Donald Trump never paid $380,000 a British court said he owed over the 'golden showers' dossier, former spy says

Cameron Manley
Wed, June 12, 2024 

Donald Trump never paid $380,000 a British court said he owed over the 'golden showers' dossier, former spy says


Trump has not complied with a British court order to pay $380,000 in legal fees, said a former spy.


The fees stem from Trump's lawsuit against ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele.


Steele's dossier alleged Trump-Russia ties. Trump called it a "pile of garbage."

Donald Trump has failed to comply with a British High Court order to pay $380,000 in legal fees and has also ignored an offer to settle with a former British spy who compiled a document that claimed Russia had interfered in the 2016 US election, Sky News reported.

Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent, produced a report commissioned by the Democratic National Convention and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign that made a series of mostly unsubstantiated allegations.

The most salacious claim in the dossier alleged that prostitutes visited Trump in the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow, and they performed an act of urination in front of him, a practice known as '"golden showers."

Trump has dismissed the claims as a "pile of garbage," saying that the Steele dossier contained numerous inaccuracies and breached his rights under the Data Protection Act.

The former president sued Steele's company, Orbis Business Intelligence, in the UK earlier this year, but the case was dismissed because it was filed after the six-year limitation period.

Trump was ordered to pay £300,000 ($380,000) in legal fees, said Steele in a tweet, on Friday.

Neither the Trump campaign nor Trump's office responded to a request for comment.

Thus far, Trump has only paid £10,000 ($12,700), ahead of the hearing as a security payment. This was transferred to Steele in February.

Earlier this year, when he lost his English High Court case against us, the judge ordered Donald Trump to pay Orbis an initial £300k in costs. Trump, who claims to respect the UK, has now been in breach of this order for two months and faces enforcement if he travels here again.

— Christopher Steele (@Chris_D_Steele) June 7, 2024

Speaking to Sky News, Steele said, "Cost is the key issue in all litigation, and particularly in what we call lawfare, which we think this is. It is an attempt to take vengeance against us or to keep us quiet."

Neither the Trump campaign nor Trump's office immediately responded to Business Insider's request for comment.

"I think he's trying to put off a lot of these legal cases and these fines and these costs until after what he thinks will be his reelection in November, in which case he will just tell us all to go and jump," Steele told Sky News.

It is the latest in Trump's legal battles coming after the former president and GOP presumptive nominee was found guilty of charges relating to a hush-money payment made to the porn star Stormy Daniels at the end of May.

The Steele dossier consisted of 16 separate reports that total 35 pages. It was leaked to and published by BuzzFeed in 2017 and alleged collusion between Donald Trump's campaign and Russia.

In 2022, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Convention agreed to pay $113,000 to settle a Federal Election Commission investigation into whether hiding payments to Steele had breached federal campaign finance laws.

The fast-food industry claims the California minimum wage law is costing jobs. 

Its numbers are fake

Michael Hiltzik
Wed, June 12, 2024

Surrounded by fast-food workers in September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill raising the minimum wage in the industry to $20 an hour from $16. (Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

The fast-food industry has been wringing its hands over the devastating impact on its business from California's new minimum wage law for its workers.

Their raw figures certainly seems to bear that out. A full-page ad recently placed in USA Today by the California Business and Industrial Alliance asserted that nearly 10,000 fast-food jobs had been lost in the state since Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the law in September.

The ad listed a dozen chains, from Pizza Hut to Cinnabon, whose local franchisees had cut employment or raised prices, or are considering taking those steps. According to the ad, the chains were "victims of Newsom's minimum wage," which increased the minimum wage in fast food to $20 from $16, starting April 1.

The rapid job cuts, rising prices, and business closures are a direct result of Governor Newsom and this short-sighted legislation

Business lobbyist Tom Manzo, touting misleading statistics

Here's something you might want to know about this claim. It's baloney, sliced thick. In fact, from September through January, the period covered by the ad, fast-food employment in California has gone up, as tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. The claim that it has fallen represents a flagrant misrepresentation of government employment figures.

Something else the ad doesn't tell you is that after January, fast-food employment continued to rise. As of April, employment in the limited-service restaurant sector that includes fast-food establishments was higher by nearly 7,000 jobs than it was in April 2023, months before Newsom signed the minimum wage bill.

Despite that, the job-loss figure and finger-pointing at the minimum wage law have rocketed around the business press and conservative media, from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Post to the website of the conservative Hoover Institution.

We'll be taking a closer look at the corporate lobbyist sleight-of-hand that makes job gains look like job losses. But first, a quick trot around the fast-food economic landscape generally.

Few would argue that the restaurant business is easy, whether we're talking about high-end sit-down dining, kiosks and food trucks, or franchised fast-food chains. The cost of labor is among the many expenses that owners have to deal with, but in recent years far from the worst. That would be inflation in the cost of food.

