The company says that it had suffered losses to the tune of several crores of rupees in terms of handling charges paid to the Kochi Port Trust, other expenses and loss of business due to the long and allegedly unnecessary detention. The company's counsel said that they would approach the court "at the earliest".

The ship, which berthed at Kochi port on February 17 some 40 hours after the killing of the fishermen, was in detention till May 4, the day it left the Indian shores on the basis of a Supreme Court order after furnishing a bond for Rs 3 crore and a demand draft for equal amount, which itself was cause of a dispute.

The company says that the State Government had extended the detention of the vessel unnecessarily even after all legal procedures for which it was needed at Kochi had been completed by February 25. It says that this delay occurred due to the wrong legal advices provided to the Government.

A special investigation team of the Kerala Police had arrested the two Italian Marines, accused of shooting the two fishermen to death, on February 19 from aboard the vessel. The examinations on board the ship and confiscation of documents and the weapons allegedly used for the crime were completed by February 25, says the company.

Confirming that they would be moving the court for compensation, shipping company lawyer VJ Mathew said that they were yet to assess the exact losses incurred by the detention of the vessel at Kochi but added that it could run into several crores of rupees. Also, they were yet to decide the volume of compensation to be sought from the Government, he said.

When the shipping company's plea seeking release of the ship came up before the Kerala High Court on March 28, Kerala Advocate General KP Dandapani had opposed it saying release could not be granted till the forensic and ballistic tests of the guns seized from it were over but the Centre had raised no objection.

On April 3, a division bench of the Kerala High Court refused permission for the ship to leave Kochi as it set aside a March 29 order of a single-judge bench that allowed the ship to set sail after submitting bank guarantee for Rs 3 crore. The division bench's order was on the basis of petitions filed by the relatives of the murdered fishermen.

Following this, Dolphin Tanker Srl approached the Supreme Court which on May 2 allowed the ship to leave Kochi almost under the same conditions set earlier by the High Court's single-judge bench. The company submitted a bond for Rs 3 crore to the High Court's Registrar General the following day but he insisted that it should furnish a demand draft for equal amount.

According to the company, it had to pay Rs 10 lakh as pilotage fee to the port trust every time it was called to the harbour from the outer berth where it was anchored under police guard since February 25. In addition to that, it was also made to pay Rs 300,000 a day on the basis of tonnage, the company says.

Source: Daily Pioneer

On August 3rd 2011 the Karin Schepers ran aground on the Cornish coast while travelling from Cork, Ireland to Rotterdam, Netherlands. Just before 3am the master relieved the second officer as the officer of the watch, he fell asleep a short time later.

The investigation found that no lookout had been posted, and with no-one awake on the bridge the vessel continued on for over 2 hours, crossing the Land's End Traffic Separation Scheme before grounding close to Pendeen Lighthouse, West Cornwall.

Fortunately, the ship was undamaged and the crew were able to refloat her on the rising tide.

The master had been the 8-12 watchkeeper, and at midnight had handed over the watch to the second officer. However, the master returned to the bridge at regular intervals after midnight, sounding increasingly intoxicated until eventually he ordered the second officer from the bridge. Shortly after this the master, alone on the bridge, fell asleep.

The grounding in August was the second time the Karin Schepers had run aground Credit: RNLI

It's not the first time the ship has run aground. on 22nd March 2009, Karin Schepers grounded in Danish waters while on passage from Finland to the UK. The Danish Maritime Authority (DMA) investigated the accident and published a report which concluded that the grounding of Karin Schepers was caused by the following:

Fortunately, the ship was undamaged and the crew were able to refloat her on the rising tide. Credit: RNLI

Following the previous grounding, the owners of the ship, HS Schiffahrts GmbH & Co KG adopted a 'zero tolerance' policy to alcohol consumption whereby any member of the crew found to have consumed alcohol would immediately be dismissed.

This policy was implemented on the owner's behalf by Marlow Navigation Co Ltd. Prior to joining Karin Schepers, crew were required to sign to acknowledge that they understood and would comply with this alcohol policy.

Safety issues identified during the investigation leading to recommendations:

The role of the coastguard in relation to the monitoring of the AIS transmissions of vessels transiting the Land's End TSS requires clarification, as differences exist between MCA operational orders and submissions made by the UK to the IMO.

The decision to allow a vessel that is aground, to refloat before a reliable assessment of her condition has been made, should be carefully and systematically considered. By permitting a vessel to refloat without a survey having been carried out, there is a possibility of an escalation of the emergency.

The decision by senior MCA staff to allow Karin Schepers to resume her passage without a survey having been conducted, stemmed from a general lack of awareness of the powers of intervention that were available to them.

