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Ian Bray, MUA Assistant National Secretary, says Patrick has received a payment of at least $18.5 million from the Victorian government to relocate while Webb Dock is redeveloped and it was in Victoria’s interests that Patrick retain permanent jobs.The Maritime Union of Australia is taking Patrick Stevedores to court, saying it wants to stop the company from making workers redundant while the parties argue over how many jobs should go.
The MUA will seek an injunction in the Federal Court in Melbourne on Thursday to stop Patrick’s making Webb Dock wharfies’ jobs redundant or casual.
The union will ask the court to defer Patrick from giving up to 80 employees redundancy notices next Tuesday, while a separate action is before the workplace umpire.
More at SBS
There is no deepwater port in the U.S. Arctic, the GAO report notes. Most ports north of the Aleutian Islands are shallow, and coastal areas in Arctic Alaska lack surface links to roads or rail systems.
Less than 1 percent of navigationally significant waters in the U.S. Arctic have been surveyed with modern technology, said a federal report released on Friday.
The report, from the Government Accountability Office, said commercial maritime activity in Arctic waters off Alaska will likely be limited over the next 10 years. A variety of reasons are responsible for that, including high operating costs, limited demand from tourists for Arctic cruises and uncertainties and setbacks in plans for offshore Arctic oil drilling, the GAO report said.
Lack of facilities and infrastructure to support Arctic shipping has also emerged as a limiting factor on shipping activity, the GAO report said.
More at the Alaska Dispatch
The Seattle Times reports that STP already filed a “request for entitlement” to be paid by the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), on the premise that a steel well casing, left in the ground after WSDOT groundwater tests in 2002 and 2010, damaged Bertha just before the machine stalled in early December. WSDOT says it has rejected the request. State officials argued that information had been given to STP in technical documents and so STP was responsible for knowing about the pipe and avoiding trouble.The costs to repair and restart Bertha, the Highway 99 tunneling machine, are somewhere close to $125 million, a senior executive says.
Chris Dixon, project director for Seattle Tunnel Partners (STP), said the number was based on restarting Bertha by Sept. 1, which was STP’s earlier, optimistic goal. On Monday, he announced the job would take until March 2015, and Dixon said today the actual cost would likely exceed the $125 million.
However, the $125 million isn’t a hard figure, and who will pay has yet to be determined.
More at the Seattle Times
The US authorities have made a decision to send to Ukraine additional “non-lethal” military assistance, says Chuck Hagel, the head of the Pentagon. According to the American “hawks”, Ukraine needs such assistance in order to protect itself from a potential attack from Russia.
The so-called “non-lethal” assistance that the Pentagon insists on providing to Ukraine includes everything that one cannot shoot with, but what is extremely needed in case of a combat operation: bullet-proof vests, nighttime vision equipment and fuel.
Some experts believe that making decision to provide assistance to Ukraine means the launching of the Syrian scenario of the crisis development.
More at Voice of Russia
Source: ALPA News
Source: Supermarket news
Source: Union-Bulletin
Source: Gazette
Source: N. O. Advocate
Source: Think Progress
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