Newport Beach-based Chipotle Mexican Grill, for example, disclosed in its most recent annual report that food, beverages and packaging cost it $2.9 billion last year, up from $2.6 billion in 2022 — though those costs declined as a share of revenue to 29.5% from 30.1%. Labor costs in 2023 came to $2.4 billion, but fell to 24.7% of revenue from 25.5% in 2022.

Read more: Column: Inside the effort by two Beverly Hills billionaires to kill a state law protecting farmworkers

At Costa Mesa-based El Pollo Loco, labor and related costs fell last year by $3.5 million, or 2.7%, despite an increase of $4.1 million that the company attributed to higher minimum wages enacted in the past as well as "competitive pressure" — in other words, the necessity of paying more to attract employees in a tight labor market.

Then there's Rubio's Coastal Grill. On June 3 the Carlsbad chain confirmed that it had closed 48 of its California restaurants, about one-third of its 134 locations. As my colleague Don Lee reported, Rubio's attributed the closings to the rising cost of doing business in California.

There's more to the story, however. The biggest expense Rubio's has been facing is debt — a burden that has grown since the chain was acquired in 2010 by the private equity firm Mill Road Capital. By 2020, the chain owed $72.3 million, and it filed for bankruptcy. Indeed, in its full declaration with the bankruptcy court filed on June 5, the company acknowledged that along with increases in the minimum wage, it was facing an "unsustainable debt burden."

The company emerged from bankruptcy at the end of 2020 with settlements that included a reduction in its debt load. Then came the pandemic, a significant headwind. Among its struggles was again its debt — $72.9 million owed to its largest creditor, TREW Capital Management, a firm that specializes in lending to distressed restaurant businesses. It filed for bankruptcy again on June 5, two days after announcing its store closings. The case is pending.

Fast-food and other restaurant jobs slump every year from the fall through January, due to seasonal factors (red line); seasonal adjustments (blue line) give a more accurate picture of employment trends. The sharp decline in 2020 was caused by the pandemic. (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)

It's worth noting that high debt is often a feature of private-equity takeovers — in such cases saddling an acquired company with debt gives the acquirers a means to extract cash from their companies, even if it complicates the companies' path to profitability. Whether that's a factor in Rubio's recent difficulties isn't clear.

That brings us back to the claim that job losses among California's fast-food restaurants are due to the new minimum wage law.

The assertion appears to have originated with the Wall Street Journal, which reported on March 25 that restaurants across California were cutting jobs in anticipation of the minimum wage increase taking effect on April 1.

The article stated that employment in California's fast food and "other limited-service eateries was 726,600 in January, "down 1.3% from last September," when Newsom signed the minimum wage law. That worked out to employment of 736,170 in September, for a purported loss of 9,570 jobs from September through January.

The Journal's numbers were used as grist by UCLA economics professor Lee E. Ohanian for an article he published on April 24 on the website of the Hoover Institution, where he is a senior fellow.

Ohanian wrote that the pace of the job loss in fast-food was far greater than the overall decline in private employment in California from September through January, "which makes it tempting to conclude that many of those lost fast-food jobs resulted from the higher labor costs employers would need to pay" when the new law kicked in.

Read more: Column: American unions have finally remembered how to win

CABIA cited Ohanian's article as the source for its claim in its USA Today ad that "nearly 10,000" fast-food jobs were lost due to the minimum wage law. "The rapid job cuts, rising prices, and business closures are a direct result of Governor Newsom and this short-sighted legislation," CABIA founder and president Tom Manzo says on the organization's website.

Here's the problem with that figure: It's derived from a government statistic that is not seasonally adjusted. That's crucial when tracking jobs in seasonal industries, such as restaurants, because their business and consequently employment fluctuate in predictable patterns through the year. For this reason, economists vastly prefer seasonally adjusted figures when plotting out employment trendlines in those industries.

The Wall Street Journal's figures correspond to non-seasonally adjusted figures for California fast-food employment published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (I'm indebted to nonpareil financial blogger Barry Ritholtz and his colleague, the pseudonymous Invictus, for spotlighting this issue.)

Figures for California fast-food restaurants from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis show that on a seasonally adjusted basis employment actually rose in the September-to-January period by 6,335 jobs, from 736,160 to 742,495.

That's not to say that there haven't been employment cutbacks this year by some fast-food chains and other companies in hospitality industries. From the vantage point of laid-off workers, the manipulation of statistics by their employers doesn't ease the pain of losing their jobs.

Still, as Ritholtz and Invictus point out, it's hornbook economics that the proper way to deal with non-seasonally adjusted figures is to use year-to-year comparisons, which obviate seasonal trends.

Read more: Column: It's a happy Labor Day indeed after NLRB cracks down on employer sabotage of union elections

Doing so with the California fast-food statistics give us a different picture from the one that CABIA paints. In that business sector, September employment rose from a seasonally adjusted 730,000 in 2022 to 741,079 in 2024. In January, employment rose from 732,738 in 2023 to 742,495 this year.

