Ship

Tugboats were finally able on Friday to tow the ill-fated Norman Atlantic to the port of Brindisi in Italy, allowing rescue teams to search the Greek-hired passenger ferry that caught fire on Sunday as it was traveling from Greece to Italy.

People traffickers have dramatically raised the stakes by using freighters to carry hundreds of migrants to Europe at a time, then jumping ship as the vessels steam towards shore.

Italian coastguards have narrowly prevented two disasters this week off the country's southern coast involving so-called "ghost ships", which seem to have originated in Turkey.

Rescue efforts to aid a freighter which sank after colliding with another merchant ship in a snowstorm off the Adriatic port of Ravenna on Dec. 28 have been suspended due to bad weather conditions, officials have said.

The European Union’s decision-making processes lend new depth to the word “incoherent”, and the current British government’s default mode is nastiness, but they have both outdone themselves this time.

By Nikos Roussanoglou

The Greek flag is among those considered to be of the highest quality in the world, with the vessels on the Greek register being among the most cutting-edge in the global seas.

An Italian port has beaten off foreign competition to scrap the hulk of the Costa Concordia cruise ship that sank off the Tuscan coast in 2012, leaving 32 dead.
      
"I can confirm that... the dismantling of the ship will take place in an Italian port," Transport Minister Maurizio Lupi said Friday.