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Warnings over the safety of OceanGate’s Titan submersible were repeatedly dismissed by the CEO of the company, email exchanges with a leading deep sea exploration specialist show. In messages seen by the BBC, Rob McCallum told OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush that he was potentially putting his clients at risk and urged him to stop using the sub until it had been classified by an independent body. Mr McCallum told the BBC that he repeatedly urged the company to seek certification for the Titan before using it for commercial tours. Mr Rush founded OceanGate in 2009 and the company offered customers a chance to experience deep sea travel, including to the wreck of the Titanic, on board Titan for a price of $250,000. Experts have questioned the safety of Titan and how private sector deep-sea expeditions are regulated.

Nada Al-Nashif, UN Deputy Human Rights Chief, presented a report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Wednesday saying that the situation in the Islamic Republic aggravated against the backdrop of continuously worsening socio-economic conditions and sanctions. The report examines developments since the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on September 16which sparked widespread protests throughout the country. According to the report, there has been a spike in death sentences and executions during the period. While the UN voices concern for human rights in Iran, it has appointed Iran’s UN ambassador Ali Bahraini to the chair of the UN Human Rights Council 2023 Social Forum, drawing global outrage. Around 20,000 people are estimated to have been detained during the protests, added the report.

111 years later, 4 high-profile passengers and the CEO of the OceanGate company, who was the pilot of the tourist submersible ‘Titan’, died after their sub imploded due to extreme pressure deep in the North Atlantic Ocean. The US Coast Guard has confirmed that one of their ROVs from the vessel Horizon Arctic located the debris of a tail comb from the OceanGate sub-Titan approximately 1600 feet from the bow wreckage of the Titanic on the seafloor. The debris was confirmed to be from Titan, the lost tourist sub from OceanGate. Wendy Rush, the wife of OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, is the great-great-grandaughter of Isidor and Ida Straus, an old couple who had perished in the Titanic disaster in 1912. Lochridge had also stated that OceanGate was unwilling to have the sub inspected and certified by established agencies.

California is partnering with Mexico to help find professional boxers owed pensions from a little-known state retirement plan, with two dozen former fighters located in recent weeks and pledges to identify more. The efforts follow a Times investigation that found most boxers owed benefits from the California Professional Boxers’ Pension Plan were unaware that the 40-year-old program existed or had little information about how to apply. The California State Athletic Commission, which administers the pension plan, said it estimates that at least a quarter of the 200 boxers currently owed benefits had a last known address in Mexico. Officials with the Consulate General of Mexico in San Diego and Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said they are helping California locate boxers using identity documents filed in Mexico and abroad to ensure those entitled to money receive it. The World Boxing Council, which is in Mexico City, is also working with the athletic commission to find boxers who are owed pensions.

The political future of one of the big names of the global populist right is on the line this week as Brazilian judges prepare to decide whether Jair Bolsonaro should be banned from running for office. If an absolute majority of the court’s seven judges find Bolsonaro guilty of misusing his presidential powers in order to boost his re-election campaign, he could be barred from seeking office for eight years. Thomas Traumann, a Brazilian journalist and political expert, said he suspected some Lula allies would have preferred to face a profoundly polarising candidate such as Bolsonaro in the 2026 election, just as some within the UK’s Labour party would rather have faced Johnson than Rishi Sunak. Should Bolsonaro be stripped of his political rights, the person widely tipped to fill his shoes is Tarcísio de Freitas, the 48-year-old governor of São Paulo and Bolsonaro’s former infrastructure minister. The swiftness with which electoral authorities have moved against Bolsonaro contrasts with sluggish efforts to hold his ally Trump accountable for his alleged role in inciting the 6 January riots.

US troops have entered Peru periodically for decades, but never for periods as long as this. Most of the US military personnel will be taking part in Resolute Sentinel 2023, a military exercise that will be staged across a number of regions of Peru between June and August. China is already Peru’s largest trading partner on both the exports and imports side while Peru is the second largest destination for Chinese investment in Latin America, behind only Brazil. A whopping 32% of Peru’s exports go to China, compared with just 12% to the US. But according to the report in Hildebrandt en sus trece, citing other documents by Craig Faller, Washington’s soft-power arm USAID will also be playing a part in the US’ counter-offensive against China and Russia in Peru. The US Ambassador to Peru, Lisa Kenna, is a former adviser to former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a nine-year veteran at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Ecological collapse is likely to start sooner than previously believed, according to a new study that models how tipping points can amplify and accelerate one another. Compared with the long-established and conclusively proven link between fossil fuels and global heating, the science of tipping points and their interactions is relatively undeveloped. Several prominent Brazil-based scientists, including Carlos Nobre, have warned that this may come much sooner. Lake Erhai in China collapsed sooner than most observers expected. While the scope of the study was limited, the authors said the results showed the need for policymakers to act with more urgency.