Restaurant lobbyists can't pretend that they're unfamiliar with the concept of seasonality. It's been a known feature of the business since, like, forever.

The restaurant consultantship Toast even offers tips to restaurant owners on how to manage the phenomenon, noting that "April to September is the busiest season of the year," largely because that period encompasses Mother's Day and Father's Day, "two of the busiest restaurant days of the year," and because good weather encourages customers to eat out more often.

What's the slowest period? November to January, "when many people travel for holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas and spend time cooking and eating with family."

In other words, the lobbyists, the Journal and their followers all based their expressions of concern on a known pattern in which restaurant employment peaks into September and then slumps through January — every year.

They chose to blame the pattern on the California minimum wage law, which plainly had nothing to do with it. One can't look into their hearts and souls, but under the circumstances their arguments seem more than a teensy bit cynical.

CABIA's Manzo said by email that the alliance's source for the job-loss statistic in its advertisement was the Hoover Institution, whose "work and credibility speaks for itself."

He's wrong about the source. Ohanian explicitly drew the number he cited in his Hoover Institution post from the Wall Street Journal; he didn't do any independent analysis.

Ohanian acknowledged by email that "if the data are not seasonally adjusted, then no conclusions can be drawn from those data regarding AB 1228," the minimum wage law. He said he interpreted the Wall Street Journal's figures as seasonally adjusted and said he would query the Journal about the issue in anticipation of writing about it later this summer.

The author of the Wall Street Journal article, Heather Haddon, didn't reply to my inquiry about why she appeared to use non-seasonally adjusted figures when the adjusted figures were more appropriate.

Ohanian did observe, quite properly, that the labor cost increase from the law was large and that "if franchisees continue to face large food cost increases later this year, then the industry will really struggle." Fast-food companies already have instituted sizable price increases to cover their higher expenses, he observed. "The question thus becomes how sensitive are fast-food consumers to higher prices," a topic he says he will be researching as the year goes on.

Get the latest from Michael Hiltzik
Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Columbia Law Review article critical of Israel sparks battle between student editors and their board − highlighting fragility of academic freedom

Neal H. Hutchens, University of Kentucky
Wed, June 12, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather near Columbia University on April 30, 2024. 

AP Photo/Craig Ruttle

Editors of Columbia Law Review, a prominent journal run by students from the prestigious university’s law school, say the publication’s board of directors urged them on June 2, 2024, to refrain from publishing an article critical of Israel.

After the students published the article online the following day, the board, which includes Columbia Law School faculty members and alumni, had the law review’s website taken down.

The board soon relented and allowed the website back online on June 6, including the article in question. But it issued a statement accusing the student editors of failing to properly review the article prior to publication.

The student editors have rejected the assertions in the board’s statement and say they’re “on strike” – refraining from some of their review duties – to protest the board’s attempts to stifle them.

This dispute has garnered far less attention than the campus protests at Columbia University and hundreds of other schools that expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people and objected to school ties to Israel’s military operations in Gaza in spring 2024.

But as a scholar of academic freedom and free speech in higher education, I believe the controversy is worth paying attention to. If, as the students allege, there was inappropriate interference with the scholarly independence of one of the nation’s most influential law reviews, this incident has few, if any, precedents.

Sharing research in law reviews

Student-run law reviews, which are an important way that legal scholars share their research about legal issues with law professors, judges, attorneys and other readers, typically have high levels of editorial independence.

If the students’ allegations are accurate, the board violated widely accepted standards of academic freedom in higher education that scholars see as critical. Academic freedom is part of what makes colleges and universities places where new views and knowledge can be shared and where accepted ideas can be questioned.

Most law schools have at least one journal with “law review” in its name. Some also have other journals that focus on specific legal topics such as education, civil rights or international issues.

Law reviews and other law school journals are usually published by the law school, despite typically being run by students. This means that student editors select the articles for publication and are responsible for the editing process.

Serving on a law review is considered an honor and can be valuable to law students in obtaining clerkships with judges and jobs with law firms or other employers.

Law reviews are a main way for sharing research on legal topics by authors such as law and other professors, attorneys and judges. The importance of law reviews to legal research means student editors of law reviews should not be improperly pressured in deciding to accept or reject articles.

The Columbia Law Review’s structure is unusual: It operates as an independent nonprofit, separate from the law school, and is overseen by a board of directors.

More typically, law reviews are part of a law school.

Like other law reviews, however, Columbia’s is run by students who attend its law school. It’s also typical in that its articles, written in a formal and academic style, are intended for legal experts rather than the general public. This particular article has instances of rarely used words such as “instantiation” and “multifarious.”

Presenting a new legal framework

Rabea Eghbariah, a Palestinian human rights lawyer with a law degree from an Israeli university who is enrolled in a doctoral legal degree program at Harvard Law School, wrote the article at the center of this dispute.