Safety issues identified during the investigation which have been addressed or have not resulted in recommendations:

After he had been ordered from the bridge by the master, who he considered to be tired and drunk, the second officer did not seek advice from another senior officer on board before going to bed. This suggests a lack of an effective crew resource management structure on board the vessel.

The fact that the owner was unaware that a lookout was, routinely, not used on board indicates a weakness in the owner's ability to monitor the onboard application of the vessel's SMS. The effectiveness of any SMS relies on a robust audit procedure in which the owner actively engages to ensure company procedures are being followed.

Where the presence of a company representative is likely to alter the normal operating methods employed on board, consideration should be given to the routine examination of onboard records, including VDR recordings to audit compliance with the SMS.

The failure to use the BNWAS is another indication that the vessel's SMS was ineffective. It is important that audits are robust and of sufficient scope to provide evidence that companies' SMS procedures are being complied with at all times.

Mariners should not hesitate to attempt to contact the watchkeepers of any vessel which appears to be standing into danger. In view of the professional manner in which Falmouth MRCC reacted once it was made aware of Karin Schepers' position, an earlier attempt to contact the vessel might have enabled action to be taken in sufficient time to have prevented the accident.

Source: ITV News

The International Maritime Organization, whose role is to improve the safety of global shipping, said it wanted a new set of global guidelines to be drawn up to help countries and shipping countries decide whether and how to deploy armed guards.

"International standards or regimes should be established," IMO Secretary-General Koji Sekimizu told reporters.

"That regime should not be made compulsory, but provide an international framework on which the flag state and the (shipping) companies may decide to employ arms on board.

"This is not a permanent solution and arms on board will not be institutionalised. These are exceptional circumstances and we hope these are temporary measures," he said after an anti-piracy conference at the IMO's headquarters overlooking the River Thames in London.

Shipping companies are increasingly reliant on private guards to deter pirates armed with machine guns and rocket launchers who are prepared to take hostages and demand ransoms worth millions of dollars each year, particularly in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.

Naval patrols by NATO, the European Union and others have failed to stop attacks by Somali pirates, prompting ship owners to look for different ways to protect their cargoes and crew.

Opponents of armed guards aboard merchant ships say their presence can escalate violence. There are also concerns about the guards' training and accountability, as well as uncertainty over their legal position if they kill suspected pirates.

The IMO said it needed to hold more talks before publishing guidelines on private guards. Many of the guards are former military personnel employed by UK companies.

"The measures that will be adopted ... are not above the law, they will all be in accordance with international and national law," said Rosalie Balkin, IMO assistant secretary-general and its director of legal affairs.

The difficulty of protecting ships was highlighted in February when Italian marines on a merchant vessel were accused of shooting dead two Indian fishermen they suspected of being pirates. India detained the marines, prompting a diplomatic row.

Alternatives to armed guards include trying to outrun pirates and using water hoses, barbed wire or non-lethal electric fences.

The threat was underlined earlier this month when Somali pirates hijacked a Greek-owned oil tanker carrying nearly one million barrels of oil in the Arabian Sea.

Days later, European helicopter gunships attacked a pirate base on the Somali coast, destroying five speedboats in the first attack by EU forces on its coastline

Source: Reuters

Stena Spirit was leaving the port on Poland's Baltic Sea coast at 8.45am on Thursday when she collided with a loading crane which tipped and fell.

"She rammed the stern into the leg of the container crane that collapsed," said Jesper Waltersson at Stena Line.

Waltersson informed that none of the 49 crew or 120 passengers were physically injured in the collision.

The Stena Spirit had set sail for Karlskrona in eastern Sweden but on Thursday afternoon remained in Gydnia.

BCT said in its statement that an investigation would be conducted into the accident and Stena Line remained uncertain when the vessel would be able to depart.

"We are looking at when we can leave the port and are waiting for the authorities to have their say," Jesper Waltersson said.

Source: Maritime Connector

The search engine plans to offer the coordinates and identity of virtually all vessels at sea on Google Maps after spending around $3million on satellite technology.

The company continues to consult with the U.S. Navy over the plans, as well as with the defence departments of countries around the world.

Google has claimed that it is better placed to track the military boats than most governments.

Ship-shape: Google will soon be able to show the location of every vessel at sea and maps of the ocean floor

Michael Jones, who is chief technology advocate at Google Ventures, told Aol: 'I watch them and they can't see themselves. It angers me as a citizen that I can do this and the entire DoD can't.'

Google is not the first to track ships at sea, but claims to have improved on previous technology.

All large vessels are fitted with the Maritime Automatic Identification System (AIS) - a series of transponders that transmit the boat's position to avoid collisions when it is dark or there is bad weather.

