OUR NEWS SECTION IS BACK UP !

 Our "News Service Crashed a couple of nights ago. This happened during a very busy news period. Last week the multi national Gulf of Aden anti piracy patrols underwent a number of routine changes such as Italy relinquishing the EU leadership to France, and Indian and Chinese vessels being relieved and then taking off for some very unusual destinations. As the Chinese war ships entered the Mediterranean, followed in short order by Indian war ships, the Russians entered the Mediterranean in two waves from the Atlantic and the Black Sea. 

 While things were getting interesting in the Mediterranean the elements of the Indian fleet that weren't there were making history as India launched its first domestically built nuclear propelled and missile capable submarine, joining a very small club of nations capable of launching nuclear missiles from under the sea. Then their long serving Chief of Navy Staff retired.  This is by no means the end of the maritime headlines from the last two weeks.

 American Admiralty Books is not a news service, we are more like an on line nautical library that also sells books and videos. Like a library, however  we do want to provide news papers and periodicals in our special field for you. Also we just happen to have some independent access to news sources that no one else has and so we have evolved our rather "laid back " "News Service", a "special page where you can find hyperlinks to the worlds maritime on line news sources by trade or geographic area, our own headline service where we try to draw your attention to important maritime stories that the general media has not published, with hyper-links to the on line published sources. We also provide a continuously updated piracy report which some of our professional mariner readers may appreciate as a voyage planning  tool. We posted an unusual number of posts directly to the blog of late because of the intensity and speed of the news breaking out of the Chinese, Indian, and Russian navies. 

 The unusual amount of space devoted to news in the blog posts were also driven   by the technical difficulties that caused us to lose the News Service for nearly 48 hours.  With the News Service functional again, we may not always run flash notices across the blog. We urge our serious maritime news readers to form the daily habit of clicking on the "News Service" feature in the page column to the right. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE THESE LAST TWO DAYS!