Pity the river boatman. Just a few months ago, a European drought lowered the water levels on many rivers and canals, significantly limiting barge and ship traffic. The lower river levels also unexpectedly exposed un-exploded ordinance from World War II. In early December, half of the population of the German city of Koblenz was evacuated so that several bombs that had emerged from the Rhine riverbank could be defused.
Now, the problem is intense cold, the coldest February across Europe in almost three decades, which has frozen solid hundreds of miles of Europe’s busiest waterways. Germany has shut the Rhine-Herne canal linking the river Rhine to Hamburg, Europe’s second largest container port. The closure canal has also cut off Berlin from the German inland waterway network. A prolonged closure of the Rhine, Europe’s busiest inland waterway, would quickly impact deep-sea port traffic and intermodal shipments. The river handles well over a million containers a year as well as iron ore, coal and grain.
Freeze Forces Germany to Close Key Shipping Artery
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What is the oldest living thing on the planet? My first guess would have been the 
At around 2AM local time Wednesday, the container ship
If a single fact can explain why an armada of high tech naval ships from around the world has failed to control, much less to eradicate, gangs of Somali pirates operating from hijacked fishing trawlers and open boats, this is it. 
The first documented European to land on Australia was the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon aboard the Duyfken in March 1606. Duyfken was also one of the first Dutch ships to got directly to the East Indies to load spices. The Dutch would long dominate the trade with the Spice Islands and ruled the Dutch East indies, now Indonesia, for centuries.
Pity the poor taxpayer. The headline was short and simple – 
It is easy to focus of the plight of the 34 dead or missing from the Costa Concordia. Regrettably, these casualties have not been the only recent deaths on the water. The past week has been particularly brutal with ship and boat sinkings in the Black Sea, off the Dominican Republic, Papua New Guinea and Dongting Lake in China. A quick run-down of one grim week’s loss of life:
The photos look Photoshopped. A man wearing a dark suit stands on the exposed articulated keel of the Open 60 racing sail boat, Hugo Boss, as she sails along heeled over on her starboard gunnel. The photo and several similar showed up in ads for Hugo Boss men’s wear. But they have to be fake right? The owner of the boat and the model for the shoot, Alex Thomspon says, no. He repeated his “keel walking” but this time on video to show the world exactly how it is done.
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