At the moment AIS can detect boats 20 mile away from each other - however, there are ongoing attempts to improve the distance and accuracy. By comparison, from space the Google satellites can detect ships anywhere.

The web power has already used its technology to track trawlers fishing illegally in foreign waters and passed the information on to governments.

Despite fears over a risk to defence ships, the vessels can go incognito by simply turning off their transmitter so military operations were unlikely to threatened.

All at sea: Internet users will be able to locate the coordinates and identity of the U.S. Navy's fleet via a simple Google search

Detractors of Google's plan to map the waters said the technology could be used by terrorists or pirates to attack ships.

However one military source responded: 'It's not the ships you can see, but the ships you can't see that matter.'

Google's plan to map the ocean floor over the next five years could reveal the resting place of spy satellites and send hostile foreign enemies on the hunt for 'sunken treasure'.

Google Maps was launched in 2005, providing aerial or satellite images for most populated areas across the world.

The service has often been controversial. Iran threatened to sue the company yesterday over dropping the name of the Persian Gulf on Google Maps.

The threat came after it left the body of water between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula nameless on its online map service.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said that if Google does not restore the name of the Persian Gulf, it will face 'serious damages'.

Google reacted to the comments, saying that its maps service had never labelled the Persian Gulf.

When asked by MailOnline if Google planned to include the title in the wake of Iranian threats, a spokesman said there were no plans to include the title on any amended map.

A separate company insider told Mail Online that it was 'definitely not' a political decision not to have Persian Gulf on Google maps, and Iran's assertion that Google had had the label removed was 'simply wrong'.

Iranians are highly sensitive about the name of the body of water, which has historically and internationally been known as the Persian Gulf.

Some Arab states insist on calling it the Arabian Gulf. The issue has stirred up tensions between Iranians and Arabs

Source: Daily Mail

The groups claim the Kulluk and support vessels will put harmful pollutants into the skies, adding problems to a region already beset by climate warming, and that the EPA granted the permit without consideration of all national environmental laws and regulations.

"EPA did not analyze whether the Kulluk will comply with all standards, and they relied on modeling tricks to reduce the measured impact." Earthjustice attorney Colin O'Brien said.

The eight groups asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene and send the permit back to the EPA for reconsideration.

The appeal was expected. A similar appeal was filed for an air permit granted to a second Shell drilling ship, the Noble Discoverer.

The EPA Appeals Board last month rejected review petitions for the Kulluk and earlier had done the same for the Noble Discoverer. Shell Alaska spokesman Curtis Smith repeated that the company expects the permits to stand up to court review.

"The EPA finding of no significant impact to the Arctic air shed and the subsequent validation of that permit by the EAB gives us a great deal of confidence that the permit, like the others we have achieved, will be upheld by the court," Smith said.

Shell plans to use the Noble Discoverer to drill three exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's northwest coast. The company hopes to use the Kulluk to drill a pair of exploratory wells in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska's north coast.

The presence of two drill ships, according to the company, means that if there's a blowout, a backup vessel would be on hand to drill a relief well.

Drilling in Arctic waters is bitterly opposed by environmental groups and some Alaska Native groups, who contend oil skimmers and other mechanical cleanup devices will not work in waters that contain ice, from slush to icebergs.

They also fault the government for allowing drilling in a region with some of the harshest weather in the country and without basic infrastructure. Alaska's northern coastlines lack deep-water ports. The nearest permanent Coast Guard facility is in Kodiak, more than 1,000 miles away.

Shell in 2008 spent $2.1 billion on Chukchi leases in a sale that environmental groups contend was illegal because the federal government had not performed required environmental studies.

The appeal Wednesday was filed by Earthjustice on behalf of Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council, Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Pacific Environment, Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands, Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society.

The groups say the Kulluk and support vessels will spew carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and black carbon that will accelerate the loss of snow and sea ice., hurting both a fragile Arctic ecosystem that's home to endangered or threatened whales, polar bears and seals, and Alaska Native coastal communities that rely on the ocean for subsistence life.

Source: Huffington Post

The Navy said it has sent a team to investigate and has no immediate estimate of the spill's size.

Oil workers returning home after work offshore said there was an oil stain about 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) long on the ocean near the P-57 oil platform operated by Petrobras, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, the Folha de S. Paulo daily newspaper reported.

The P-57, a converted oil tanker, works in the Jubarte field about 85 kilometers (53 miles) off Brazil's coast. Jubarte produced 186,000 barrels of oil per day in February, or about more than 8 percent of Brazil's total oil output of 2.1 million bpd, according to Brazil's oil regulator, the ANP.

