CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

PwC Australia in talks to spin off units damaged by scandal - source

Lewis Jackson and Scott Murdoch
Fri, June 23, 2023 

 Logo of Price Waterhouse Coopers at office in Berlin


By Lewis Jackson and Scott Murdoch

SYDNEY (Reuters) -PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia is looking to sell its government, education and healthcare practice to private equity firm Allegro Funds, according to a person familiar with the matter, as the firm battles the fall out from a major scandal.

The scandal, which first broke in January, centres around a former PwC tax partner who had been advising the federal government on laws to prevent corporate tax avoidance and shared confidential information with colleagues who then used it to pitch to multinational companies for work.

While the scandal began in PwC's tax practice it has tainted the more lucrative government consulting business as a growing number of departments and organisations, including the Reserve Bank of Australia, pause or review work with the "big four" professional services firm.

A term sheet for a potential deal has been drawn up, the Australian Financial Review said when it first reported the story on Friday.

The sale could include roughly 100 partners and 1,000 staff, or 10% of the firm, the AFR added. PwC Australia made A$3 billion ($2.01 billion) in revenue last financial year.

A spokesperson said PwC does not comment on market speculation when asked for a response. Allegro Funds did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The person familiar with the sale plan could not be named as the information had not yet been made public.

Allegro Funds describes itself as a restructuring specialist with over A$4 billion ($2.68 billion) under management.

Acting PwC Australia chief executive Kristin Stubbins said last month the firm would "ringfence" its government consulting business and appoint a separate board to consider "strategic options for the business".

In a sign the scandal is beginning to impact PwC's private sector work, four major pension funds managing roughly A$750 billion froze work with the firm this month.

($1 = 1.4914 Australian dollars)

(Reporting by Lewis Jackson; Editing by Lincoln Feast & Simon Cameron-Moore)

Thai Finance Chief Seeks Speedy Probe Into Stark Irregularities

Anuchit Nguyen
Thu, June 22, 2023 




(Bloomberg) -- Thai regulators must speed up investigations of suspected accounting irregularities at Stark Corp. Pcl that’s triggered the nation’s biggest bond default in three years to restore investor confidence, according to Finance Minister Arkhom Termpittayapaisith.

The Securities & Exchange Commission and Stock Exchange of Thailand have been asked to quickly conclude their probe, Arkhom told reporters in Bangkok. Law enforcement agencies must bring charges against all individuals found to be in breach of laws, he said after meeting with officials from the SEC and the stock exchange about Stark on Thursday.

Investors have been hit by a slump in Stark Corp.’s shares that’s seen its market capitalization plummet to about $11 million from this year’s peak of $1.2 billion. The electric cables maker has defaulted on its bonds and a special audit revealed accounting irregularities in the past two years that’s left it with liabilities exceeding assets.

The Stark turmoil has also weighed on the broader market with investor sentiment already weakening over the delay in a pro-democracy coalition’s ability to muster enough support to form a government after last month’s general election. The benchmark SET index is down 9.6% this year, the biggest decliner in Asia, and closed at its lowest level since March 2021 on Thursday.

A quick resolution to the Stark is important “to rebuild investors’ confidence,” Arkhom said late Thursday. The SEC and the exchange were also ordered to improve their supervision of listed companies to quickly detect any irregularities, he said.

The Department of Special Investigation has agreed to investigate allegations of fraud by some of its former executives, Bangkok Post reported, citing Director-General Suriya Singhakamol. There is evidence suggesting Stark’s executives violated Securities and Exchange Act, the newspaper reported.

JPMorgan Chase is fined by SEC after mistakenly deleting 47 million emails



Thu, June 22, 2023 
By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) -JPMorgan Chase has been fined $4 million by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after about 47 million emails belonging to its retail banking group were mistakenly and permanently deleted.

The emails dated from Jan. 1 to April 23, 2018, and were deleted in June 2019 from about 8,700 mailboxes, including those belonging to as many as 7,500 employees who regularly worked with customers.

Many of the emails were business records that the largest U.S. bank was required under SEC rules to keep for three years.

The deletions occurred after JPMorgan's corporate compliance technology department, which had been trying unsuccessfully to delete some communications from the 1970s and 1980s, sought help from an outside vendor managing the bank's email storage.

According to a cease-and-desist order, the vendor failed to properly apply the three-year retention setting to "Chase" emails from early 2018.

"As a result, the troubleshooting exercise permanently deleted all of the emails in that domain from that period which were not subject to legal holds," the order said.

JPMorgan, which is based in New York, did not admit or deny wrongdoing in agreeing to the civil settlement. It has adopted its own email coding procedures to avoid a recurrence.

"JPMorgan takes its record-keeping obligations seriously," the bank said in a statement.

According to the SEC, JPMorgan has been unable in at least 12 civil securities-related regulatory probes to comply with subpoenas and document requests for communications that had been permanently deleted.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

OceanGate CEO was sued by couple claiming fraud months before Titanic submarine went missing

Bevan Hurley
Wed, June 21, 2023 

The CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, one of five crew members onboard the company’s missing submersible Titan, was sued for fraud by a Florida couple who claimed their planned deep-sea voyage to the Titanic was repeatedly cancelled and attempts to secure a refund were ignored.

Marc and Sharon Hagle filed a lawsuit in Orange County in February that accused CEO Stockton Rush of defrauding them of $210,258 which they paid to secure two berths on a 2018 trip to the famed North Atlantic shipwreck.

The Hagles allege that they signed a contract and paid deposits in November 2016 to become one of the first of OceanGate’s paying customers soon after the Titanic expeditions were first publicised.

