Hanjin shipping collapse in South Korea leaves freight stranded, portends weakening global economy
The collapse of a South Korean freight shipping line is starting to cause chaos and confusion at major ports around the Asia-Pacific region.
Hanjin — which is the seventh-biggest shipping company in the world — went into receivership late last week after its creditors rejected a restructuring plan.
While Australia is yet to feel the effects, Hanjin's fleet have been denied access to ports as stevedores demand payment of arrears and cash in advance.
Since Friday, the company has literally been all at sea, with 45 vessels denied access to ports in China, Japan, Singapore and India.
Joe Gleinser, the president of GCS Technologies, an Austin-based IT support and services company, walked me through just how time-consuming it is for companies to deal with ransomware attacks, which generally starts with the appearance of “unusually named files” or files that suddenly can’t be accessed. “Locking the network down”—freezing some or all of a company’s systems—is typically the first step after the attack is recognized, in an effort to stop the damage and look for fixes.
Now, it’s still early in the development of this technology. Uber’s cars will actually be manned by a person who can take control of the vehicle when it hits a situation that it’s not programmed for or if there’s an emergency. It’s a bit like autopilot on a plane with a person at the controls just in case.
For sheer impact and inconvenience, little compares with the August 14-15, 2003 blackout affecting the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada. The cause was overgrown trees brushing up against high voltage lines in FirstEnergy's system in northern Ohio. This resulted in a cascade of transmission line failures ultimately affecting 50 million people and was the biggest blackout in North American history.
U.S., China Agree on Implementing Paris Climate Change Pact
U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday outlined new plans for expanding their joint efforts on climate change, showcasing one of the few areas of agreement in an otherwise tense relationship between the two leaders. U.S. officials detailed the agreement reached by Messrs. Obama and Xi ahead of what is likely to be their final meeting before a new president enters the White House in January. The new steps include formal adoption by both the U.S. and China of the international climate-change agreement reached in Paris in December 2015, as well as a road map for achieving emissions reductions in commercial aircraft and for phasing out hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, a potent group of gases that are linked to climate change but aren’t covered by the Paris agreement. The moves cap three years of efforts by Messrs. Obama and Xi to advance climate-change initiatives, following […]
