The European Commission announced an EU initiative to boost security and the safety of maritime routes across seven African countries in the Gulf of Guinea. The Critical Maritime Routes in the Gulf of Guinea Program will help governments in West and Central Africa improve the safety of their main shipping routes by providing training for coast guards and setting up a network to share information among countries and agencies in the region. The program will begin this month in Benin, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria, Sâo Tomé and Principe and Togo. The EU will provide 4.5 million euros ($5.9 million) for the project.
Dugie Standeford
Dugie Standeford, European Correspondent, Communications Daily and Privacy Daily, is a former lawyer. She joined Warren Communications News in 2000 to report on internet policy and regulation. In 2003 she moved to the U.K. and since then has covered European telecommunications issues. She previously covered the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and intellectual property law matters. She has a degree in psychology from Duke University and a law degree from the University of Tulsa College of Law.
The Union of the Comoros became the 146th contracting party to the International Convention on the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System on Dec. 7. Located in the Indian Ocean northwest of Madagascar, Comoros mainly exports vanilla, ylang-ylang, cloves and copra, and imports rice, consumer goods, petroleum products, cement and transport equipment.
GateKeeper USA Inc.'s CAMS device can meet U.S. Department of Homeland security100% container screening requirements, the company said. CAMS is the only known equipment that can scan the interior of a shipping container 24/7 and will signal alerts in real time from the moment it's loaded until it's shipped inland and taken off at its final destination, it said. The press release responded to recent news reports that the U.S. had backed off its cargo-scanning goals. CBP said port X-ray and Gamma-ray machines could only scan 4.1 percent of the millions of containers arriving in U.S. ports each year, it said. Nevertheless, U.S. legislators continue to favor the 100% mandate because they’re worried about terrorists detonating dirty bombs at ports, it said. Failure to detect chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive material “is a breach that cannot be tolerated” and the CAMS device is the way to resolve the problem, the company said.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control is issuing General License No. 7 under the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators Sanctions Regulations, 31 C.F.R. Part 544, authorizing certain transactions related to the arrest, detention and judicial sale of the MV Amina (f.k.a. Shere, a.k.a Iran Tabas, IMO No. 9305192), which is a vessel on OFAC's Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list. The vessel is currently under arrest in Galle, Sri Lanka.
As the international community increasingly bars or restricts Iranian financial institutions from accessing the international financial system, Iran is relying more heavily on third-country exchange houses and trading companies to move funds, the Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets Control said in a Jan. 10 advisory. Those entities often lack their own U.S. correspondent accounts, relying on their banks' correspondent accounts to access the U.S. financial system. They're often located in jurisdictions considered high-risk for transactions implicating OFAC sanctions, and they appear to process primarily commercial transactions rather than personal ones, it said.
The following individuals have been added to OFAC's SDN List:
The State Department's Shipping Coordinating Committee will meet at 10:30 a.m. Feb. 27 in Room 5-1224 of the U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters Building, 2100 Second Street, SW, Washington, D.C., to prepare for the meeting of the International Maritime Organization Subcommittee on Flag State Implementation March 4-8 in the U.K.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is proposing several minor amendments to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 119 to revise the formatting and replace a missing footnote in Table II, it said in a Federal Register notice for publication Jan. 10. The standard was amended in a final rule published June 26, 2003 as part of a comprehensive upgrade of several standards to improve tire safety, as required by the Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability, and Documentation (TREAD) Act of 2000. NHTSA believes the proposed revision is needed to correct minor oversights in the June 2003 final rule for No. 119. Comments are due by March 11 to DOT Docket Number NHTSA-2010-AK17 at http://www.regulations.gov, or to Docket Management Facility: U.S. Department of Transportation, 1200 New Jersey Avenue S.E., West Building Ground Floor, Room W12-140, Washington, D.C. 20590-001.
There has been “substantive progress” on more than half of 20 critical steps needed to further reduce highway crashes, the American Trucking Associations reported. Its report came four years after ATA published a list of safety priorities and urged policymakers to do more to make trucks and roadways safer. ATA wants common-sense, data-supported regulatory and legislative changes to boost safety, President Bill Graves said. State and federal regulators and lawmakers have responded in several areas but there's much more work to be done, he said. Areas where no headway has been made include implementation of a national speed limit of 65 mph and speed limiters for all commercial vehicles, ATA said. In addition, the federal truck safety program, along with many states, “is moving in the wrong direction on truck-involved traffic enforcement interventions.”
Air freight demand increased in November, up 1.6 percent over the same period in 2011, the International Air Transport Association said in its monthly report on air traffic. “November brought some positive signs for air transport demand -- particularly for air cargo,” said Director General Tony Tyler. It's premature to consider this a turning point for air cargo markets in terms of bouncing back and regaining lost ground, he said, but when coupled with better economic developments in the U.S., and more business confidence in recent months, “the conditions are aligning to see a return to growth in 2013.” IATA expects cargo volumes to grow 1.4 percent this year. But the bottom line is that continued growth isn't guaranteed, IATA said. Governments should try to lower barriers to connectivity growth by addressing excessive taxation, high infrastructure costs, and onerous regulation, and by boosting the capacity and efficient of airports and air navigation services, it said.