Explaining his motivation in an interview with Reuters in 2017, Mr Hagle said: “One of our personal goals in life is to not be sitting around in a rocking chair when we are 100 years old saying, ‘I wish I had done that.’”

In mid-2017, the Hagles became suspicious that the submersible vessel, then known as the Cyclops 2, was not going to be ready by the planned departure date, according to the lawsuit.

The court filing states that the Hagles wanted to pull out of the expedition, and requested a refund of their $20,000 deposits.

They claim that Mr Rush visited them at their Florida home in September 2017 to convince them the trip would be going ahead as planned.

A Florida couple allege OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush misled them about a planned Titanic expedition (OceanGate)

Mr Rush described “what could be expected during the adventure”, they claimed.

He allegedly said passengers would be free to move around inside the submersible and take turns at the viewing portal.

“Rush knew that if Plaintiffs requested a refund of their Deposit and withdrew from the Expedition others may follow,” the lawsuit states.

The Cyclops 2 was undertaking deep dive testing in the Bahamas at the time, and the Hagles allege they were invited to join Mr Rush on an excursion.

Marc and Sharon Hagle claimed in a lawsuit that they were promised by Mr Rush that the OceanGate Expeditions submersible vessel Titan would be ready to visit the Titanic wreck site in 2018 (PA Media)

The Hagles further stated that Mr Rush made “false representations” that the vessel would be ready to dive to the Titanic by June 2018, and convinced them to sign a second contract pay the full $105,129 per-person fee.

The promised trip to the Titanic wreck in 2018 was later cancelled as OceanGate had not had sufficient time to certify the Titan to travel to the 4,000m depth, the Hagles said.

A subsequent trip in 2019 was also cancelled after a support vessel pulled out. Then in late 2019, the rescheduled 2020 expedition was abruptly cancelled, the Hagles claim.

The couple said their repeated efforts to get a refund were denied, and they were later told that if they refused to go on the 2021 expedition they would lose their money.

The case has not had any activity since it was filed in February.

An OceanGate Expeditions spokesperson told The Independent they had no comment about the lawsuit.

When reached for comment by the Daily Beast, Mr Hagle said: “My thoughts go out to the owners of OceanGate, the people that are on the submersible, both the crew and the guests. And we’re hoping for a miracle and that everybody comes home safely.

“I think the pleadings speak for themselves.”

Mr Rush, British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman Dawood, are missing aboard the Titan, which lost contact with a support vessel on Sunday morning.

An extensive search and rescue effort has so far failed to find any sign of the submersible vessel.

BECAUSE OF COURSE THEY ARE
Conservatives Are Now Blaming The Titanic Sub Tragedy On 'Wokeness'



Nathalie Baptiste
Thu, June 22, 2023 

On Sunday, the submersible Titan went missing far off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in the North Atlantic ocean. The tourist expedition, led by OceanGate, a company that runs submersible trips for tourism and exploration, was supposed to take five men to view the shipwreck of the Titanic, nearly 13,000 feet below sea level.

A search for the sub, which included OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush onboard, is now over after debris from the vessel was located following an apparent “catastrophic implosion,” the U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday.

As the U.S. and Canadian governments shelled out funds in the rescue and recovery effort, the media reported on a series of safety concerns that most likely led to the sub going missing.

But conservatives had another theory. Could the sub have disappeared because OceanGate’s CEO went “woke”?

Wokeness has become a new boogeyman for the right, and no one is safe —even in a case like this, with five people believed to have lost their lives in the deep sea.

Being woke once meant being aware of social injustices, but conservatives have appropriated it to refer to anything that they disagree with or that has a hint of liberalism. It’s often used as a not-very-subtle replacement for racial slurs.

On Wednesday afternoon, Fox News’ Jesse Watters suggested on the network’s show “The Five” that the men may have perished in the sub because Rush was too woke.

“There’s been lawsuits, there’s been accusations about slashing regulations. He’s quoted as saying he didn’t hire a bunch of 50-year-old white guys with military experience because he didn’t want his vessels to be not inspirational for a younger generation,” Watters said, referring to the OceanGate CEO previously stating that he didn’t want to hire older white men.

“I don’t care who is in these vessels, I just want them to be experienced and safe. And if you’re gonna be woke, you might have to —” Watters said before cutting himself off. (A popular slogan on the right is “Go woke, go broke.”)

OceanGate had been sued by a former employee who warned about safety issues, and it seemingly ignored experts who said the vessel’s trips could be catastrophic. But right-wingers, increasingly obsessed with labeling anyone and anything as woke, decided to focus on Rush supposedly not employing enough white men.

This week, the New York Post ran a story about Rush’s comments on not wanting to hire “white guys,” hinting that perhaps the expedition would have gone differently if he had.

On Twitter, some were more explicit in their claims.

“Wokeness killed the people on that submarine,” one user tweeted. “Let that sink in. They died because the woke CEO said he wouldn’t hire 50 year-old white men who knew how to command submarines and would rather train others.”

The tweet concluded: “The CEO died too. That’s the next level of ‘go woke, go broke.’”

OceanGate joins a long list of the accused. Earlier this year, Republicans blamed wokeness when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed — because it had a Black person and two members of the LGBTQ+ community on its board.

Bud Light has been accused of going woke because of a one-off partnership with transgender TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Target has been vilified for displaying Pride merchandise. Chick-fil-A and Cracker Barrel have suffered the same fate for having staffers tasked with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at work.

But by the GOP’s own definition, it would be a stretch to blame wokeness for the Titan tragedy.

