USA
Six killed when small plane crashes, bursts into flames in field near Southern California airport
Six people were killed when a small plane crashed in a field and burst into flames during the second of two landing attempts in fog just before dawn Saturday at a Southern California airport, authorities said.
The crash of the Cessna C550 business jet occurred around 4:15 a.m. in Murrieta, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
It took firefighters more than an hour to extinguish the flames, which charred about an acre of vegetation at the edge of French Valley Airport, said the Riverside County Fire Department.
The jet, which can seat up to 13 people, crashed about 500 feet (150 meters) short of the intended runway, said Elliott Simpson, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board.
Read: How 4 children survived 40 days after plane crash in Colombia’s jungle
“Most of the airplane, with the exception of the tail, was consumed by fire,” Simpson told reporters at an afternoon briefing. Investigators were combing through a debris field about 200 feet (60 meters) long, he said.
All six people on board died at the scene, the Riverside County Sheriff's Office said in a statement. The victims, all adults, were not immediately identified.
The plane, which had departed from Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas for the 45-minute flight to Murietta, crashed during its second approach, the NTSB said. The pilot was cleared for a landing using only instruments because of limited visibility from the low cloud ceiling, Simpson said.
“The visibility and ceilings allowed for a landing, but it was right on the minimums" of the regulations set for that airport, he said. Investigators will review recordings between the pilot and air traffic control.
Read: Philippine plane crash kills 2, another carrying 6 missing
A preliminary report was expected in about two weeks, the NTSB said.
The FAA’s aircraft tracking database lists the jet as owned by Prestige Worldwide Flights LLC of Imperial, California. Officials with the company could not be reached for comment.
It was the second fatal crash this week at the small county-owned airport in Murrieta, a city with about 112,000 residents. A man was killed and three people were injured on July Fourth when a single-engine Cessna 172 crashed in a parking lot shortly after takeoff from French Valley.
Read more: Plane crash kills 2, burns homes in California neighborhood
Guantanamo detainees tell first independent visitor about scars from torture and hopes to leave
At the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the aging men known by their serial numbers arrived at the meeting shackled. Every single one told the visitor — for many the first independent person they had talked to in 20 years — "You came too late."
But they still talked, about the scant contacts with their families, their many health problems, the psychological and physical scars of the torture and abuse they experienced, and their hopes of leaving and reuniting with loved ones.
For the first time since the facility in Cuba opened in 2002, a U.S. president had allowed a United Nations independent investigator, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, to visit.
Also read: Lawyer: US approves release of oldest Guantanamo prisoner
She said in an interview with The Associated Press that it's true she came too late, because a total of 780 Muslim men were detained there following the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, and today there are just 30 remaining.
The United Nations had tried for many years to send an independent investigator, but was turned down by the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
Ní Aoláin praised President Joe Biden's administration for allowing "critical voices" into the facility. And she expressed hope other governments that have barred U.N. special investigators will follow Biden's example.
The Belfast-born law professor said she believes the cross-section of "high-value" and "non-high value" detainees she met with — the Biden administration gave her free rein to talk to anyone — "recognized the importance of sitting in a room with me."
Also read: 9/11 : Did Al-Qaeda accelerate the West's decline?
"But I think there was a shared understanding that at this point, with only 30 of them left, while I can make recommendations and they will hopefully substantially change the day-to-day experience of these men, the vast majority of their lives was lived in a context where people like myself and the U.N. had no influence," she said.
Ní Aoláin, concurrently a law professor at the University of Minnesota and at Queens University in Belfast, said she has visited many high-security prisons during her six years as a U.N. human rights investigator, including some built for those convicted of terrorism and related serious offenses.
But "there is really no population on Earth like this population that came to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the circumstances in which they came, rendered across borders," she said.
In her report issued June 26, Ní Aoláin said even though the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were "crimes against humanity," the treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo was unjustified. The vast majority were brought there without cause and had no relationship to the terrorist attacks, she wrote, adding that all of the men still alive suffer from psychological and physical trauma.