The US Department of Labor previously found that the company illegally denied workers overtime pay. The labor department launched an investigation into Taqueria Garibaldi in 2021, at which point the business owners instructed employees to tell investigators that they worked 40 hours a week, were provided two days off and 30-minute breaks, and were paid only with checks, court records show. Employees did as they were told under threat of retaliatory actions such as firing and holding immigration statuses over their heads, according to the labor department. After local reporters covered the labor department’s lawsuit against the restaurant chain in May 2021, the business fired Maria Parra, an employee who they believed had filed the original complaint to the labor department. In addition to paying back wages and damages to 35 workers and $5,000 to the Department of Labor, the owners and operators of Taqueria Garibaldi are also required to use a digital time clock system at each location that allows employees to accurately record their work times and must submit payroll and employee contact information to the labor department upon request for the next three years.

The Seventh Commission of the House of Representatives of the Colombian Congress, on Tuesday, June 20, shelved the labor reform bill put forth by the country’s first leftist government led by President Gustavo Petro and Vice president Francia Márquez. The labor reform bill, which had been presented by Representative Maria Fernanda Carrascal of the Historic Pact coalition, sought to expand workers’ rights and improve working conditions. During the majority of sessions, the members of conservative parties had deliberately ended or left the sessions abruptly to avoid starting debate on the labor reform. Last week, after months, the report on the reform was finally approved by the commission. The labor reform is one of the key initiatives of the Petro government to seek social changes in the country alongside healthcare and pension reforms.

If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices.

NEWFOUNDLAND, Canada - The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that an underwater vessel has located a debris field near the Titanic in the search for a missing submersible with five people aboard, a potential breakthrough in the around-the-clock effort. The search for the missing submersible on an expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic passed the critical 96-hour mark Thursday when breathable air could have run out, a grim moment in the intense effort to save the five people aboard. The Titan submersible was estimated to have about a four-day supply of breathable air when it launched Sunday morning in the North Atlantic - but experts have emphasized that was an imprecise approximation to begin with and could be extended if passengers have taken measures to conserve breathable air. MORE: Why rescue mission for Titanic submersible is so difficult. At least 46 people successfully traveled on OceanGate’s submersible to the Titanic wreck site in 2021 and 2022, according to letters the company filed with a U.S. District Court in Norfolk, Virginia, that oversees matters involving the Titanic shipwreck.

Greek authorities have so far recovered the bodies of at least 81 people, and more than 100 passengers have been rescued, including Pakistanis, Egyptians, Syrians, Afghans and Palestinians. Survivors and the United Nations have said hundreds were aboard the boat and many are still missing and feared dead. If a death toll in the hundreds was confirmed, it would be among the worst shipwrecks recorded in the Mediterranean. Greek authorities have further been criticized for not acting to rescue the migrants, even though a coast guard vessel escorted the trawler for hours. International maritime law dictates that authorities are obligated to conduct immediate rescue operations - with or without an explicit plea for help. Artist Oliver Jeffers shared his feelings with a cartoon on Tuesday, which marked World Refugee Day.

Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou declared a water emergency in the capital Montevideo and the metropolitan area on June 19, following seven months of drought. Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou, on Monday, June 19, declared a water emergency in the capital Montevideo and the metropolitan area. The department has been facing a severe running water scarcity due to a prolonged drought. The president also reported that a special supply of water -without the increased level of sodium and chlorine currently present in the water supplied by the State Sanitation Works- would be guaranteed for hospitals and the Child and Family Care Centers and the Child and Adolescent Institute of Uruguay facilities. The water levels at the Paso Severino reservoir, which supplies fresh water to the Montevideo metropolitan area where 60% of the country’s population live, are critically low.

Some Ukrainian journalists have also warned that military handlers’ tight oversight of journalists is skewing coverage of the war. The Ukrainian military doesn’t have a formal embed system - the process by which war journalists cover conflicts by tagging along troops in the field - and most press access consists of short, chaperoned visits to military positions further back than the actual front lines. As a result, stories about the front lines are often told by journalists visiting recently liberated areas or as secondhand accounts relayed by military leadership. Many of the journalists whose credentials were revoked more recently had at some point worked in Russian-held territories, sometimes as far back as 2014, when Russia first invaded Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. In May, military authorities also canceled all existing credentials and made journalists apply for new ones; several journalists said their new credentials were denied.