If anything, a CEO allegedly ignoring experts and choosing to hire inexperienced workers in lieu of higher-paid ones, while also donating to GOP candidates, is the opposite of wokeness. That all seems in line with standard operating procedures for the wealthy.

But wokeness has become such a pervasive party of right-wing ideology that it’s not just progressive ideals getting slapped with the label anymore — CEOs who plan ill-advised trips to the bottom of the ocean now qualify, too.

The Navy first detected the Titan sub's implosion soon after it went missing: WSJ

A senior Navy official said the service does not usually make the information public until the search for survivors ends conclusively. 

Erin Snodgrass,Lloyd Lee
Thu, June 22, 2023 

An undated photo shows a tourist submersible belongs to OceanGate at sea.Ocean Gate / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The Navy detected the Titan's implosion soon after it lost contact, per The Wall Street Journal.


Defense officials told the outlet the Navy began listening for the vessel right after it went missing.


A top-secret detection system used to find enemy submarines registered the sound.

At least some in the upper echelons of the US military were aware of the Titan submersible's fate days before the rest of the world, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The US Navy first detected the sound of the Titan's likely implosion soon after the vessel lost contact with its mothership on Sunday while on an exploratory dive to the Titanic shipwreck more than two miles beneath the surface, The Journal reported Thursday.

A top secret acoustic detection system that is used by the Navy to identify enemy submarines first registered the sound of an implosion near the since-discovered debris site on Sunday, US defense officials told the outlet.

The Navy did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Navy officials began searching for sounds from the missing Titan almost immediately after it lost contact, according to the newspaper.

"The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost," a senior U.S. Navy official told the Journal. "While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission."

A senior Navy official told the Washington Post the service does not usually make the information public until the search for survivors ends conclusively. Until then, it's nothing more than a "data point."

The fact that the Navy detected the sounds — and withheld the information from the public for five days wasn't surprising given the US's decades-long history of using devices to detect underwater activity, Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Post.

"I would be surprised if they hadn't heard it," he said."They suspected what happened but couldn't be sure. What you're looking at is just lines on a graph. And if you try to convince people you weren't doing a search because the lines on a graph indicated an implosion, that wouldn't be acceptable to many."

Coast Guard officials on Thursday said the Titan appears to have suffered a "catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber," imploding and shattering its debris 1,600 feet from the famous shipwreck.

The five passengers' death would have been instantaneous, Stefan Williams, a professor of marine robotics at the University of Sydney whose lab works with uncrewed submersibles, previously told Insider.

Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger said at the press conference that the implosion would have "generated significant broadband sound down there that the sonar buoys would have picked up."

Officials told the Journal that the Navy couldn't definitively conclude that the sound detected on its system came from the Titan, but the signal helped narrow the scope of the search.

The search for the vessel prompted a massive international effort, including Canadian authorities, commercial vessels, and a French vessel that deployed a remotely operated vehicle (ROV).

The device, capable of diving 20,000 feet underwater, discovered the debris believed to be part of the missing Titan on Thursday morning.

Thursday, June 22, 2023: This article has been updated to include additional details that emerged following the breaking news.

Sub's implosion was the quickest way Titan submersible passengers could've died

Grace Eliza Goodwin
Thu, June 22, 2023 

OceanGate Expeditions' Titan submersible.OceanGate Expeditions via AP, File)

The Titan submersible's implosion is the quickest way the passengers could've died.


The US Coast Guard announced on Thursday that it believes the sub imploded in the water near the Titanic wreck.


All 5 passengers — including the sub maker's CEO and millionaires — are presumed died.

The US Coast Guard said on Thursday that the missing Titan submersible appears to have suffered a "catastrophic implosion" before search and rescue efforts even began.

And out of all the possible scenarios, an implosion was the quickest way the five passengers aboard could've died.

"It would happen quite quickly, and there would be little chance of surviving," Stefan Williams, a professor of marine robotics at the University of Sydney whose lab works with uncrewed submersibles, previously told Insider.

It's not clear exactly when the implosion happened, but the Coast Guard said search buoys deployed to help look for the missing sub didn't hear the sound of any collapse of the OceanGate vessel.

The Titan sub dove under the waves around 8 a.m. on Sunday and lost contact with a surface ship about an hour and 45 minutes later. The Coast Guard first heard from OceanGate that the sub hadn't returned at about 6 p.m. that evening.

The Coast Guard said two debris fields were found about 1,600 feet away from the bow of the Titanic wreck on the ocean floor indicating the submersible imploded in the "water column" nearby.

It's not clear if those aboard reached the Titanic before the implosion.

Science writer David Pogue — who previously reported on OceanGate and the Titan sub for CBS — said those aboard would have died immediately.

"Remember, as we know, at those pressures, if a molecule of water gets in, it's over instantly," Pogue told CNN's Jake Tapper on Thursday. "I know it's no great comfort to the families and the spouses, but they did die instantaneously. They were not even aware that anything was wrong."

‘Titanic’ Director James Cameron Speaks Out on Titan Sub: ‘Warnings Went Unheeded’

Cameron noted that he’s a submersible designer himself and that after taking part in over 30 dives, he is well-versed in the dangers of deep-sea exploration.

Helen Holmes
Thu, June 22, 2023 

Dave J Hogan/Getty Images

Titanic director James Cameron has weighed in on the tragic Titan submersible voyage that now appears to have claimed the lives of all five people onboard.

The Oscar winner, who himself has taken several underwater excursions to the sunken wreck of the Titanic, told ABC News on Thursday: “I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result. For us, it’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded. To take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.”

Cameron noted that he’s a submersible designer himself and that after taking part in over 30 dives, he is well-versed in the dangers of deep-sea exploration.