The Biden administration, which has said it wants to close the Guantanamo facility, said in a statement attached to the report that Ní Aoláin's findings "are solely her own" and "the United States disagrees in significant respects with many factual and legal assertions" but it will carefully review her recommendations.
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In last week's interview with the AP, Ní Aoláin talked about what she saw on a personal level.
She said all U.S. personnel are required to address detainees by their internment serial number, not their name, which she called "dehumanizing."
Ní Aoláin said she is especially concerned about three detainees who have not been charged and "live in a complete legal limbo," which is "completely inconsistent with international law." Of the others, 16 have been cleared to leave but haven't found a country willing to take them and 11 still have cases pending before U.S. military commissions.
When the detainees were brought to meet her, they were shackled, which she said is not standard procedure even for those convicted of terrorism. Under international law, she said, people cannot be shackled except for imperative security reasons, and in her view at Guantanamo it should be prohibited and used only as a last resort in exceptional circumstances.
"You're dealing with an elderly vulnerable population who are incarcerated," Ní Aoláin said.
"These men, because they are torture victim survivors, they have difficulties concentrating, they have challenges with recurrent memory, somatic pain. Many of them struggle with mobility and other issues," including permanent disabilities, traumatic brain injuries, chronic pain and gastrointestinal and urinary problems, she said.
Ní Aoláin said force feeding has been an ongoing practice in response to their hunger strikes, which along with suicidal ideas and self-harm "speak to the core finding of this report — which is the deep and profound despair of individuals who've been held without trial for 20 years, have not seen their family members, have had no access to the outside world" except their lawyers until she visited in February for four days.
Practices like using restraints cause added psychological distress for many of the detainees, she said.
For the report, Ni Aoláin also interviewed victims, survivors and families of those killed on 9/11, and she met with some of the 741 men who already had been released from Guantanamo, including approximately 150 resettled in 29 countries. The rest returned home, and 30 men have since died.
What the men still at Guantanamo and those who have been released need most, she said, "is torture rehabilitation — every single one — and the U.S. is a leader in torture rehabilitation."
She welcomed Biden's "extraordinary statement" on June 26, the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, reaffirming U.S. opposition "to all forms of inhumane treatment and our commitment to eliminating torture and assisting torture survivors as they heal and in their quests for justice."
"That tells me … there is a capacity to remedy here," she said. Rehabilitation is critical for all torture victims, she said, but also "for ourselves, because that's what democracies do. … We look at our past, we take it onboard, and we address it, because democracies are self-correcting."
Ní Aoláin called the communal meals and communal prayer for all detainees — which the U.S. emphasizes —very important.
"The men themselves are enormously important to each other in their rehabilitation," she said. "There is an enormous bond of support and fraternity and care amongst these men for each other."
Ni Aoláin noted the detainees have some privileges — they are able to watch television and read books — and there are language classes, some opportunities to learn about computers and art lessons.
She said she was "really gratified" the Biden administration recently decided to allow detainees to take as much of their artwork "as is practicable" when they leave.
"This creative work is enormously important to these men," she said, noting that a detainee who recently returned to Pakistan had an art exhibition in Karachi some weeks ago.
Among the many recommendations Ní Aoláin's report makes is for torture rehabilitation and additional education and training, especially for those cleared to leave.
"These men are going to go out into the world," she said. "Many of them were young men when they were detained and rendered to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They're now old men, middle-aged men, who have to figure out how to go back into life, and many of them have huge anxieties" about providing for their families and about being fathers after so many years.
Gunman opens fire on Philadelphia streets, killing 5
A heavily armed gunman in a bulletproof vest opened fire on the streets of Philadelphia on Monday night, seemingly at a random, killing five people and wounding two boys before surrendering, police said.
The shootings took place over several city blocks in the southwestern neighborhood of Kingsessing. Responding officers chased the suspect as he continued to fire, and he was arrested in an alley after giving himself up, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said at a news conference.
"Thank God our officers were on the scene and responded as quickly as they did. I can't even describe the level of bravery and courage that was shown, in addition to the restraint that was shown here," Outlaw said.
