#Xinhua news agency

[blueiscoool]

Stunning Tang Dynasty Murals in a Tomb Unearthed in China

A Tang dynasty tomb unearthed in China dates from the 700s, and the murals on its walls give an unprecedented view of daily life at the time.

Archaeologists in northern China have unearthed a centuries-old tomb decorated with stunning murals portraying daily life during the Tang dynasty, which ruled much of central and eastern China from A.D. 618 to 907.

The tomb includes never-before-seen depictions of daily life, including men threshing grain and making noodles.

One of the murals also depicts what appears to be a "Westerner" with blond hair and a beard who probably hailed from Central Asia, Victor Xiong, a professor of history at Western Michigan University who wasn't involved in the discovery, said in an email.

The tomb was discovered in 2018 during roadwork on a hillside on the outskirts of Taiyuan, the capital of China's northern Shanxi province, but archaeologists only reported on the completed excavations last month.

According to an article from China’s government-owned news agency Xinhua, an epitaph in the tomb states it was the burial place of a 63-year-old man who died in 736, as well as his wife.

The tomb consists of a single brick chamber, a door and a corridor. Scenes from life during the Tang dynasty adorn the walls of the tomb, the door, the corridor, and the platform on which the coffin was placed. The domed ceiling of the chamber is painted with what may be a dragon and phoenix.

Tomb guardians

Several figures painted near the door represent the "doorkeepers" or guardians of the tomb; they are wearing yellow robes and some have swords at their waists, according to Xinhua. Other murals portray natural landscapes, as well as men threshing grain, women grinding flour, men making noodles and women fetching water from a well.

They are rendered in the traditional "figure under a tree" style that was popular in the Shanxi region at the time, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported. As its name suggests, the style features people carrying out activities underneath beautifully depicted trees.

Many of the figures in the murals look like the same Chinese man and woman, and archaeologists think they may have been the two people buried in the tomb. The woman, in one scene, is dressed in a colorful gown and is leading four horses, alongside a bearded man holding a whip.

Other murals show mountains, trees and camels, and the series of paintings around the coffin may represent the Chinese tomb owner at different stages of his life, Xinhua reported.

Traditional style

The murals in the tomb appear to be well preserved. "The most familiar theme depicted in these murals is that of human figures under trees — a tradition that harks back to the Han dynasty [206 B.C. to A.D. 220]," Xiong said. Similar murals had been found in China's Xinjiang, Shandong, Shaanxi and Gansu regions.

He noted that the blond "non-Han" man leading camels has distinctive clothing. "Based on his facial features and outfit style, we can identify him as a 'Westerner,' likely a Sogdian from Central Asia," Xiong said. (The Sogdians were a trading people along the Silk Road routes between Asia and Europe at the time, living mainly in what are now Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

He added that many of the murals gave "never-before-seen" representations of daily chores and labor during the Tang dynasty.

By Tom Metcalfe.

[mariacallous]

Over the past decade, China has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in its international media network. The Xinhua News Agency, China Global Television Network, China Radio International, and the China Daily web portal produce material in multiple languages and use multiple social-media accounts to amplify it. This huge investment produces plenty of positive coverage of China and benign depictions of the authoritarian world more broadly. Nevertheless, Beijing is also aware that news marked “made in China” doesn’t have anything like the influence that local people, using local media, would have if they were uttering the same messages.

That, in the regime’s thinking, is the ultimate form of propaganda: Get the natives to say it for you. Train them, persuade them, pay them—it doesn’t matter; whatever their motives, they’ll be more convincing. Chinese leaders call this tactic “borrowing boats to reach the sea.”

When a handful of employees at RT, the Russian state television network formerly known as Russia Today, allegedly offered to provide lucrative payments to the talking heads of Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based far-right influencer team, borrowing boats to reach the sea was exactly what they had in mind. According to a federal indictment released last week, RT employees spent nearly $10 million over the course of a year—money “laundered through a network of foreign shell entities,” including companies in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, and Hungary—with the aim of supporting Tenet Media’s work and shaping the messages in its videos.

The indictment makes clear that the influencers—propagandists, in fact—must have had a pretty good idea where the money was coming from. They were told that their benefactor was “Eduard Grigoriann,” a vaguely Euro-Armenian “investor.” They tried to Google him and found nothing; they asked for information and were shown a résumé that included a photograph of a man gazing through the window of a private jet. Sometimes, the messages from Grigoriann’s team were time-stamped in a way that indicated they were written in Moscow. Sometimes the alleged employees of Grigoriann’s alleged company misspelled Grigoriann’s name. Unsurprisingly, in their private conversations, the Tenet Media team occasionally referred to its mysterious backers as “the Russians.”