In it, he proposes a new legal framework to describe Israel’s displacement and “abuses” of the Palestinian people as a crime against humanity comparable to apartheid or genocide.

Harvard Law Review previously commissioned and edited a similar article before deciding not to publish it.

Fears of backlash for publishing an article critical of Israel prompted the belated rejection, according to a statement from 25 student editors at Harvard released in November 2023.

It’s not uncommon for law reviews to publish articles making potentially controversial claims. For example, the previous issue of the Columbia Law Review included an article in which the author argued that prisoners made to perform work as a part of their sentences were being treated like enslaved people.

Centrality of academic freedom

Campus unrest over the Israel-Hamas conflict has raised questions about the rights of students to express their personal views when they participate in campus protests.

Likewise, this dispute raises questions about the academic freedom of student editors and their rights to free speech.

The First Amendment clearly protects free-speech rights for students who attend public colleges and universities. But it applies only to those institutions.

Technically, private institutions – such as Columbia University and the associated nonprofit that oversees the law review’s finances but has, until now, not sought to intervene in decisions on articles – aren’t bound by the First Amendment.

Still, most of them consider freedom of speech and academic freedom as central to their mission.

Academic freedom relies on customs and practices to protect the rights of faculty members to exercise independence in their teaching, research and other job responsibilities without inappropriate interference from their employers.

It’s not completely clear that students enjoy the same kinds of academic freedom.

Nearly all colleges and universities accept, however, that students should have the right to express their own views and have access to all sorts of arguments.

The students who edit Columbia Law Review probably have limited legal options to challenge the board’s actions. Instead, as shown by their decision to strike, the students likely must use strategies besides legal action to establish that the board violated academic freedom principles.

The board may also respond with additional statements of its own to defend its actions.

Overriding institutional commitments

The Columbia Law Review dispute can be seen as part of ongoing tensions on campuses across the nation over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

One argument is that bias against Palestinians has overridden institutional commitments to free speech and academic freedom. An opposing view is that pro-Palestinian protests or other efforts, such as this law review article that refers to Israel’s government as a “regime,” are too often marked by antisemitism.

Either way, it’s now clear that these tensions aren’t limited to campus protests. Ultimately, I believe, they could directly challenge institutional commitments to academic freedom and independence in scholarly inquiry.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Neal H. Hutchens, University of Kentucky

Read more:

• Media coverage of campus protests tends to focus on the spectacle, rather than the substance

• University of Florida bans professors from giving expert testimony against state – a scholar explains the academic freedom issues

• Why universities turn to the police to end student protests − and why that can spiral out of control

Neal H. Hutchens works for the University of Kentucky.

Chinese scientists admit to faking research over institutional pressure

Mizy Clifton
Tue, June 11, 2024 



Insights from The Economist, Science, and Nature
The News

Chinese scientists felt pressured to engage in unethical research practices out of fear of losing their jobs, a study found.

The Chinese government’s 2015 “Double First-Class Scheme” called on universities to boost their global rankings by publishing more articles in international journals. One faculty head reportedly told academics they should “leave as soon as possible” if they did not meet publication targets, according to science journal Nature.


Citing such pressures, academics admitted to “falsifying data, plagiarizing, exploiting students without offering authorship, and bribing journal editors.” However, other Chinese scientists said the paper painted an overly negative picture and that its author only spoke to a small sample of academics.

SIGNALSSemafor Signals: Global insights on today's biggest stories.
Chinese universities incentivize quantity over qualitySources: The Economist , Queen Mary's University

Research in China suffers from the problem of “bad incentives,” The Economist argued. Chinese universities have published more scientific papers than any other country since 2017, partly owing to researchers being rewarded for quantity over quality: About 46% of around 50,000 retracted studies collated by CrossRef and Retraction Watch are from China. University leaders tend to be government officials who are good at chasing targets but poor at fostering good science, a professor at Hangzhou Dianzi University told the magazine. The problem may not be exclusive to China: A 2023 paper found that the UK’s performance-based funding allocation system incentivized poor quality research, with papers published just before evaluation deadlines featuring in lower-impact journals and receiving fewer citations.

Chinese universities may be turning away from international journalsSource: Science

Chinese academics are encouraged to publish in international journals, but this trend may be reversing as researchers try to build up a portfolio of home-grown journals. That’s partly because authors have to pay journals to get their papers published, and China wants to capture some of that spend, the co-author of a 2023 report on the Chinese science publishing market told Science. The Chinese government and universities may also want to move away from Western-dominated research agendas so they can focus on topics that better serve the country’s interests, a higher-education researcher at the University of Hong Kong argued.