“I’ve been down there many times, I know the wreck site very well,” he said. “And of course, as a submersible designer myself, I designed and built a sub to go to the deepest place in the ocean, so I understand the engineering problems associated with building this type of vehicle, and all the safety protocols that you have to go through.”

He added: “It’s absolutely critical for people to get the take-home message that deep submersible diving is a mature art.”

The Titan submersible, operated by OceanGate Expeditions, went missing on Sunday in the Atlantic Ocean near the site of the Titanic shipwreck. The U.S. Coast Guard said in a press conference on Thursday that the missing sub is believed to have succumbed to a “catastrophic implosion” near the wreckage site.

James Cameron Says He Knew About Sub Implosion Days Before Any of Us

AJ McDougall
Thu, June 22, 2023 

CNN

James Cameron, the director of 1997’s Titanic, said in an interview on Thursday that he had correctly guessed the fate of the Titan submersible less than 24 hours after it disappeared on Sunday—then watched the “futile” search unfold, “hoping against hope that I was wrong.”

Cameron, a prolific deep-sea explorer himself, explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he’d missed the initial news of OceanGate Expeditions losing contact with its submersible, having been out to sea on a ship. By Monday morning, though, he was in contact with his colleagues in what he called “the deep submergence community.”

Learning from them that both communications and tracking had been lost simultaneously, Cameron said he’d begun to suspect an implosion, “a shockwave of events so powerful that it actually took out” tracking, a secondary system with its own fail-safes.


“I got on the horn again with some other people, tracked down some intel that was probably of a military origin, although it could have been research—because there are hydrophones all over the Atlantic—and got confirmation that there was some kind of loud noise consistent with an implosion event,” the director continued.

“That seemed to me enough confirmation. I let all of my inner circle of people know that we had lost our comrades. And I encouraged everybody to raise a glass in their honor on Monday.”

Cameron said he received the information from “credible sources” and “I took that as a factor...I couldn’t think of any other scenario in which a sub would be lost where it lost comms and navigation at the same time, and stayed out of touch and did not surface.”

A 'Terrified' Teen and a Maritime Legend: Tributes Pour in for Titanic Sub Victims

He told BBC News that the next few days “felt like a prolonged and nightmarish charade where people are running around talking about banging noises and talking about oxygen and all this other stuff.”

“I knew that sub was sitting exactly underneath its last known depth and position,” he said. “That’s exactly where they found it.”

On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed in a press conference that debris evidence found near the wreck of the Titanic suggested that a “catastrophic implosion” had taken place, killing all five people aboard.

Cameron said he had known “in [his] bones” that he had been right even before the announcement. “So it certainly wasn’t a surprise today.”

On CNN, Cameron added he believes the passengers on the sub “had some warning, that they heard some acoustic signature of the hull beginning to delaminate.” Cameron believes they he heard delamination–the process when water begins to force layers of fibres apart–“with their ears, not through the sensor system in the last moments of their lives, and that’s quite a horrifying prospect.”

He said it was “unconscionable” that the company in charge of the submersible mission to the Titanic, OceanGate, did not go through appropriate safety procedures. He confirmed he never had business with OceanGate and did not try to warn billionaire Stockton Rush of his safety problems, thinking “maybe they’ve solved it [safety issues].”

In an earlier interview on Thursday, he told ABC News that several of his deep submergence colleagues had written letters to OceanGate officials in the past, warning that their submersible was too experimental and its safety needed to be certified.

“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result,” said Cameron.

“For us, it’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded. To take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.”

A diving expert who has taken part in over 30 deep-sea expeditions, Cameron in 2012 piloted an experimental craft of his own design on a record-breaking dive to an undersea valley in the Mariana Trench.

He “knowingly” did not seek certification for his vessel, he told The New York Times on Thursday, because it was a scientific—and solo—mission.

“I would never design a vehicle to take passengers and not have it certified,” he said.

The Daily Beast.

James Cameron says Titan submersible passengers likely had warning just before implosion

Emily St. Martin
Thu, June 22, 2023 

"Titanic" director James Cameron, left, says that the Titan submersible deaths are "impossible to process" and that passengers were likely warned just before the implosion. (Pat Martin / For The Times; Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

“Titanic” director James Cameron said during an ABC News interview that one of his longtime friends was among the passengers on the tourist submersible Titan and that sensors likely warned of the disaster just before it occurred. All five aboard were killed in a “catastrophic implosion, officials said.

After OceanGate Expeditions released a statement Thursday saying that all five passengers’ lives had “sadly been lost” and the company confirmed that the debris found was indeed from the missing submersible, Cameron weighed in on the tragedy.

“This OceanGate sub had sensors on the inside of a hull to give them a warning when it was starting to crack,” he told ABC News. “And I think if that's your idea of safety, then you're doing it wrong. They probably had warning that their hull was starting to delaminate, starting to crack. ... [W]e understand from inside the community that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up, trying to manage an emergency.”

The director of the 1997 blockbuster "Titanic" is a longtime member of the diving community, has experience designing submarines able to withstand the depths that the Titan could not and has ventured down to the wreck of the Titanic 33 times himself.

Cameron described implosion as a “violent event,” and he said engineers typically focus first and foremost on the submersible design maintaining structural integrity against pressure that increases with depth.

Read more: 5 aboard Titanic tourist sub are dead after 'catastrophic implosion'

“People in the community were very concerned about this sub,” Cameron told the network. “A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified. I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result.

"For us, it’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded. To take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.”