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No connection was immediately known between the victims and the shooter, she said. He had a bulletproof vest, an "AR-type rifle," multiple magazines, a handgun and a police scanner.
Officers were flagged down at about 8:30 p.m., and multiple calls of shots fired came in from Kingsessing. Police found some gunshot victims, and as they were attending to them, they heard more gunfire, Outlaw said. Police later told Fox 29 that a fifth victim was found. He was chased into his home and shot to death. Bullet casings were found outside the home.
The suspected shooter was identified as a 40-year-old man. A second person was also taken into custody who may have returned fire at the suspect, but police did not know whether there was a connection between the two people, Outlaw said.
The chief said dozens of shell casings were found across an eight block area.
Also read: Police: 8 killed in Texas mall shooting, gunman also dead
"You can see there are several scenes out here," Outlaw said. "We're canvassing the area to get as much as we can, to identify witnesses, to identify where cameras are located and to do everything to figure out the why," Outlaw said.
Three of the dead were 20 to 59 years old, while the fourth, who had not yet been identified, was estimated to be between 16 and 21. The victim found in his home was 31 years old. All were male.
The two hospitalized victims are boys, ages 2 and 13. They were in stable condition, Outlaw said.
The shooting occurred a day after gunfire erupted at a holiday weekend block party in Baltimore, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the southwest, killing two people and wounding 28 others. The wounded in that shooting ranged in age from 13 to 32, with more than half minors, according to officials.
The Philadelphia violence is the country's 29th mass killing in 2023, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University, the highest on record by this time in the year.
Also read: Texas man kills 5 neighbors after they complained of gunfire
The numbers people killed in such events is also the highest by this time in the year.
There have been more than 550 mass killings since 2006, according to the database, in which at least 2,900 people have died and at least 2,000 people have been injured.
Long wait for US passports hampering summer travel plans
Seeking a valid U.S. passport for that 2023 trip? Buckle up, wishful traveler, for a very different journey before you step anywhere near an airport.
A much-feared backup of U.S passport applications has smashed into a wall of government bureaucracy as worldwide travel rebounds toward record pre-pandemic levels — with too few humans to handle the load. The result, say aspiring travelers in the U.S. and around the world, is a maddening pre-travel purgatory defined, at best, by costly uncertainty.
With family dreams and big money on the line, passport seekers describe a slow-motion agony of waiting, worrying, holding the line, refreshing the screen, complaining to Congress, paying extra fees and following incorrect directions. Some applicants are buying additional plane tickets to snag in-process passports where they sit — in other cities — in time to make the flights they booked in the first place.
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So grim is the outlook that U.S. officials aren't even denying the problem or predicting when it will ease. They're blaming the epic wait times on lingering pandemic -related staffing shortages and a pause of online processing this year. That's left the passport agency flooded with a record-busting 500,000 applications a week. The deluge is on-track to top last year's 22 million passports issued, the State Department says.
Stories from applicants and interviews by The Associated Press depict a system of crisis management, in which the agencies are prioritizing urgent cases such as applicants traveling for reasons of "life or death" and those whose travel is only a few days off. For everyone else, the options are few and expensive.
So, 2023 traveler, if you still need a valid U.S. passport, prepare for an unplanned excursion into the nightmare zone.
'PLENTY OF TIME' TO 'WE'LL STILL BE OK' TO BIG PROBLEMS
It was early March when Dallas-area florist Ginger Collier applied for four passports ahead of a family vacation at the end of June. The clerk, she said, estimated wait times at eight to 11 weeks. They'd have their passports a month before they needed them. "Plenty of time," Collier recalled thinking.
Then the State Department upped the wait time for a regular passport to as much as 13 weeks. "We'll still be okay," she thought.
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At T-minus two weeks to travel, this was her assessment: "I can't sleep." This after months of calling, holding, pressing refresh on a website, trying her member of Congress — and stressing as the departure date loomed. Failure to obtain the family's passports would mean losing $4,000, she said, as well as the chance to meet one of her sons in Italy after a study-abroad semester.
"My nerves are shot, because I may not be able to get to him," she said. She calls the toll-free number every day, holds for as much as 90 minutes to be told — at best — that she might be able to get a required appointment at passport offices in other states.
