Tag: US & Canada

A submersible vessel taking five tourists on a deep ocean journey to view the wreckage of the Titanic went missing on Sunday, triggering an enormous search and rescue effort.

Here is a look at the situation as rescuers race against time to search an area about half the size of Belgium for the submersible, which could be on the ocean floor or bobbing on the surface, with the tourists bolted in from the outside.

On Tuesday at 17:00 GMT, experts estimated the submersible had about 40 hours of breathable air left, which means rescuers have a little more than 20 hours to find the missing vessel.

Inhospitable terrain

If the submersible is on the ocean floor, it would be nearly impossible to rescue, experts say.

The Titanic wreck is about 2.5 miles (4 kilometres) below the surface. The submersible lost contact more than halfway down on its dive.

“It’s pitch black down there. It’s freezing cold. The seabed is mud and it’s undulating. You can’t see your hand in front of your face,” said Tim Maltin, an expert on the Titanic’s sinking and wreckage.

Mike Reiss, a previous Titan passenger, said: “They might be stuck at the bottom of the ocean.

“Perhaps there was a breach, and water came in; I’m not very optimistic for their return,” he added.

Bring it up?

Experts also say that a sub-to-sub rescue is unlikely from the bottom of the sea.

Only a handful of submersible craft exist that could reach the depths of the Titanic wreck. Even if they could reach it, submersibles do not have the power to tow the missing vessel up to the surface.

“We know more about the Moon surface than the bottom of the ocean because we just haven’t surveyed it,” said Jamie Pringle, a forensic geoscientist at Keele University in Britain.

Finding it on the surface

Experts say if the vessel is bobbing at the ocean’s surface, finding it will be a needle-in-a-haystack situation.

The vessel the size of a van (length 6.7 metres and width 2.8 metres) will be even harder to spot if it is partially submerged. It is far out in the ocean, so moving ships and equipment to the large area being searched takes time.

What has been done so far?

At least 10,000 square miles (25,900 square kilometres) have been searched, according to the US Coast Guard.

The Canadian research icebreaker Polar Prince, which was supporting the Titan, was conducting surface searches with help from a Canadian Boeing P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft, and the Canadian military dropped sonar buoys to listen for any possible sounds from the Titan.

An underwater robot had also started searching in the vicinity of the Titanic, and there was a push to get salvage equipment to the scene in case the submersible is found, said Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District in Boston.

Two US Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft were conducting overflights, and three C-17s from US Air Mobility Command have also been used to move another commercial company’s submersible and support equipment from Buffalo, New York, to St John’s to aid in the search.

A Royal Canadian Navy ship that provides a medical team specialising in dive medicine and a six-person mobile hyperbaric recompression chamber also was en route on Tuesday, according to the Canadian military.

Canadian P-3 aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area. As a result, ROV operations were relocated in an attempt to explore the origin of the noises. Those ROV searches have yielded negative results but continue. 1/2

— USCGNortheast (@USCGNortheast) June 21, 2023

Where did the Titan go missing?

The crew of the Titan submersible lost contact with the crew of the Polar Prince research ship – an hour and 45 minutes after it began a dive to see the wreck on Sunday.

The wreck of the Titanic, a British ocean liner that struck an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912, lies about 900 miles (1,450km) east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and 435 miles (700km) south of St John’s, Newfoundland.

The Titanic sits on the ocean floor, about 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) below sea level.

What’s the worst-case scenario?

“The real nightmarish scenario is that they’re alive, at the surface … running out of air, and unable to get out,” David Pogue, science writer and previous Titan passenger, told media.

According to Jannicke Mikkelsen, a friend of on-board businessman Hamish Harding and fellow explorer, the lack of power is one of the main challenges.

The search is being conducted from Boston.

“They have enough oxygen to keep them alive and sustain them for 96 hours, but they also need power to stay alive, so the worst-case scenario is they have oxygen, but they don’t have power, and if they don’t have power they are going to become hypothermic pretty quickly,” she said.

Were there any previous warnings to OceanGate?

Years before OceanGate’s submersible went missing, the company faced several warnings as it prepared for its mission.

David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of marine operations, wrote an engineering report in 2018 that said the craft under development needed more testing and that passengers might be endangered when it reached “extreme depths,” according to a lawsuit filed that year in US District Court in Seattle.

OceanGate sued Lochridge that year, accusing him of breaching a non-disclosure agreement, and he filed a counterclaim alleging that he was wrongfully fired for raising questions about testing and safety. The case settled on undisclosed terms several months after it was filed.

Further, OceanGate has said the craft was designed to reach depths of 4km (13,123 feet), where the Titanic rested.

But, according to Lochridge, the passenger viewport was only certified for depths of up to 1,300 metres (4,265 feet), and OceanGate would not pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport certified for 4,000 metres.

 

OceanGate also received another warning in 2018, this one from the Marine Technology Society, which describes itself as a professional group of ocean engineers, technologists, policymakers and educators.

The letter, reported by the New York Times, said society members were worried that “the current experimental approach adopted by OceanGate could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry”. The US Coast Guard says a search covering 10,000 square miles (26,000 square kilometres) has turned up no signs of a missing submersible.

Miami Mayor Francis Saurez joins a crowded field of Republican candidates dominated by former President Donald Trump.

Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, Florida, has become the latest Republican to launch a bid for the 2024 United States presidential race.

The son of a prominent Cuban American politician and a rising Republican star in his own right, Suarez filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday to formalise his campaign, according to US media reports.

Suarez’s entry into the race makes him the third major political figure from Florida to announce their candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Two current Republican frontrunners are based in the state: former President Donald Trump and his closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

The 45-year-old mayor, however, would be the only major Hispanic candidate to launch a bid so far. Florida has long been a prized swing state — though recent trends indicate it is leaning further right — and its large Cuban American population has been an influential Republican base for decades.