The Times obtained the 2018 letter privately written to Stockton Rush, the chief executive of OceanGate, who was among those who died in the implosion. The manned underwater vehicles committee at the Marine Technology Society wrote to Rush, stressing the need for a third-party safety review of OceanGate’s submersibles.

“Our apprehension is 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 letter stated.

William Kohnen, chairman of the committee, told The Times that OceanGate “raised a number of eyebrows.”

Also in 2018, David Lochridge, a former OceanGate employee, sued the company for terminating him after he raised safety red flags, “particularly OceanGate’s refusal to conduct critical, non-destructive testing of the experimental design of the hull.” Lochridge specified that its hull monitoring system would detect failure "often [only] milliseconds before an implosion."

He said he disagreed with Rush’s decision to “subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible.”

Read more: 'Catastrophic' safety concerns raised about sub long before ill-fated Titanic voyage

Cameron also told ABC News that he was mourning the death of French Titanic explorer Paul-Henri “P.H.” Nargeolet, a longtime friend who was aboard the Titan submersible.

“It’s really quite surreal, it’s just astonishing,” he said. “P.H., the French legendary submersible dive pilot, was a friend of mine. It’s a very small community, I’ve known P.H. for 25 years.

"For him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process.”

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

El Nino’s Fierce Heat Carries New Risk of Resurgent Deadly Viruses

Low De Wei
Thu, June 22, 2023



(Bloomberg) -- The return of El Niño after nearly four years is raising the specter of extreme weather, economic pain, and agricultural disruption across the globe. Now add another unpleasant effect to the mix: a resurgence of tropical diseases

The World Health Organization sounded the alarm in a press conference earlier this week, when Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that the weather phenomenon “could increase transmission of dengue and other so-called arboviruses such as Zika and chikungunya.”

Mosquitoes that transmit such viruses flourish in the warmer weather that El Niño is set to bring to many parts of the world.

Regions from South America to Asia are already grappling with surges in tropical diseases. Peru has declared a state of emergency over its worst recorded dengue outbreak on record, with about 150,000 suspected cases reported so far this year. The WHO warned that infections are putting a “heavy burden” on the country’s health system.

Meanwhile, Thailand has seen its highest number of dengue cases in three years, with 19,503 reported by local health authorities from the start of 2023 through the first week of June. Cases are also on the rise in Malaysia and Cambodia, according to the WHO, while Singapore authorities warned earlier in the year about the potential for a surge in cases between June and October.

Elsewhere, other tropical diseases are taking a toll. Paraguay has reported at least 40 deaths from an ongoing outbreak of chikungunya that began last year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

--With assistance from Jason Gale.

An environmental writer asks: What world will my daughter inherit?

Story by Dennis Drabelle • Yesterday 


In his 1950 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature, William Faulkner said, “I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” The title of David Gessner’s new book, “A Traveler’s Guide to the End of the World: Tales of Fire, Wind, and Water,” suggests a 21st-century update of Faulkner’s dictum: Man will prevail but might not endure.

A veteran writer on the environment, Gessner evokes the havoc resulting from human-caused climate change by taking us to a host of melting, blazing, flooded or desiccated places, including the Mississippi River Delta; his hurricane-prone hometown of Wilmington, N.C.; the Colorado River, in the throes of becoming Colorado Creek; Miami, New York and other coastal cities vulnerable to what geology professor Hal Wanless predicts will be “an eight- to ten-foot sea level rise by the end of the century. Maybe eleven to thirteen.”

This is a lot to assimilate, and Gessner admits to being a writer who likes to “jump around.” He allowed himself a year and a half of jumping and note-taking, a period in which, “without trying very hard,” he witnessed one climatic disaster or its aftermath after another.

In one passage he pulls things together with the single word “never,” which he kept hearing from people he met. “‘Never have we had so many fires.’ ‘Never has it been so hot.’ ‘Never have we had so many juniper trees die.’” To which might be added a “never” that cropped up as this review was being written: drifting smoke from fires in Nova Scotia, which for the first time ever gave New York the worst air quality of any city in the world.

For the most part, however, Gessner organizes his material around a question he put to one expert after another. What kind of world will Gessner’s daughter, Hadley, be living in four decades from now, when she turns 60, his own age when he started working on the book?


David Gessner, author of “A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World.”© Debbie Lorenc

Here again Manhattan comes into play: Hadley is currently an undergraduate at NYU. “There are many visions for the future of the city,” her father reports. “Almost all of them are watery.” For in addition to coping with rising sea levels, residents can expect to be hit by more hurricanes. Meteorologists rank New York, “despite the relatively low odds of a major storm, as the country’s second most dangerous major city, behind only the hurricane bull’s eye of Miami and just ahead of New Orleans.”

For all its evocative prose and knowledgeable commentary, however, “A Traveler’s Guide” can be frustrating to read. The lack of an index is an inconvenience, and the book loses focus for a time when Gessner dwells on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and the reactions thereto of his former college classmate and friend Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). Effective as Raskin was in defending the constitutional process and denouncing the attempted coup by the Proud Boys and their ilk, neither he nor that day of infamy has much to do with Gessner’s “Tales of Fire, Wind, and Water.”Read more from Book World

Nevertheless, “A Traveler’s Guide” is replete with thought-provoking set pieces. For instance, Gessner offers sardonic wisdom from one of his most relied-upon sources, Orrin Pilkey, an emeritus professor of earth sciences at Duke. On a visit to Long Beach Island on the New Jersey shore, Pilkey rails at the stupidity of using federal relief refunds to rebuild houses destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. “It was, as Orrin had said, like giving money to people to help them rebuild on a train track, and then telling them to just keep their fingers crossed and hope the train doesn’t come again.”