"I can't afford four more plane tickets anywhere in the United States to get a passport when I applied in plenty of time," she said. "How about they just process my passports?"
THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT HAS A CULPRIT: COVID
By March, concerned travelers began asking for answers and then demanding help, including from their representatives in the House and Senate, who widely reported at hearings this year that they were receiving more complaints from constituents on passport delays than any other issue.
The U.S. secretary of state had an answer, of a sort.
Bangladeshi Passport Renewal Process for Expatriates Living Abroad
"With COVID, the bottom basically dropped out of the system," Antony Blinken told a House subcommittee March 23. When demand for travel all but disappeared during the pandemic, he said, the government let contractors go and reassigned staff that had been dedicated to handling passports.
Around the same time, the government also halted an online renewal system "to make sure that we can fine tune it and improve it," Blinken said. He said the department is hiring agents as quickly as possible, opening more appointments and trying to address the crisis in other ways.
Passport applicants lit up social media groups, toll-free numbers and lawmakers' phone lines with questions, appeals for advice and cries for help. Facebook and WhatsApp groups bristled with reports of bewilderment and fury. Reddit published eye-watering diaries, some more than 1,000 words long, of application dates, deposits submitted, contacts made, time on hold, money spent and appeals for advice.
It was 1952 when a law required, for the first time, passports for every U.S. traveler abroad, even in peacetime. Now, passports are processed at centers around the country and printed at secure facilities in Washington, D.C. and Mississippi, according to the Government Printing Office.
But the number of Americans holding valid U.S. passports has grown at roughly 10% faster than the population over the past three decades, according to Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University's Questrom School of Business.
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After passport delays derailed his own plans to travel to London earlier this year, Zagorsky found that the number of U.S. passports per American has soared from about three per 100 people in 1989 to nearly 46 per 100 people in 2022. Americans, it turns out, are on the move.
"As a society gets richer," says Zagorsky, "the people in that society say, 'I want to visit the rest of the world.'"
FOR AMERICANS AND OTHERS ABROAD, IT'S NO PICNIC EITHER
At U.S. consulates overseas, the quest for U.S. visas and passports isn't much brighter.
On a day in June, people in New Delhi could expect to wait 451 days for a visa interview, according to the website. Those in Sao Paulo could plan on waiting more than 600 days. Aspiring travelers in Mexico City were waiting about 750 days; in Bogota, Colombia, it was 801 days.
In Israel, the need is especially acute. More than 200,000 people with citizenship in both countries live in Israel. It's one appointment per person, even for newborns, who must have both parents involved in the process, before traveling to the United States.
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Batsheva Gutterman started looking for three appointments immediately after she had a baby in December, with an eye toward attending a family celebration in July, in Raleigh, N.C.
Her quest for three passports stretched from January to June, days before travel. And it only resolved after Gutterman payed a small fee to join a WhatsApp group that alerted her to new appointments, which stay available for only a few seconds. She ultimately got three appointments on three consecutive days — bureaucracy embodied.
"We had to drive the entire family with three small children, an hour-and-a-half to Tel Aviv three days in a row, taking off work and school," she said. "This makes me incredibly uneasy having a baby in Israel as an American citizen, knowing there is no way I can fly with that baby until we get lucky with an appointment."
Recently, there appeared to be some progress. The wait for an appointment for a renewed U.S. passport stood at 360 days on June 8. On July 2, the wait was down to 90 days, according to the web site.
FRUSTRATING TALES EMERGE FROM THE TRENCHES
Back in the U.S., Marni Larsen of Holladay, Utah, stood in line in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, in hopes of snagging her son's passport. That way, she hoped, the pair could meet the rest of their family, who had already left as scheduled for Europe, for a long-planned vacation.
She'd applied for her son's passport two months earlier and spent weeks checking for updates online or through a frustrating call system. As the mid-June vacation loomed, Larsen reached out to Sen. Mitt Romney 's office, where one of four people he says is assigned full-time to passport issues were able to track down the document in New Orleans.