Critics say some unethical studies aren’t being retracted fast enoughSources: Nature , The Guardian

Fraudulent research practices aren’t the only problem: Advocates told Nature that unethical studies on Chinese minority groups like the Uyghur aren’t being retracted fast enough. In 2023, the Dutch academic publisher Elsevier retracted a 2019 article by Chinese and Danish researchers titled “Analysis of Uyghur and Kazakh populations using the Precision ID Ancestry Panel” after an investigation revealed they had not obtained ethical approval to collect genetic samples. “Given how coercive the overall environment has been for the Uyghurs [in China], it’s not really possible for Uyghurs to say no [to the collection of their DNA],” an Asia expert at Human Rights Watch told The Guardian.

Opinion
How long will feckless Joe Biden ignore the grave threat of sharks and electric boats?

Rex Huppke, USA TODAY
Wed, June 12, 2024 

Thank God for MY PRESIDENT, Donald J. Trump, the one presidential candidate with courage enough to confront the greatest twin threats of our time: sharks and electric boat batteries.

At a recent rally, Trump brought up the dilemma that’s keeping so many Americans who ride through shark-infested waters in battery-powered boats awake at night: “What would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?”

It’s truly every electric-boat-using parent’s worst nightmare, assuming they don’t understand how boat batteries work and don't question why the shark that’s 10 yards over there wouldn’t also be getting electrocuted.

“Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking?” Trump smartly asked. “Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?”
Unlike Trump, Biden doesn't care if you get eaten by a shark

These are not the kind of sensible, America-loving questions you hear from Sleepy Joe Biden. Does he even care about patriotic Americans like us, the ones who might one day be forced to choose between boat-battery electrocution or death by shark?

I doubt he cares at all. He’s too busy being both dementia-addled AND the devious mastermind of a global crime family while also turning our country into a banana republic by allowing the justice system to use a "jury" to find Trump “guilty” of “crimes.”

Obviously Trump is Jesus: Marjorie Taylor Greene compares Trump to Jesus. Which Bible is she reading?

No, you won’t hear one word from Biden about sharks or large boat batteries.

He’s either too busy being totally out of it due to severe mental decline OR carefully plotting an elaborate scheme to get his son convicted on federal gun charges so people think that the justice system is legitimate and that Trump’s recent 34-count conviction on New York felony charges wasn’t actually rigged.

President Joe Biden, seen here ignoring the important issue of sharks and boat batteries.

NICE TRY, SLEEPY JOE!

Maybe for a change you could give a damn about the American people by making sure they aren’t dying of ocean electrocution or in the razor-toothed mouths of presumably electrocution-proof sharks!
Trump will surely protect us from battery electrocution and sharks

At the same rally where Trump addressed our nation’s shark/battery crisis – a speech many are saying was as good as, if not better than, President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address – the man who made MAGA noted: “By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that? A lot of sharks. I watched some guys justifying it today. ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry, they bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry but they misunderstood who she was.’ These people are crazy. He said there’s no problem with sharks they just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming now who really got decimated and a lot of other people too, a lot of shark attacks.”

Indeed. All these shark attacks, combined with what I assume are innumerable instances of battery-powered boats sinking near sharks, have created a national catastrophe Biden is choosing to ignore.

It might seem as if shark attacks are on the rise after two recent attacks – less than two hours and 5 miles apart – left three people injured on Florida Panhandle beaches in June 2024. Worldwide, there were 69 unprovoked shark bites on humans in 2023, and 36 of them were in the United States. Two of the 36 were fatal: one in Hawaii, the other in California.

Questions abound when it comes to sinking electric-powered boats

There are so many questions. Why are the boats sinking, and why, as Trump mentioned, is there always a shark “approximately 10 yards” away?

Are these sharks working for the Democratic National Committee? Is the Biden Crime Family having communist China manufacture the boats that keep sinking under the weight of these batteries?

Hunter Biden convicted: Hunter Biden guilty verdict proves Trump's trial wasn't 'rigged'

And why does the electrical current stop mattering if the person jumps over by the shark?

Wouldn’t the boater who leaps overboard get both electrocuted AND eaten by the shark that, for some reason, is wholly unfazed by any electric current?
Another Biden term means certain death for electric-boat owners

And why have we never heard of the presumably thousands of people who are being electrocuted by boat batteries? Is this a cover-up by the fake news media?

With shark-lover Biden in office, we’ll surely never know. And unless Trump gets elected this fall, more and more Americans will have to answer the impossible question posed by the man we Republicans think should be leader of the free world: “Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?”

Vote accordingly, folks. Otherwise, the sharks and the batteries win.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on X, formerly Twitter, @RexHuppke and Facebook facebook.com/RexIsAJerk.

You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump wisely warns voters of the threat of sharks and electric boats

James Cameron says the OceanGate submersible rescue morphed into a 'crazy' operation when 'we all knew they were dead'

Aditi Bharade
Updated Wed, June 12, 2024

James Cameron says the OceanGate submersible rescue morphed into a 'crazy' operation when 'we all knew they were dead'

James Cameron has said the rescue operation for the OceanGate submersible victims became "crazy."