He draws an apt comparison to Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” Those fictional anarchists, you may recall, conspired to blow up Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado and recover the splendid scenery and valuable ecosystem beneath the impounded water. “Now it isn’t just monkey wrenchers who are seriously talking about closing down the dam,” Gessner writes, “and … drought appears to be doing what explosives did not,” i.e., making the great lost canyon visible again.

He also describes a surreal phenomenon in the mountains of Nevada. “Two sunsets glow in front of me. One actual one and the other, further south, something that looks like a sunset but isn’t. The reds and purples and swirling blacks … of the southern pseudo-sunset are the reflection of a fire, not the fire of the sun.”

In the end, Gessner takes a small step back from his “end of the world” rhetoric. He consoles himself, and possibly us, by recalling that all the warnings from his sources are informed conjectures, not certainties. “Because, strangely,” he writes, “one of the most reassuring things is the fact that we really don’t know where we are heading.”

Dennis Drabelle, a former contributing editor of Book World, is the author, most recently, of “The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of National Parks.”

A Traveler’s Guide to the End of the World

Tales of Fire, Wind, and Water

By David Gessner

Torrey House. 359 pp. $21.95, paperback

A nuclear site is on tribes' ancestral lands. Their voices are being left out on key cleanup talks


Three federally recognized tribes have devoted decades to restoring the condition of their ancestral lands in southeastern Washington state to what they were before those lands became the most radioactively contaminated site in the nation's nuclear weapons complex, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

But the Yakama Nation, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and Nez Perce Tribe have been left out of negotiations on a major decision affecting the future cleanup of millions of gallons of radioactive waste stored in underground tanks on the Hanford site near Richland.

In May, federal and state agencies reached an agreement that hasn't been released publicly but will likely involve milestone and deadline changes in the cleanup, according to a spokesperson for the Washington State Department of Ecology, a regulator for the site. As they privately draft their proposed changes, the tribes are bracing for a decision that could threaten their fundamental vision for the site.

“As original stewards of that area, we’ve always been taught to leave it better than you found it,” said Laurene Contreras, program administrator for the Yakama Nation’s Environmental Restoration/Waste Management program, which is responsible for the tribe's Hanford work. “And so that’s what we’re asking for.”

From World War II through the Cold War, Hanford produced more than two-thirds of the United States' plutonium for nuclear weapons, including the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. Production ceased in 1989, and the site’s mission shifted to cleaning up the chemical and radioactive waste left behind.

For these tribes, which have served as vital watchdogs in the cleanup process, the area’s history dates back long before Hanford, to pre-colonization. It was a place where some fished, hunted, gathered and lived. It’s home to culturally significant sites. And in 1855 treaties with the U.S. government in which the tribes ceded millions of acres of land, they were assured continued access.

The U.S. Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington State Department of Ecology have held confidential negotiations since 2020 on revising plans for the approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks at Hanford. The discerning eyes of the tribal experts have been kept out, though EPA and Ecology have said there will eventually be opportunities for the tribes to meet with them about this.

The revisions are expected to affect an agreement among the three agencies that outlines the Hanford cleanup. Mason Murphy, program manager for the Confederated Tribes' Energy and Environmental Sciences program, points out that the tribes also weren't consulted in that original 1989 agreement.

“It’s an old scabbed-over wound,” Murphy said.

Currently, the agencies plan to convert high-level radioactive waste into glass form that would be sent to a deep geological repository, said Ecology Department spokesperson Ryan Miller. Low-level waste would be converted and disposed of permanently in stainless steel containers at a landfill at the Hanford site

But there isn’t a deep geologic repository in the U.S. to dispose of the high-level waste, he said. And turning that waste into a glass form is reliant on a plant that hasn’t been completed and “faces ongoing technical challenges,” according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report published last month.

Changes to plans to turn the high-level waste into a glass form could have wide-ranging consequences, said Dan Serres, conservation director for the environmental group Columbia Riverkeeper.

“There’s nothing that I’m aware of that demonstrates that another path is going to protect the Columbia River, or groundwater, or the interests of tribes (that) have a right to be using as much of this area as possible,” he said.

The tribes do have small teams of experts dedicated to the cleanup, and they've had an impact.

Through testimony to lawmakers in the 1980s, the Yakama Nation was instrumental in keeping the 580-square-mile (1,500-square-kilometer) site from becoming a deep repository where high-level nuclear waste from across the U.S. would be stored indefinitely.

More recently, tribal experts determined the U.S. Department of Energy's work to remove the radionuclide strontium from groundwater at Hanford would push it into the nearby Columbia River. Their findings prompted the federal agency to reconsider its plans, said Rose Ferri, project tracking resource analyst for Yakama Nation.

"It is important for someone to be that other level of review; to be like, ‘Does this really make sense? Are you really understanding the science here or was there a mistake made?’” said McClure Tosch, a natural resource injury assessment lead for the Yakama Nation.

Last week, experts from the tribe traveled to a Nike Missile site, which had been used to protect Hanford from enemy aircraft, to examine completed cleanup work and determine future restoration options.

The Nez Perce Tribe has four experts within its Environmental Restoration and Waste Management program, which handles much of its Hanford work. Program director Jack Bell said the team's hydrogeologist determined that Energy Department contractors underestimated to what extent a radioactive contaminant could travel into groundwater. The tribe sent letters to the agencies, and the model was updated.

“That model will be used over and over again,” Bell said.