It was supposed to be shipped to Los Angeles, where she got an appointment to retrieve it. That meant Larsen had to buy new tickets for herself and her son to Los Angeles and reroute their trip from there to Rome. All on a bet that her son's passport was indeed shipped as promised.
"We are just waiting in this massive line of tons of people," Larsen said. "It's just been a nightmare."
They succeeded. But not everyone has been so lucky.
Miranda Richter applied in person to renew passports for herself and her husband, as well as apply a new one on Feb. 9 for a trip with their neighbors to Croatia on June 6. She ended up canceling, losing more than $1,000.
Her timeline went like this: Passports for her husband and daughter arrived in 11 weeks, while Richter's photo was rejected. On May 4, she sent in a new one via priority mail. Then she paid a rush fee of $79, which was never charged to her credit card. Between May 30 and June 2, four days before travel, Richter and her husband spent more than 12 hours on the national passport line while also calling their congressman, senators and third-party couriers.
Finally, she showed up in person at the federal building in downtown Houston, 30 minutes before the passport office opened. Richter said there were at least 100 people in line.
"The security guard asked when is my appointment, and I burst out in tears," she recalls. She couldn't get one. "It didn't work."
FINALLY: A HAPPY ENDING
"I just got my passports!" Ginger Collier texts.
She ended up showing up at the passport office in Dallas with her daughter-in-law at 6:30 a.m. and being sorted into groups and lined up against walls. Finally they were called to a window, where the agent was "super nice" and pulled all four of the family's applications — paperwork that had been sitting in the office since March 17. More than seven hours later, the two left the office with directions to pick up their passports the next day.
They did — with four days to spare.
"What a ridiculous process," Collier says. Nevertheless, the reunion with her son in Italy was sweet. She texted last week: "It was the best hug ever!"
Fact-checkers dispute US President’s tweet claiming ‘cutting deficit by $1.7 trillion in 2 years’
US President Joe Biden's claim that he reduced the deficit by $1.7 trillion in a span of two years has been widely disputed by fact-checking organisations.
The analysis suggests that the reduction was primarily a consequence of the expiration of temporary pandemic-related spending measures rather than deliberate actions taken by the administration.
The Washington Post, renowned for its rigorous fact-checking process, has deemed Biden's claim “highly misleading,” and other fact-checkers have also disputed its accuracy.
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A tweet from the verified account of US President Biden, on June 22, 2023, said: “I cut the deficit by 1.7 trillion dollars in two years – that's more than any president on record."
However, according to the analysis provided by fact-checking reports, the $1.7 trillion reduction in spending touted by Biden was not a result of deliberate action taken by his administration but rather the expiration of pandemic emergency spending measures.
These spending measures had automatic expiration provisions, meaning that the reduction in the deficit occurred due to the temporary nature of the pandemic-related spending, rather than intentional efforts by the president to address the national debt.
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In essence, the reduction was a consequence of the specific circumstances surrounding the pandemic emergency spending, rather than a testament to Biden's fiscal policies.
The Washington Post's assessment and other fact-checking organisations' findings underscore the need to scrutinize political claims made by public figures.
The reports indicate that Biden's claim of a $1.7 trillion reduction in the deficit requires further examination and context to accurately understand the role played by his administration in this decline.
Also read: Biden to host outgoing NATO secretary-general Stoltenberg as competition to replace him heats up
Tech billionaires' cage match? Musk throws down the gauntlet and Zuckerberg accepts challenge
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are ready to fight, offline.
In a now-viral back-and-forth seen on Twitter and Instagram this week, the two tech billionaires seemingly agreed to a "cage match" face off.
It all started when Musk, who owns Twitter, responded to a tweet about Meta reportedly preparing to release a new Twitter rival called "Threads." He took a dig about the world becoming "exclusively under Zuck's thumb with no other options" — but then one Twitter user jokingly warned Musk of Zuckerberg's jiu jitsu training.
"I'm up for a cage match if he is lol," Musk wrote late Tuesday.
Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta Platforms, soon responded — and appeared to agree to Musk's proposal.