"We all knew they were dead," Cameron told "60 Minutes Australia" in an interview that aired on Sunday.

The Titanic expert added that the rescue then turned into a "beautiful media circus."

A year on from the OceanGate implosion, the filmmaker and Titanic expert James Cameron has said the rescue operation was "crazy" — because people involved in the rescue already knew the victims were all dead.

In an interview with "60 Minutes Australia" released on Sunday, Cameron commented on the sprawling four-day rescue operation that followed the submersible's disappearance on June 18.

"We all knew they were dead. We'd already hoisted a glass, a toast to our fallen comrades, on Monday night," he said in the interview.

He added that he thought the Coast Guard followed a rescue procedure that was "unnecessarily torturous" for the families because the authorities had already been informed of an "implosion event" near the Titanic wreck site.



Cameron said he'd received news of the implosion from a naval source on Monday morning and had written it down on a stationary pad in his hotel.

"I literally wrote that on the pad the moment I heard from my naval source, a very reliable source, that they had heard an event and triangulated it to the site," Cameron said.

The note he showed to the interviewer read: "9:25 confirmed implosion."

But Cameron said the catastrophe made for a "beautiful media circus."

"It just transformed into this crazy thing," he added. "Everybody running around with their hair on fire, when we knew right where the sub was. Nobody could admit that they didn't have the means to go down and look. So they were running all over the surface, and the entire world waiting with bated breath."

The US Coast Guard and OceanGate announced on June 22 that debris found on the sea bed confirmed that the submersible had imploded and that the five men on board were dead.

The victims were the British billionaire Hamish Harding, the British-Pakistani multimillionaire Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman, the former French navy diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush.

The titanium and carbon-fiber submersible set off on June 18 to explore the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, nearly 13,000 feet underwater. It went off the radar less than two hours after the dive started.

Cameron, who has visited the Titanic wreck 33 times, has vocally criticized OceanGate, the company behind the ill-fated submersible.

He said that he'd warned company officials that the Titan vessel could lead to "catastrophic failure" and that it was "only a matter of time" before something would go wrong.

He also said the company lacked "rigor and discipline" and that new regulation was needed in deep-sea exploration.

Cameron's representative didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular working hours.

James Cameron reveals devastating intelligence he received about doomed Titan submersible after disaster

Emma Guinness
Tue, June 11, 2024 

James Cameron has slammed the ongoing investigation into the Titan submersible disaster almost a year after it claimed the lives of five people – as he revealed the tragic intelligence he received in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.

The acclaimed Titanic director, 69, who has made over 30 dives to the wreck in manned submersibles, offered to be an expert witness in the investigation. However, he claims he has never been asked for his opinion almost a year after the 15 June disaster.

Cameron claims that a “very reliable” source told him that an implosion was detected close to the wreck site while the investigation was still continuing under the assumption that the men trapped in the Titan could still be alive.

“I literally wrote that on the [notepad] the moment I heard from my naval source, a very reliable source, that they had heard an event and triangulated it to the site [of the sub],” Cameron said.

While Cameron does not believe that the US Coast Guard deliberately lied to the families of the men who died, he does believe they withheld information and “went by a procedure that was torturous for the family.”

His revelation comes after the US Coast Guard confirmed to The Independent that the investigation was still in its fact-finding phase.

Five people, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and Cameron’s close friend and Titanic expert, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, lost their lives around two hours into the Titan submersible’s commercial dive to the Titanic wreck site.

The disaster was the result of a “catastrophic implosion” that has been speculated to be the result of the submersible’s controversial carbon fibre hull.

James Cameron has visited the Titanic wreck multiple times and offered to be a witness in the Titan submersible disaster investigation. but he claims he has never been called upon. (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Questions about the submersible’s safety had already been raised before last year’s disaster and now experts, including Cameron, are questioning how the company behind the Titan, OceanGate, was even allowed to offer commercial trips to the wreck in the “experimental” vehicle.

“I’ve volunteered to the investigative committee at the Coast Guard,” Cameron told 60 Minutes Australia on Sunday (8 June).

“They should be inviting me but they’re not. Why listen to a scientist?’

Cameron continued: “Frankly, I think they’ve kind of got egg on their face and they don’t want outside opinions.

“‘That’s just my interpretation.”

The Titanic tourist sub had a carbon fibre hull, which has been speculated to have played a role in its catastrophic implosion last year (OceanGate Expeditions)

OceanGate notably had its passengers sign a waiver that mentioned the submersible’s experimental status and had them repeatedly accept the risk of death.

The company claimed before the disaster that paying citizen explorers were the key to better understanding the world’s oceans and charged $250,000 for a visit to the Titanic.

“These guys broke the rules,” Cameron told 60 Minutes.

“It’s that simple. They should not have been legally allowed to carry passengers.”

The disappearance of the submersible made international news, prompting an extensive search and rescue operation.