The state Ecology Department said it plans to consult with the tribes once the draft agreement is more finalized. But when that will happen and in what form is still unclear. An energy department spokesperson said in a statement that while the tribes are not included in the negotiations, in other instances the department “consults with Tribal Nations when its action affects, or has the potential to affect, tribal rights or resources.” A regional EPA spokesperson said in a statement when the negotiations are completed, there will be opportunity for “tribal consultation and input ahead of public comment."

Tosch said every chance he gets, he brings up the Yakama Nation not being included in the negotiations.

“If there are permit decisions made, where there is a lot more on-site closure of waste, rather than what we assumed would have been all high-level waste that would have been treated and taken off site … that’s more land that will forever be a waste disposal facility,” he said. “That is very much against the direction and vision for tribal council.”

Hallie Golden, The Associated Press

US Supreme Court rules against Navajo Nation in water dispute

 The United States Supreme Court building in Washington

Thu, June 22, 2023 
By John Kruzel and Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday dealt a setback to the Navajo Nation, rejecting its bid to require the federal government to develop a plan to secure water access for the tribe on reservation lands in the parched American southwest.

The justices, in a 5-4 decision authored by conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concluded that an 1868 peace treaty between the United States and the tribe did not require the government to take steps such as assessing the tribe's water needs and potentially building pipelines, pumps and wells.

More than 30% of households on the Navajo reservation currently lack running water, according to the tribe.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has supported Native Americans rights in various cases since joining the court in 2017, dissented from the decision along with the court's three liberal justices.

"The 1868 treaty reserved necessary water to accomplish the purpose of the Navajo Reservation," Kavanaugh wrote in the ruling. "But the treaty did not require the United States to take affirmative steps to secure water for the Tribe."

The treaty, reached three years after the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War, ended two decades of sporadic fighting between the United States and the Navajos and established the Navajo Reservation, which encompasses roughly 17 million acres (6.9 million hectares), largely in the Colorado River Basin.

The treaty secured the right of the Navajos to make use of the land, minerals and water on the reservation, which spans parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

Gorsuch criticized the ruling for deciding more than what was required by the case. In his dissent, Gorsuch wrote that the Navajos sought simply to identify the water rights that the U.S. government holds in trust on the tribe's behalf.

"The government owes the Tribe at least that much," Gorsuch wrote.

The ruling reversed a decision by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that had given a green light to the Navajo Nation's lawsuit against the U.S. Interior Department and others seeking to prod the government to develop a plan to secure water for the tribe. The 9th Circuit said that the government had a "duty to protect and preserve the Nation's right to water."

"The Department of the Interior is committed to upholding its trust and treaty obligations to Tribes, as well as to ensuring that water rights for Colorado River users are fulfilled according to the law. We are reviewing the decision," a department spokesperson said in a statement following Thursday's ruling.

The decision follows another ruling this month in which the Supreme Court upheld a decades-old federal law governing Native American adoption and foster care placements, throwing out a challenge brought by the state of Texas and other plaintiffs to standards that give preferences to Native Americans and tribal members.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York and John Kruzel in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)

Supreme Court rules against Navajo Nation in Colorado River water rights case

 Raynelle Hoskie attaches a hose to a water pump to fill tanks in her truck outside a tribal office on the Navajo reservation in Tuba City, Ariz., on April 20, 2020. The Supreme Court has ruled against the Navajo Nation in a dispute involving water from the drought-stricken Colorado River. States that draw water from the river — Arizona, Nevada and Colorado — and water districts in California had urged the court to decide for them, and that's what the justices did in a 5-4 ruling. 

(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

JESSICA GRESKO
Thu, June 22, 2023 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled against the Navajo Nation on Thursday in a dispute involving water from the drought-stricken Colorado River.

States that draw water from the river — Arizona, Nevada and Colorado — and water districts in California that are also involved in the case had urged the court to decide for them, which the justices did in a 5-4 ruling. Colorado had argued that siding with the Navajo Nation would undermine existing agreements and disrupt the management of the river.

The Biden administration had said that if the court were to come down in favor of the Navajo Nation, the federal government could face lawsuits from many other tribes.

Lawyers for the Navajo Nation had characterized the tribe’s request as modest, saying they simply were seeking an assessment of the tribe's water needs and a plan to meet them.

The facts of the case go back to treaties that the tribe and the federal government signed in 1849 and 1868. The second treaty established the reservation as the tribe’s “permanent home” — a promise the Navajo Nation says includes a sufficient supply of water. In 2003 the tribe sued the federal government, arguing it had failed to consider or protect the Navajo Nation’s water rights to the lower portion of the Colorado River.

Writing for a majority made up of conservative justices, Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained that “the Navajos contend that the treaty requires the United States to take affirmative steps to secure water for the Navajos — for example, by assessing the Tribe's water needs, developing a plan to secure the needed water, and potentially building pipelines, pumps, wells, or other water infrastructure.”

But, Kavanaugh said, "In light of the treaty's text and history, we conclude that the treaty does not require the United States to take those affirmative steps.”

Kavanaugh acknowledged that water issues are difficult ones.

“Allocating water in the arid regions of the American West is often a zero-sum situation,” he wrote. It is important, he said, for courts to leave “to Congress and the President the responsibility to enact appropriations laws and to otherwise update federal law as they see fit in light of the competing contemporary needs for water.”

A federal trial court initially dismissed the lawsuit, but an appeals court allowed it to go forward. The Supreme Court's decision reverses that ruling from the appeals court.

In a dissent, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that he would have allowed the case to go forward and he characterized the Navajo's position as a “simple ask.”

“Where do the Navajo go from here?” he wrote. “To date, their efforts to find out what water rights the United States holds for them have produced an experience familiar to any American who has spent time at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The Navajo have waited patiently for someone, anyone, to help them, only to be told (repeatedly) that they have been standing in the wrong line and must try another.”