But the real question is not whether the talking heads of Tenet Media—the founders, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, who were the main interlocutors with the Russians, but also Tim Pool, Lauren Southern, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson—had guessed the true identity of their “investor.” Nor does it matter whether they knew who was really paying them to make videos that backed up absurd pro-Moscow narratives (that a terrorist attack at a Moscow shopping mall, loudly claimed by the Islamic State, was really carried out by Ukrainians, for example). More important is whether the audience knew, and I think we can safely say that it did not. And now that Tenet Media fans do know who funds their favorite influencers, it’s entirely possible that they won’t care.

This is because the messages formed part of a larger stream of authoritarian ideas that are now ubiquitous on the far right, and that make coherent sense as a package. They denounce U.S. institutions as broken, irreparable: If Donald Trump doesn’t win, it’s because the election is rigged. They imply American society is degenerate: White people are discriminated against in America. They suggest immigrants are part of a coordinated invasion, designed to destroy what remains of the culture: Illegal immigrants are eating household pets, a trope featured during this week’s presidential debate. For the Russians, the amplification of this narrative matters more than specific arguments about Ukraine. As the indictment delicately explains, many of the Russian-sponsored videos produced by Tenet Media were more relevant to American politics than to the Ukraine war: “While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions.”

But these themes are also consistent with the Trump campaign’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions. People who have come to distrust the basic institutions of American democracy, who feel aggrieved and rejected, who believe that immigrants are invaders who have been deliberately sent to replace them—these are not people who will necessarily be bothered that their favorite YouTubers, according to prosecutors, were being sponsored by a violent, lawless foreign dictator who repeatedly threatens the U.S. and its allies with nuclear armageddon. On the contrary, many of them now despise their own country so much that they might be pleased to hear there are foreigners who, like the ex-president, want to burn it all down. If you truly hate modern America—its diversity, its immense energy, its raucous debate—then you won’t mind hearing it denounced by other people who hate it and wish it ill. On X earlier this year, Chen referred to the U.S. as a “tyranny,” for example, a phrase that could easily have been produced by one of the Russian propagandists who regularly decry the U.S. on the evening news.

These pundits and their audience are not manipulated by Russian, Chinese, and other autocrats who sometimes fill their social-media feeds. The relationship goes the other way around; Russian, Chinese, and other influence operations are designed to spread the views of Americans who actively and enthusiastically support the autocratic narrative. You may have laughed at Trump’s rant on Tuesday night: “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.” But that language is meant to reach an audience already primed to believe that Kamala Harris, as Trump himself said, is “destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn’t have a chance of success. Not only success. We’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids.”

Plenty of other people are trying to reach that audience too. Indeed, the Grigoriann scheme was not the only one revealed in the past few days. In a separate case that has received less attention, the FBI last week filed an affidavit in a Pennsylvania courthouse supporting the seizure of 32 internet domains. The document describes another team of Russian operatives who have engaged in typosquatting—setting up fake news websites whose URLs resemble real ones. The affidavit mentions, for example, washingtonpost.pm, washingtonpost.ltd, fox-news.in, fox-news.top, and forward.pw, but we know there are others. This same propaganda group, known to European investigators as Doppelganger, has also set up similar sites in multiple European languages. Typosquatters do not necessarily seek to drive people to the fake sites. Instead, the fake URLs they provide make posts on Facebook, X, and other social media appear credible. When someone is quickly scrolling, they might not check whether a sensational headline purporting to be from The Washington Post is in fact linked to washingtonpost.pm, the fake site, as opposed to washingtonpost.com, the real one.

But this deception, too, would not work without people who are prepared to believe it. Just as the Grigoriann scam assumed the existence of pundits and viewers who don’t really care who is paying for the videos that make them angry, typosquatting—like all information laundering—assumes the existence of a credulous audience that is already willing to accept outrageous headlines and not ask too many questions. Again, although Russian teams seek to cultivate, influence, and amplify this audience—especially in Pennsylvania, apparently, because in Moscow, they know which swing states matter too—the Russians didn’t create it. Rather, it was created by Trump and the pundits who support him, and merely amplified by foreigners who want our democracy to fail.