"Send me location," Zuckerberg wrote on a Wednesday night Instagram story, which showed a screenshot of Musk's tweet alongside another user's response urging the Twitter owner to "start training."
Zuckerberg is actually trained in mixed martial arts. The Facebook founder posted about completing his first jiu jitsu tournament last month.
In response to Zuckerberg's location request on Wednesday, Musk proposed the Vegas Octagon. He then joked about his fighting skills and workout routine, suggesting that the fight may not be serious.
"I have this great move that I call 'The Walrus', where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing," Musk wrote.
Whether or not Musk and Zuckerberg actually make it to the ring has yet to be seen — especially as Musk often tweets about action prematurely or without following through. But, even if their cage match agreement is all a joke, the banter gained attention. An endless chain of memes and posts to "choose your fighter" have sprung up in response.
"The story speaks for itself," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to The Associated Press. Zuckerberg has not commented further.
Despite the uncertainity of a cage match actually happening, bids are already being placed for a projected winner. DraftKings' projected odds stood at 140+ for Musk and -160 for Zuckerberg on Thursday.
The Associated Press also reached out to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which owns the Octagon, and Twitter for statements. Twitter's press email responded with a poop emoji, its standard automated response to reporters.
Tourist sub's implosion draws attention to murky regulations of deep-sea expeditions
When the Titan submersible made its fateful dive into the North Atlantic on Sunday, it also plunged into the murkily regulated waters of deep-sea exploration.
It's a space on the high seas where laws and conventions can be sidestepped by risk-taking entrepreneurs and the wealthy tourists who help fund their dreams. At least for now.
"We're at a point in submersible operations in deep water that's kind of akin to where aviation was in the early 20th century," said Salvatore Mercogliano, a history professor at Campbell University in North Carolina who focuses on maritime history and policy.
Also read: Titan submersible imploded, killing all 5 on board, US Coast Guard says
"Aviation was in its infancy — and it took accidents for decisions to be made to be put into laws," Mercogliano said. "There'll be a time when you won't think twice about getting on a submersible and going down 13,000 feet. But we're not there yet."
Thursday's announcement by the U.S. Coast Guard that the Titan had imploded near the Titanic shipwreck, killing all five people on board, has drawn attention to how these expeditions are regulated.
Mercogliano said such operations are scrutinized less than the companies that launch people into space. In the Titan's case, that's in part because it operated in international waters, far from the reach of many laws of the United States or other nations.
The Titan wasn't registered as a U.S. vessel or with international agencies that regulate safety, Mercogliano added. Nor was it classified by a maritime industry group that sets standards on matters such as hull construction.
Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO who died on Titan, had said he didn't want to be bogged down by such standards.
"Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation," Rush wrote in a blog post on his company's website.
Also read: 5 people on missing submersible believed to be dead, company says
The Titan was a small vessel that was launched from another ship, the Canadian icebreaker Polar Prince, a setup that Mercogliano likened to pulling a boat on a trailer, in terms of regulatory purposes.
"The highway patrol has jurisdiction over the car and over the trailer, but not over the boat," he said. "The boat is cargo."
Experts say wrongful death and negligence lawsuits are likely in the Titan case — and they could be successful. But legal actions will face various challenges, including waivers signed by the Titan passengers that warned of the myriad ways they could die.
Mike Reiss, a writer for "The Simpsons" television show who went on a Titanic expedition with OceanGate in 2022, recalled that his waiver said he would be "subject to extreme pressure. And any failure of the vessel could cause severe injury or death."
"I will be exposed to risks associated with high pressure gases, pure oxygen, high voltage systems which could lead to injury, disability and death," Reiss said Thursday, going by memory. "If I am injured, I may not receive immediate medical attention."
Also read: What we know about the Titanic-bound submersible that's missing with 5 people onboard
Thomas Schoenbaum, a University of Washington law professor and author of the book "Admiralty and Maritime Law," said such documents may be upheld in court if they are worded well.
"If those waivers are good, and I imagine they probably are because a lawyer probably drafted them, (families) may not be able to recover damages."
At the same time, OceanGate could still face repercussions under the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, Schoenbaum said. But it may depend on which arm of OceanGate owned the Titan submersible.
