This is the New World Report. I'm John Batchel with Professor Evan Panama, resolved, right? The Chinese have left the theater. And Panama is back in charge of the canal at both ends. It's developing investment. It's charging the most it's ever charged right now because of the pressure on the Panama Canal to take up what can't go through safely the Red Sea

and what certainly is not coming out of the Persian Gulf.

But suddenly the Chinese show up with what you'd have to stay is the background of a protection racket.

That's a nice shipping income you have there with flagged vessels.

Too bad if anything happened to them.

Professor, you left us hanging the last episode.

China was persecuting Panama, Panama flagged vessels because Panama had asked China to leave the

theater.

Is that still continuing?

Has it been, is there a conversation about it?

It is still continuing, John, and we seem to be entering yet another phase of the back and forth

the drama. As we talked about last week, it's been somewhat surprising that China has so

publicly pushed back on having Hutchison being, you know, kicked out of

the port and those ports being assigned to subsidiaries of the shipping giants,

Mariskin Mediterranean shipping, while Panama tries to resolve the issue with a new, you know,

public auction for who controls the port. But, you know, China not only said

we're going to stop all investment in Panama, they ordered their, their logistics giant Costco,

to stop using the port. And then China tried to use control over, you know, its own ports to say to the

big international shipping giants, MSC and

Marisk, hey, if you want to have good access to Chinese ports, you better stop, you know,

operating these Panamanian ports that you've been awarded, you know, as well. And so the latest in this

drama is that after the Chinese pushback, you know, have a U.S. and regional pushback

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