These influencers and audiences are cynical, even nihilistic. They have deep distrust in American institutions, especially those connected to elections. We talk a lot about how authoritarianism might arrive in America someday, but in this sense, it’s already here: The United States has a very large population of people who look for, absorb, and believe anti-American messages wherever they are found, whether on the real Fox News or the fake fox-news.in. Trump was speaking directly to them on Tuesday. What happens next is up to other Americans, the ones who don’t believe that their country is cratering into chaos and don’t want a leader who will burn it all down. In the meantime, there are plenty of boats available to borrow for Russians who want to reach the sea.

[accio-victuuri]

July CPNs round-up ❤️💛💚

• xz as backing vocals for the song everything is lovely

• clowning about screen protectors

• both of their names together on hs for being posted by xinhua news agency

• same city in Beijing on 7/6 - there was some talk that xz’s flight out has been changed to the 12th, probably to spend more time with wyb who will leave on the 10th. which didn’t happen cause wyb left 7/8 but still got to to spend that time together. some were clowning about how his airport shirt had a crease on it & how that made it seem like it was folded like how xz does it so ya know, is it a sign? lol.

• 7/10 XZS paris vlog clowning: posting so close to yibo’s appearances and similar shots // the two bros focused in the video, paris olympics and torchbearer route.

• 7/12 XZS vlog - possibly texting wyb and little prince figures + snowy mountain ; jacques tati films bgm used

• 7/14 xzs vlog clues! more symbolism and that goose laugh

• walking in the streets of paris

• similarity between tao and yibo showing off a photo of their significant other

• continuing on with the off white with “painting” shirts that xz wears, which is already strike 3 && kind of proves the sdc 3 clowning. he wore this during his off work hours. ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

it follows the pattern 👀👀👀

• 7/15 xzs vlog clowning continues - same place different time / confirmation of the bystander lyrics connection and E142 cue

• NOT TOTALLY CPN BUT ME BEING EMOTIONAL. LOL. SEEING YIBO do that torch really in that simple outfit everyone was wearing. mostly bare faced and all eyes on him. that moment — and then you see him wearing that bome necklace makes me go somft. 🥹🥹🥹🥹 he will go to so many places and experience a lot of things but he will always have a piece of xz with him.

some are getting excited about them with silver jewelry necklace but xz’s is boucheron which he is endorsing. as much as i love jewelry cpns, i always get picky when it’s something they endorse, unless there is an additional clue. but i understand why people got 👀 when they saw that silver chain with GG. unfortunately, this is not the necklace we think it is.

another one is this “couple” / same style jacket they both wore when they went abroad. RBS already explained this and i totally agree with their stand on it. i guess what makes this cpn-y to me is the “style” it, showing how their preferences overlap in clothing. and that’s why we think they have a “shared closet”.

<< previous post

• On 7/19, the booting ceremony of XZ’s new film DeXian JinZhi, the cast was revealed and we learned that Yin Zheng is there. Yin Zheng is WYB’s very close friend, so we will definitely keep an eye out on how he will interact with XZ 😂😂😂😂 and oh, Peng Yucheng is also there! who is Bobo’s friend and someone he fake kissed HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! so many common friends!

• some minor cpns from xzs 7/20 vlog + something i forgot to add, same acne studios plain shirt. HAHAHAHAHA! twinning! 👯‍♀️

• xz vlogs appear to be countdowns 🤔🤔🤔

• BJYX related hs on them speaking goose language! HAHAHAHAHA! we shall remain relevant forever!

• what a nice magazine! our boys! side by side! and it’s like a fanfic cover for pairing wei ruolai and chunsheng!

• them posting for public welfare and in support of the olympics for CCTV ( here and here ) also with mengniu’s short film. i love seeing them supporting the same thing and hopefully they get to collab someday for a common cause 🌎 if there is any type of project they can work together, this may be it, cause fans can’t even be outwardly toxic especially if it’s a government project.

• 7/26/2024 xzs vlog candies

• 7/28 coco crush posts clowning

• 7/29 throwback video uploaded by rufeng

• 7/30 XZS vlog clowning time: dancing like wang laoshi, possible mv for bystander and wonderful world lyrics.

plus some more ⬇️⬇️⬇️

ohhhhh. a snowy mountain or is it? i mean who wouldn’t be taken by that and especially someone like xz. love how he took pictures of it and drew it too. in the post by xzs it’s in the c-position, probably cause it’s drawn by xz but also it’s photo #5/18 WYB.

p3 is also our colors! green (ish), red and yellow!