Rush, the late OceanGate CEO, told AP in 2021 that it was an American company. But he said OceanGate Expeditions, which led dives to the Titanic, was based in the Bahamas.
Schoenbaum said the Bahamas subsidiary has the potential to circumvent U.S. law, but courts have at times "pierced the corporate veil" and OceanGate could be found liable.
There are also questions of whether the Titan was insured or if the Canadian icebreaker's insurance could come into play.
The countries where lawsuits may be filed could also depend on contracts signed by passengers and crew.
"I would be very surprised, in a high-risk operation like this, if the contract did not address which law applies and where any claim can be filed," said George Rutherglen, a professor of admiralty law at the University of Virginia.
In the meantime, Rutherglen said, he expects the U.S. will respond with tighter regulations given the loss of life and the millions of dollars spent by the Coast Guard.
"These wrecks at the bottom of the sea have become more accessible with advancing technology," Rutherglen said. "It doesn't mean that it's necessarily become safer to go down and take a look."
The International Maritime Organization, which regulates commercial shipping, could take some kind of action, he added, and Congress also could pass legislation. Nations such as the U.S. could, for example, block ships engaging in such expeditions from docking in their ports.
"I would just be surprised if any incident with all of these costs involved — wrongful death, expensive rescue — would not lead to some initiatives," he said.
But not everyone agrees.
Forrest Booth, a San Francisco-based partner at Kennedys Law, said the International Maritime Organization "has no authority to impose its will."
"There could be a move for states to adopt an international treaty on the deep ocean," Booth said via email. "But that will be resisted by some nations that want to do deep-sea mining, etc. I do not think much of substance will happen after the media attention of this event dies down."
5 people on missing submersible believed to be dead, company says
The company leading the Titan submersible trip to the wreckage of the Titanic says the five missing crew members are believed to be dead.
OceanGate Expeditions on Thursday says its pilot and chief executive Stockton Rush, along with passengers Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet “have sadly been lost.”
Read: Debris field found in search for missing submarine
OceanGate did not provide details Thursday when the company announced the “loss of life” in a statement or how officials knew the crew members perished.
The vessel’s 96-hour oxygen supply likely ended early Thursday morning.
Read: Search for the missing Titanic submersible nears the critical 96-hour mark for oxygen supply
The company has been chronicling the Titanic’s decay and the underwater ecosystem around it via yearly voyages since 2021.
Debris field found in search for missing submarine
The search for a missing submersible with five people aboard took a bleak turn Thursday when the U.S. Coast Guard said a debris field was found at the bottom of the ocean near the Titanic, and the critical 96-hour mark passed when breathable air could have run out.
The Coast Guard’s post on Twitter did not say whether officials believe the debris is connected to the Titan, which was on an expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic. It said the debris was discovered within the search area by a remotely operated underwater robot, and was being evaluated.
The Titan was estimated to have about a four-day supply of breathable air when it launched Sunday morning in the North Atlantic — but experts have emphasized that was an imprecise approximation to begin with and could be extended if passengers have taken measures to conserve breathable air. And it’s not known if they survived since the sub’s disappearance.
Rescuers have rushed ships, planes and other equipment to the site of the disappearance. On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard said an undersea robot sent by a Canadian ship had reached the sea floor, while a French research institute said a deep-diving robot with cameras, lights and arms also joined the operation.
Authorities have been hoping underwater sounds might help narrow their search, whose coverage area has been expanded to thousands of miles — twice the size of Connecticut and in waters 2 1/2 miles (4 kilometers) deep. Coast Guard officials said underwater noises were detected in the search area Tuesday and Wednesday.
Jamie Pringle, an expert in Forensic Geosciences at Keele University, in England, said even if the noises came from the submersible, "The lack of oxygen is key now; even if they find it, they still need to get to the surface and unbolt it."
The Titan was reported overdue Sunday afternoon about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, as it was on its way to where the iconic ocean liner sank more than a century ago. OceanGate Expeditions, which is leading the trip, has been chronicling the Titanic’s decay and the underwater ecosystem around it via yearly voyages since 2021.