At the time, it was believed that the five passengers – Stockton Rush, 61, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding, 58, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Sulaiman – could still alive on the submersible, but were at risk of dying when the sub’s limited emergency oxygen supply eventually ran out.

Hope was further fuelled by reports of banging from beneath the ocean, which were wrongfully interpreted as the passengers attempting to make themselves known ahead of a rescue.

The search for the submersible was called off when its remains were discovered close to the Titanic wreck site (PA Media)

But Cameron has slammed the handling of the investigation and how these bangs were interpreted.

“I mean my jaw literally dropped open farther and farther each day that they never cautioned everybody,” he said.

“Everybody running around with their hair on fire when we knew right where the sub was.

“But nobody could admit that they didn’t have the means to go down and look.

“So they were running all over the surface and the entire world waiting with bated breath talking about 96 hours of oxygen.

“We all knew they were dead.

“We’d already hoisted a glass, you know, a toast to our fallen comrades on Monday night.

“They’re hearing… something tapping against a hull over the sound of 11 ships operating in the immediate vicinity, moving giant pieces of deck equipment around?

“That’s like hearing a sparrow fart over the cacophony of an airport.”

The search for the missing submersible was finally called off shortly after its oxygen supply would have run out when its remains were discovered on the ocean floor, close to the bow of the Titanic.

The Titan wreck was salvaged as part of the ongoing investigation into last June’s disaster (Reuters)

Captain Jamie Frederick of the US Coast Guard, however, has defended the handling of the search and said it had to continue until definitive information had been discovered.

He also said that the information about the implosion that Cameron had access to was classified at the time.

“In the business of search and rescue, absent definitive information, we have both a moral and statutory responsibility, frankly, to continue to search,” Frederick said.

“If you don’t have hope and you’re conducting a search and rescue case, you’re in the wrong business.”

OceanGate suspended all of its operations in the wake of the disaster.

A spokesperson for the Coast Guard told The Independent: “The Titan Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) remains in the fact-finding phase of the investigation and is collecting all relevant evidence and information.

“A projected completion date is not available.

“The latter part of the fact-finding phase will include a public hearing, and the MBI will provide at least 60 days’ notice ahead of the public hearing.”

The US Coast Guard told The Independent: “The Titan Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) became aware of Mr Cameron’s willingness to assist the investigation after viewing the Australian 60 Minutes segment. The MBI welcomes his participation, and the team will be reaching out to him.”

Stockton Rush reportedly wanted OceanGate to build underwater doomsday bunkers for billionaires

Jyoti Mann
Wed, June 12, 2024 

Stockton Rush reportedly wanted OceanGate to build underwater doomsday bunkers for billionaires


Stockton Rush envisioned OceanGate underwater hubs for billionaire doom preppers, Wired reported.


Rush pitched ambitious plans for self-driving submersibles to investors, per the report.


Wired revealed new details about Rush and OceanGate a year after its submersible imploded.


It seems OceanGate's late former CEO Stockton Rush had high hopes for the company behind the Titan submersible, which imploded last year.

According to a new report from Wired, Rush dreamt of having underwater OceanGate bases that could be used by billionaire doomsday preppers or as data storage units.

Wired obtained thousands of leaked documents and spoke to former employees to uncover new details about Rush, including how he reportedly shrugged off concerns and took shortcuts to make his submersible vision a reality.

Rush, who died when the sub imploded in June 2023, also reportedly pitched the company's board and investors on an ambitious concept for what OceanGate could become. This included self-driving submersibles that could dive to depths of 6,000 meters — about half as deep as the wreck of the Titanic, the report says.

After the fatal incident that also killed four other people, Business Insider obtained a waiver signed by prospective passengers which revealed the Titan sub had only reached the depth of the Titanic wreck on 13 out of 90 dives. This meant its success rate could have been as low as 14% on deep-sea expeditions.

Rush had a bold and daring vision for the company, which internally called itself "SpaceX for the oceans," its cofounder Guillermo Söhnlein previously told BI.

According to Söhnlein, who left OceanGate in 2013, the company had set out to help humanity set up underwater cities by creating small bus-sized submersibles.

He told BI: "We were solving the transportation problem for these future underwater communities."

At the time of the tragedy, people with knowledge of OceanGate's workings spoke out about how they had warned Rush of safety concerns they had related to its sub, which was not certified by regulatory bodies.

Rob McCallum, a former OceanGate consultant, warned Rush in emails in 2018 previously seen by BI that he was putting passengers' lives at risk and urged him not to carry out deep-sea dives until the sub was proven safe.

McCallum had also told BI that OceanGate's approach to engineering was "ad hoc" and "ultimately inappropriate."

The sub embarked on its fatal journey last June on an expedition to the Titanic wreckage, which sits nearly 13,000 feet below the ocean surface, when it lost communications with its support ship an hour and 45 minutes into the trip.