Gorsuch said one “silver lining” of the case may be that his colleagues in the majority recognized that the tribe may still be able to “assert the interests they claim in water rights litigation, including by seeking to intervene in cases that affect their claimed interests.”

Gorsuch, a conservative and Colorado native who has emerged as a champion of Native rights since joining the court in 2017, was joined by the court's three liberals: Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

During arguments in the case in March, Justice Samuel Alito pointed out that the Navajo Nation’s original reservation was hundreds of miles away from the section of the Colorado River it now seeks water from.

Today, the Colorado River flows along what is now the northwestern border of the tribe’s reservation, which extends into New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. Two of the river’s tributaries, the San Juan River and the Little Colorado River, also pass alongside and through the reservation. Still, one-third of the some 175,000 people who live on the reservation, the largest in the country, do not have running water in their homes.

The government argued that it has helped the tribe secure water from the Colorado River’s tributaries and provided money for infrastructure, including pipelines, pumping plants and water treatment facilities. But it said no law or treaty required the government to assess and address the tribe’s general water needs. The states involved in the case argued that the Navajo Nation was attempting to make an end run around a Supreme Court decree that divvied up water in the Colorado River’s Lower Basin.

In a statement, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren called the ruling “disappointing" and said the tribe's lawyers “continue to analyze the opinion and determine what it means for this particular lawsuit.”

“My job as the President of the Navajo Nation is to represent and protect the Navajo people, our land, and our future,” Nygren said. “The only way to do that is with secure, quantified water rights to the Lower Basin of the Colorado River.”

Rita McGuire, a lawyer who represented states opposing the tribe’s claims, said the court “ruled exactly right” and that “we’re very pleased.”

____

Associated Press reporter Michael Phillis in St. Louis contributed to this report.

In a scathing dissent, Neil Gorsuch compared the Navajo Nation's plight to the experience of 'any American who has spent time at the Department of Motor Vehicles'

Sonam Sheth

 Business Insider
Thu, June 22, 2023 

Neil Gorsuch.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the US is not required to secure water for the Navajo Nation.


Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a dissent comparing the plight of the Navajos to waiting at the DMV.


The Navajo "have tried it all," he wrote. "At each turn, they have received the same answer: 'Try again.'"

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote an impassioned dissent comparing the Navajo Nation's fight over water rights to the experience of "any American who has spent time at the Department of Motor Vehicles."

"The Navajo have waited patiently for someone, anyone, to help them, only to be told (repeatedly) that they have been standing in the wrong line and must try another," Gorsuch wrote.

The high court ruled 5-4 in Arizona v. Navajo Nation on Thursday that under an 1868 treaty, the US is not required to secure water for the Navajo Nation.

Specifically, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who delivered the majority opinion, argued that the Navajo Nation was asking the federal government to take "affirmative steps to secure water for the Navajos."

But Gorsuch wrote in his dissent that the majority "rejects a request the Navajo Nation never made."

Instead, he wrote, "the relief the Tribe seeks is far more modest."

The Navajo "have a simple ask: They want the United States to identify the water rights it holds for them," he wrote. "And if the United States has misappropriated the Navajo's water rights, the Tribe asks it to formulate a plan to stop doing so prospectively."

Gorsuch, who was nominated by then President Donald Trump in 2017, has a long history of ruling in favor of Indigenous rights. And at 26 pages, his dissent in Arizona v. Navajo Nation was twice as long as the majority opinion.

The court's three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — joined Gorsuch in his dissent. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett joined in the majority opinion.

Gorsuch in his dissent underscored the Navajo Nation's efforts to avoid taking its case to the Supreme Court.

The US "has never denied that the Navajo may have water rights in the mainstream of the Colorado River (and perhaps elsewhere) that it holds in trust for the Tribe," Gorsuch wrote. "Instead, the government's constant refrain is that the Navajo can have all they ask for; they just need to go somewhere else and do something else first."

They "have tried it all. They have written federal officials. They have moved this Court to clarify the United States' responsibilities when representing them," he wrote. "They have sought to intervene directly in water-related litigation. And when all of those efforts were rebuffed, they brought a claim seeking to compel the United States to make good on its treaty obligations by providing an accounting of what water rights it holds on their behalf. At each turn, they have received the same answer: 'Try again.'"

NBC News highlighted the stakes of the case in March.

Crystal Tulley-Cordova, a hydrologist in the Navajo Nation's department of water resources, told NBC that the tribe needs enough water to transition from "survival mode to thriving mode."

The Navajo Nation first filed a lawsuit in 2003 arguing that the US government was required to ensure that the tribe had enough access to water on its reservation. Twenty years later, the litigation wound up before the high court.

Gorsuch in his dissent wrote that the majority "neglect[ed]" to take into account the violent history leading up to the Treaty of 1868 establishing the Navajo Reservation, the "discussions that surrounded that Treaty," and "the many steps the Navajo took to avoid this litigation."

But he highlighted that the majority opinion left open the possibility that the Navajo can seek to intervene in future cases that "affect their claimed interests" in water-rights litigation.

"After today," Gorsuch wrote, "it is hard to see how this Court (or any court) could ever again fairly deny a request" from the Navajo to intervene in such cases.

That leaves the tribe "in a familiar spot," he continued. As they did at Bosque Redondo, "they must again fight for themselves to secure their homeland and all that must necessarily come with it. Perhaps here, as there, some measure of justice will prevail in the end."

LISTEN LIVE: Supreme Court hears cases over rights of Navajo Nation to water from Colorado River

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