By Thursday morning, hope was running out that anyone on board the vessel would be found alive.
Just a day after Blinken’s Beijing visit to stabilize US-China relations, Biden calls Xi Jinping a ‘dictator’
China on Wednesday called comments by U.S. President Joe Biden referring to Chinese leader Xi Jinping as a dictator “extremely absurd and irresponsible,” as a new rift threatened to upset tentative efforts to stabilize the relationship between the two countries.
The clash of words comes just over a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded a visit to Beijing that sought to break the ice in a relationship that has hit a historical low. While both sides saw those talks as productive, they did not result in any significant breakthroughs beyond an agreement to return to a broad agenda for cooperation and competition.
Also read: Blinken and Xi pledge to stabilize deteriorated US-China ties, but China rebuffs the main US request
Biden, at a fundraiser in California on Tuesday night, said Xi was embarrassed by recent tensions over a suspected Chinese spy balloon that was shot down by the Air Force over the East Coast.
“That’s a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn’t know what happened,” Biden said.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning, responding to a question about Biden’s remarks, said they “go totally against facts and seriously violate diplomatic protocol, and severely infringe on China’s political dignity.”
Also read: Xi meets Blinken in Beijing
“It is a blatant political provocation. China expresses strong dissatisfaction and opposition,” Mao said at a daily briefing.
“The U.S. remarks are extremely absurd and irresponsible,” Mao said.
Mao reiterated China's contention that the balloon was for meteorological research and had been accidentally blown off course.
“The U.S. should have handled it in a calm and professional manner,” she said. "However, the U.S. distorted facts and used forces to hype up the incident, fully revealing its nature of bullying and hegemony.”
Also read: US ‘does not support’ Taiwan independence, Blinken says
Biden has previously used the term dictator, along with war criminal, to refer to Russian President Vladimir Putin over his country's invasion of Ukraine.
While Xi heads a country formally named the People's Republic of China, he faces no limits on his terms as head of state, commander of the military and leader of the ruling Communist Party, which brooks no challenges to its authority.
Blinken’s visit, during which he met with Xi, was aimed at easing tensions between the two superpowers.
The trip was originally scheduled for February but was put on hold after the balloon incident. While the visit marked a return to high-level contacts between the sides, China continues to refuse talks between their militaries.
In recent days, the U.S. says Chinese warplanes and naval ships have maneuvered in ways that threaten their U.S. counterparts in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, despite agreements between them on protocols for avoiding such incidents.
During Blinken's visit, China reiterated its strong objections to U.S. support for the self-governing island democracy of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own territory. The U.S. has also sought to block China's access to cutting-edge computer chip manufacturing technology that could be used for military purposes and accused Beijing of stealing American intellectual property.
In his comments at the fundraising event for his 2024 re-election campaign, Biden said he believed the balloon incident had caught Xi unaware.
“It was blown off course up through Alaska and then down through the United States. And he didn’t know about it,” Biden said. “When it got shot down, he was very embarrassed. He denied it was even there.”
Xi was likely upset by the implication that he hadn't been fully informed about the facts surrounding the balloon incident, said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the London University School of Oriental and African Studies and a longtime observer of Chinese politics.
“My sense is that Xi may not want to overreact and put the relationship back on ice again,” Tsang said in an e-mail.
Despite their sharp political divide, the countries continue to have deep economic and cultural links. Bilateral trade passed $690 billion last year and an estimated 300,000 Chinese are believed to be studying in the U.S., shoring up American institutions that have come under financial pressure.
After meeting with Xi on Monday, Blinken acknowledged entrenched differences. “We have no illusions about the challenges of managing this relationship. There are many issues on which we profoundly, even vehemently, disagree,” he said.
Xi sounded a similar note but suggested the rivalry could be overcome.
“The competition among major countries is not in line with the trend of the times and cannot solve the problems of the United States itself and the challenges facing the world,” he told Blinken. “China respects the interests of the United States and will not challenge or supplant the United States. Similarly, the United States should also respect China and not harm its legitimate rights and interests.”