unfair dismissal THE International Transport Workers' Federation's campaign for fair employment at sea has itself been hit by an embarrasing claim of unfair dismissal.
SudAmericana takes control of Montemar CHILEAN shipping giant Companhia SudAmericana de Vapores has tightened its grip further on the South American container market through the purchase of a controlling interest in Montevideo-based line Montemar.
Stavraetos runs short of supplies The ship at the centre of a dispute between a powerful grain house and the Congo's port of Matadi is running dangerously short of supplies and will soon be without power, its owners are warning.
Swan Reefer rescue package cuts Ugland reefer exposure UGLAND International is to cut its exposure to the depressed reefer market by nearly 40% as part of a rescue package hammered out for Norway's embattled Swan Reefer.
Gdynia port firm eyes BCL stake The Port of Gdynia Holding is having talks with Polish Ocean Lines over the acquisition of the latter's 40% stake in the container feeder operator Baltic Container Line, according to the port holding's vice-president Janusz Jarosinski.
FEFC axes Europe inland rates THE European Commission's fight against joint inland transport pricing by ocean carriers has claimed another success with one of the world's oldest freight conferences revising its tariff accordingly.
Cruise Line fire NORWEGIAN Cruise Line has been forced to cancel two cruises and cut short a third because of a fire in the engine room of the Norway at Barcelona, writes David Mott.
Another major unionized LTL carrier bites the dust. Denver-based NationsWay, the largest privately held LTL concern, closed abruptly late last month. Jerry McMorris, founder of the 40-year-old carrier, is liquidating the carrier rather than reorganizing it. The Teamsters union charged McMorris with "monumental bad management." The company had struggled for at least the past five years and was only marginally profitable. But the decision to close NW may have as much to do with McMorris' role as majority owner of the hugely profitable Colorado Rockies baseball team, which increasingly has occupied his heart and time.
Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater promised to halve the number of motor-carrier-related deaths, but trucking attorneys are poised to take the Department of Transportation to court over some of Slater's proposals and Public Citizen's Joan Claybrook accused Slater of being mostly talk and little substance. More tax dollars, more inspectors adopting pit-bull attitudes and a trendy safety awareness slogan will cut motor-carrier-related highway deaths by at least 2,500 annually, said Slater. He's expecting truck drivers to work fewer hours and accept less pay, motor carriers to place an electronic big brother in every tractor cab and shippers to embrace higher freight rates as a result.
Germany's Deutsche Post has shelled out more than $3 billion in a little over a year to acquire global and European logistics, express and parcel companies. It's now Europe's biggest freight transportation company and the buying spree is not over yet. According to Uwe R. Dorken, DP's managing director, international, the German post office has made only about 75 percent of its planned acquisitions ahead of its stock market privatization, which is scheduled for the second half of 2000.
The Big Four LTL carriers are growing increasingly frustrated with the nation's rail service. After enduring a 24-day strike in 1994 to win the right to place up to 28 percent of their freight on the rails, the LTL carriers are now taking some of that freight away from the rails and putting it on over-the-road trucks. They say rails' shoddy service is to blame. Yellow Freight System will be making a change of operations, effective July 18, that will take 6 percent of its freight off the railroads. That will add approximately 135 Teamsters jobs and 1 million additional line-haul miles for YFS. Roadway Express made a similar change in March. ABF Freight System and Consolidated Freightways are planning moves similar to YFS, executives said.
If the U.S. Customs Service's overburdened import processing system breaks down, "the flow of trade across our borders would be slowed significantly, if not brought to a halt in many places," Customs Commissioner Raymond Kelly told a Senate Finance Committee hearing, in a frank assessment of his agency's operational efficiency. The frailty of customs' automated system of handling imports "threatens to reduce our processing power dramatically," he said. Meanwhile, said Gerald McManus, BDP International vice president and former assistant customs commissioner, the issue is "up in the air" with no money allocated in the president's budget. "How long can customs keep patching up its system?" he asked.
Increased competition from rival Union Pacific may have been a significant factor in Burlington Northern Santa Fe's recent organizational restructuring, say shippers, although Wall Street believes increased spending without corresponding revenue growth has more to do with the changes than UP turning up the heat. In announcing a drop in earnings based on anticipated second-quarter results, BNSF Chairman Rob Krebs appointed chief operations officer Matt Rose to president and COO, marking the first time Krebs has considered future leadership succession at the company, noted one observer.
The e-commerce boom has express carriers scrambling to figure how they can grab a piece of the ever-changing home delivery market. Residential deliveries have been shunned in the past by many traditional carriers because it simply costs too much to make single stops to drop off a package. RPS Inc. is the most recent transportation company to announce it is taking a stab at the home delivery market, the first departure from its wholly business-to-business strategy. Airborne Express has something up its sleeve as well.
Exel Logistics, a third-party logistics provider selected Descartes Systems Group's Energy DeliveryNet.com software suite to coordinate what it calls a "service delivery community." Energy DeliveryNet.com facilitates supply-chain collaboration through tracing and managing product flow, identifying exceptions and notifying users, and integrating disparate systems through the Internet. Does Exel hope to use this technology for other customers? Yes. But this apparently hinges on the question: What is a leading logistics provider?
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