Jubarte is the fourth largest producing oil field in the country. When natural gas is added, production was equivalent to 198,000 barrels of oil per day (boepd).

Petrobras plans to spend about $225 billion over five years to help triple output to about 6 million bpd by 2020. The vast majority of that oil will come from offshore fields near Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

A spill in the Frade field south of Jubarte in November led to civil lawsuits seeking about $20 billion in damages and criminal charges against Chevron, which operates the field, as well as Transocean, its drilling contractor, and 17 of the two companies' employees.

Chevron and its partners in the field decided to shut down output in Frade after additional, unexplained leaks were found in field waters in March. Frade produced 64,000 barrels a day of oil in February, the ANP said.

Chevron and Transocean deny any wrongdoing. Chevron owns 52 percent of Frade and Petrobras owns 30 percent. The rest is owned by a Japanese group led by Inpex and Sojitz Corp .

Petrobras' press office said it had no comment. The ANP said officials were not immediately available for comment. Brazil's environmental protection agency Ibama did not immediately return calls requesting comment.

Petrobras preferred shares, the company's most-traded class of stock, fell 1.4 percent to 19.02 reais in Sao Paulo trading. The benchmark Bovespa index of the most-traded stocks on the Sao Paulo stock exchange fell 0.33 percent.

Source: Reuters

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) says it estimates that during the 52-day leak, Elgin released the equivalent of 47,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, or 18,000 tonnes more than would have been released during normal operations of the well.

The greenhouse gas impact was mitigated when Total was able to slow the leak of natural gas from 200,000 cubic metres a day at its start to around a third of that in mid April, and then down to 50,000 cubic metres by the time the well was stopped with heavy mud on 15 May.

A Decc spokesman said:

"The provisional total UK emissions of the basket of six greenhouse gases covered by the Kyoto protocol, including the offshore sector, during 2011 was 549.3m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or approximately 45.8m tonnes per month."

"The Elgin release therefore represents approximately 0.1% of the UK's monthly emissions total. Only considering the increase in emissions compared with the normal emissions from the platform the increase represents just 0.04% of the monthly emissions total, which is overall insignificant, although obviously undesirable."

Last month, Marine Scotland also indicated that the leak had little impact on marine life in the two-mile exclusion zone around the well. Neither the water nor fish in the area showed signs of hydrocarbon contamination.

The worst off could be Total, which may have lost around £93.6m (£1.8m a day) during the leak, though stock prices have increased since the company announced it had "killed" the leak.

WWF Scotland welcomed the news that Total had stopped the leak.

Dr Richard Dixon , director of WWF Scotland, said: "However, the fact it happened at all and that a potent greenhouse gas has been spewing out for nearly two months is deeply concerning. This is the second serious leak in the North Sea within the past two years and underlines the risks of the offshore oil industry even in the well-known waters around Scotland."

"We should be trying to give up our addiction to oil and gas, and not seeking it out in more difficult places with the risks to the environment that poses when things go wrong."

Source: The Guardian

The MSC is meeting for its 90th session at IMO Headquarters from 16 to 25 May, with some 900 delegates registered from IMO member States and observers from international and non-governmental organizations.

The instruction to the working group to develop the guidance for PMSCs followed an intense debate on arms on board ships during the high-level segment, held over the first day and a half of the Committee's session, which saw interventions from a number of Ministers, Secretaries of State and other senior Government representatives as well as the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Legal Affairs.

In his address to the high-level segment Mr. Sekmizu said:

"The carriage of firearms on board merchant ships is a complex legal issue with Member States taking diverse positions. The Committee has determined that the carriage of armed personnel is a matter for flag States to authorize, however it has also accepted that their carriage has legal implications for coastal and port States, particularly with respect to the carriage, embarkation and disembarkation of firearms and security equipment in areas under the jurisdiction of such port or coastal States."

He went on to emphasize that carriage of arms was a high-priority issue for the shipping industry, and said: "While recognizing the reality of the situation in which private security guards are employed and the diverse positions of Governments, there is a need to consider how the international community should deal with the issue of private security guards and, in particular, the need to arrive at practical solutions to the issue."

The high-level segment agreed that the use of PMSC on board ships was an exceptional measure to be used only in exceptional circumstances in the high risk area, and should not become institutionalized. However, guidance was needed to assist policy development at the national level and facilitate greater harmonization of policies in international shipping related to the issue of arms on board. Such guidance would not constitute a recommendation or an endorsement of the general use of privately contracted armed security personnel.

The high-level segment endorsed the view that the carriage of armed personnel aboard ships for enhancing their protection in the high risk area should be left to flag States to decide, once a thorough risk-assessment exercise had been carried out and following consultations with the shipowners concerned.

Source: IMO