But Suarez has an uphill battle to unseat Trump at the head of the Republican field. On Tuesday, as Trump faced federal arraignment in a classified documents case, Suarez made an appearance outside the Miami court where the proceedings were unfolding, only to be confronted by angry protesters who called him a “swamp monster” or a “RINO” — an acronym for “Republican in name only”.

Suarez has publicly distanced himself from both Trump and DeSantis, positioning himself as a more centrist Republican voice.

When Trump disparaged the Caribbean country of Haiti as a “sh**hole”, Suarez took to Twitter to “wholeheartedly condemn the discriminatory comments”, citing his family roots in the immigrant community.

Suarez also told US media that he did not vote for Trump’s reelection bid in 2020. Explaining his decision to the publication Politico, Suarez said, “A politician has to be — I don’t want to say perfect, but they have to be someone that is civil, that treats people with respect, that inspires people, that has those sets of characteristics.”

Suarez also was openly sceptical of DeSantis’s early gubernatorial bid, choosing instead to vote for his Democratic rival Andrew Gillum in the 2018 race. But by 2022, when DeSantis made a second successful run for the governor’s mansion, Suarez had turned his support to the Republican.

Nevertheless, Suarez has remained a critical voice. In May, he slammed DeSantis’s ongoing feud with the entertainment company Disney, calling it a “personal vendetta” on the NewsNation show, The Hill.

Suarez himself has come under fire in recent months, as he faces allegations of misusing his position to help a real estate developper, Location Ventures, secure permitting for a condominium project.

While Miami’s mayor is allowed to hold paid positions outside of office, the role is barred from seeking “to secure special privileges or exemptions”. A local newspaper, the Miami Herald, reported this month that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched an investigation.

First elected as Miami mayor in 2017, Suarez has long been weighing a long-shot presidential bid, with reports emerging as far back as 2021, the same year as his reelection.

His father, Xavier Suarez, was Miami’s first Cuban-born mayor, initially elected in 1985. And during his own tenure as mayor, the younger Suarez positioned Miami as the next major US tech hub, seeking to draw talent away from traditional bases of innovation like California’s Silicon Valley during the height of the coronavirus pandemic

“We want to be on the next wave of innovation,” Suarez told the New York Times’s DealBook publication in 2021. He famously announced on Twitter he would accept salary payment in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin — though other digital currencies he publicly supported, like MiamiCoin, have plummetted in value or since been embroiled in scandal.

DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY,

Video from the scene shows a massive slab, covering an entire section of the northbound lanes, collapsed onto the surface roadway in northeast Philadelphia.

A large vehicle fire under an elevated section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia has caused a huge portion of the highway to collapse, closing it in both directions.

Video from the scene showed a massive slab covering an entire section of the northbound lanes collapsed onto the surface roadway in northeast Philadelphia. Officials said there were no immediate reports of injuries.

Captain Derek Bowmer of the Philadelphia Fire Department said emergency crews responding shortly before 6:30am (10:30 GMT) on Sunday to an accident report found heavy fire from a vehicle or vehicles.

Early reports indicated a vehicle may have been a tanker truck, but officials said that had not yet been confirmed. The fire was reported to be under control.

Interstate 95 is the main highway in the eastern United States linking major centres such as New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, DC and running all the way south to Florida state.

Bowmer said the northbound lanes were gone and the southbound lanes were “compromised” because of the heat from the fire.

He also said runoff from the fire or perhaps compromised gas lines were causing explosions underground. Officials said they were also concerned about the environmental impacts of runoff into the nearby Delaware River.

“Today’s going to be a long day. And obviously, with 95 northbound gone and southbound questionable, it’s going to be even longer than that,” said Dominick Mireles, director of Philadelphia’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM).

Heavy construction equipment would be required to start to remove the debris, he said.

The OEM said other streets were closed for the response and urged people to avoid the area. They also said they planned to launch a drone to assess the damage.

Theodore Kaczynski was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that set universities nationwide on edge.

Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died on Saturday. He was 81.

Branded the “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical centre in Butner, North Carolina, Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press. He was found unresponsive in his cell Saturday morning and was pronounced dead about 8am, she said. A cause of death was not immediately known.

Before his transfer to the prison medical facility, he had been held in the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that set universities nationwide on edge. He admitted to committing 16 bombings from 1978 to 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims.

A loner since childhood, the Harvard University graduate targeted academics, scientists and computer store owners, and even tried to blow up a commercial airliner in a campaign against what he believed were the evils of modern technology. For years he frustrated police with no solid clues to the killer’s identity.

The Unabomber’s deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans mailed packages and boarded aeroplanes, even virtually shutting down air travel on the West Coast in July 1995.

He forced The Washington Post, in conjunction with The New York Times, to make the agonising decision in September 1995 to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, which claimed modern society and technology was leading to a sense of powerlessness and alienation.

But it led to his undoing. Kaczynski’s brother David and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, recognised the treatise’s tone and tipped off the FBI, which had been searching for the Unabomber for years in nation’s longest, costliest manhunt.

Authorities in April 1996 found him in a 10-by-14-foot (three-by-four-metre) plywood and tarpaper cabin outside Lincoln, Montana that was filled with journals, a coded diary, explosive ingredients and two completed bombs.

As an elusive criminal mastermind, the Unabomber won his share of sympathisers and comparisons to Daniel Boone, Edward Abbey and Henry David Thoreau.

But once revealed as a wild-eyed hermit with long hair and beard who weathered Montana winters in a one-room shack, Kaczynski struck many as more of a pathetic loner than a romantic anti-hero.