Days after it was declared missing, US Coast Guard officials said the sub probably suffered a "catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber."

OceanGate didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

Business Insider

Rights groups urge Thailand not to extradite Vietnamese activist, saying he's at risk if sent home

NAPAT KONGSAWAD and DAVID RISING
Thu, June 13, 2024

 A flag of Vietnam is seen as a soldier watches from a top of a building neighboring Government Guesthouse and a hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Feb. 24, 2019. Human rights groups urged Thailand on Thursday, June 13, 2024, not to extradite a Vietnamese activist detained in Bangkok, saying that he could be at risk if handed back to Vietnam. 

(AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe, File)More

BANGKOK (AP) — Human rights groups urged Thailand on Thursday not to extradite a Vietnamese activist detained in Bangkok, saying that he could be at risk if handed back to Vietnam.

Y Quynh Bdap, who had United Nations refugee status in Thailand, was picked up by local police on Tuesday, the day after he had met with Canadian Embassy officials as he pursued asylum there, according to the Peace Rights Foundation, a Thai organization that had been in contact with him.

The co-founder of the Montagnards Stand for Justice group was convicted in absentia in Vietnam in January on allegations that he was involved in organizing anti-government riots in Vietnam's central highland province of Dak Lak last June.

Vietnamese authorities had been making inquiries in Thailand about him, with Thailand’s assistance, which sent him into hiding six months ago, Bdap said before his arrest in a video statement.

In the June 7 video, provided to The Associated Press by Kannavee Suebsang, a Thai opposition lawmaker who is active in human rights issues, Bdap said he had “absolutely nothing to do with that violent incident.”

“I am a human rights activist fighting for religious freedom and advocating for people's rights,” said the 32-year-old Bdap, who fled to Thailand in 2018.

“My activities are peaceful, consisting only of collecting and writing reports on human rights violations in Vietnam.”

Thai immigration authorities told the AP they would look into the case, but then never provided any information or comment.

Bdap is now being held in a Bangkok prison awaiting an extradition hearing, which could take about a week, according to Human Rights Watch.

UNHCR, the U.N. agency for refugees, said that it couldn't comment on individual cases, but that it “actively engages” with Thailand's government to ensure fundamental international obligations are honored, including not forcibly returning refugees to a country where they are likely to be subject to persecution.

“States have the primary responsibility to provide protection and safety to persons on their territory, including refugees and asylum-seekers and people whose lives could be at risk if they were returned,” spokesperson Liana Bianchi said.

Calls to the Vietnamese Embassy in Thailand went unanswered.

Vietnam has long been criticized by rights groups and others for its treatment of the country's Montagnard minority, a term loosely used to refer to many predominantly Christian ethnic groups that live in the central highlands and neighboring Cambodia.

Human Rights Watch has said many have been driven to seek asylum in Cambodia and Thailand as Vietnamese authorities have subjected their communities to intimidation, arbitrary arrests and mistreatment in custody.

“Y Quynh Bdap would be at real risk if returned to Vietnam," said Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch.

"Thai authorities should immediately release this prominent religious freedom advocate and refugee. Returning him to Vietnam would be a violation of Thailand’s obligations under Thai and international law.”

The organization has been critical of Thailand for its record on sending home dissidents from Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and China to uncertain fates, in what they said in a recent report was a quid-pro-quo form of transnational repression, in which those countries sent home dissidents wanted by Thailand.

The country has ratified the International Convention for Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which took effect Thursday, but it's unclear whether Bdap's case will fall under its purview.

“Cooperation between states in locating persecuted opposition groups is a concerning situation for human rights,” Kannavee said.

He cited examples of Thai activists turning up dead in Laos and Cambodian opposition groups being rounded up in Thailand.

“This is happening all over,” Kannaveee said.

“Transnational repression really does happen and the exchanges of these dissidents happens regularly, whether in secret or in full view of the public.”

Bdap was convicted in January on terrorism charges and sentenced in absentia to 10 years in prison for his alleged involvement in the Dak Lak riots, at a time when he was in Thailand.

Overall, about 100 people were tried for alleged involvement in the violent riots at two district government offices in which nine people were killed, including four police officers and two government officials. Fifty-three were convicted on charges of “terrorism against the people's government,” state-run Vietnam News reported.

Days after the verdicts, Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang rejected criticism that Vietnam had used the trial as an opportunity to crack down on ethnic minorities, saying the government needed to “strictly deal with terrorism according to international law,” the Vietnam News reported.

“All ethnicities living in a territory of Vietnam are equal,” he said.

Unlike Uyghur refugees indefinitely detained by Thai authorities, Bdap faces a more credible threat of extradition since he has been criminally convicted in his homeland, Peace Rights Foundation said.

In the video entreaty Bdap recorded before being apprehended, he pleaded for the “help of the United Nations, NGOs, and governments of democratic countries.”

“Please protect me,” he said.