SEE YOU ALL NEXT MONTH!!!!!

<<< previous post

[beyourselfchulanmaria]

📷 中國桂林, Guilin, China 1970’s by Xinhua News Agency 新華社北京 Beijing News

與其想知道何時再去度假，不如建立一個你無需逃離的人生。

Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.

🎧 🎻 陳蓉暉小提琴專輯 【如詩如畫小提琴 - 伊甸園VOL. 2 】 完整專輯12首

[thirdset]

Zheng Qinwen + 2024 Slam Outfits © Erick W. Rasco, Anadolu, Xinhua News Agency, Mike Everton, Daniel Kopatsch, Baptiste Fernandez, Matthew Stockman

[little-red-book-daily]

Imperialism will not last long because it always does evil things. It persists in grooming and supporting reactionaries in all countries who are against the people, it has forcibly seized many colonies and semi-colonies and many military bases, and it threatens the peace with atomic war. Thus, forced by imperialism to do so, more than 90 per cent of the people of the world are rising or will rise in struggle against it. Yet, imperialism is still alive, still running amuck in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the West imperialism is still oppressing the people at home. This situation must change. It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism.

Interview with a Hsinhua(Xinhua) News Agency correspondent (September 29, 1958).

[newsfromstolenland]

"China has launched a renewed crackdown on golf, closing 111 courses in an effort to conserve water and land, and telling members of the ruling Communist Party to stay off the links.

The state-run Xinhua News Agency said Sunday the courses were closed for improperly using groundwater, arable land or protected land within nature reserves. It said authorities have imposed restrictions on 65 more courses.

China banned the development of new golf courses in 2004, when it had fewer than 200. Since that time, the number of courses more than tripled to 683 before the new crackdown, Xinhua said."

Full article

This is great news, and exactly what needs to be done all over the world to protect biodiversity and the environment! Fuck golf courses!

tagging: @allthecanadianpolitics

[workersolidarity]

🇯🇵 🚨

MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE ROCKS TAIWAN, TSUNAMI WARNINGS ISSUED FOR JAPAN

📹 A massive 7.5 magnitude earthquake rocks Taiwan today, prompting Japan's Meteorological agency to issue tsunami warnings.

The agency told residents of Okinawa Island, Miyakojima Island and Yaeyama Island to immediately evacuate, warning of waves up to 3 meters (9.8ft).

A little while ago, Xinhua News Agency reported tsunami waves of 30cm had reached the Japanese island of Yonaguni.

#source1

#source2

#videosource

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[loveforlandonorris]

🎤 Lando at the Drivers' Press Conference before the Chinese GP:

(The video is from F1Fever on YouTube)

Transcript:

Interviewer: And Lando, what about your expectations coming into the weekend?

Lando: Probably not as high as Suzuka. I think that's our opinion. But still in a good position. I think we've been happy with how the season started. I think we're in a good qualifying battle with Aston, Mercedes, it’s very close and even last weekend ahead of Ferrari, but I think the order is still clear.

And I think in the racing we've done a good job. Not as good as Red Bull but and Ferrari, but I'm a head of Aston and Mercedes. So I think we're in a good spot. This wasn't a great circuit for us in 2019 but many things have changed since then. So I'm so optimistic we can have a good weekend.

Interviewer: What is it about this layout that gives you less confidence?

Lando: The long corners. Just, like, Turn 1. Yeah, this type of corner is just not good for us. Similar to, say, Zandvoort, that kind of experience for us. So yeah, we've got some things to try. And we're constantly trying to improve these areas. But it's an area we know is one of our biggest weaknesses, and maybe we kind of get away with it in qualifying but especially into the race becomes a bigger problem for us.

Interviewer: There were some race day frustrations for you in Japan, but afterwards, your boss Andrea Stella, said that the team can win this year. How quickly do you think you can do that?

Lando: Not anytime soon, that's for sure. I think we can. Right place, right time, if we improve the car how we need to. Honestly, there weren't too many frustrations with Suzuka. I think everything went pretty much as expected. I don't think we did a perfect job and I think we probably should have finished one place higher up, potentially. But I don't think it was far off. We've been the same place all season. We've been behind Red Bull, we've been behind Ferrari and we've been a bit of a step ahead of the other two teams come the race. And that's exactly how last weekend went.

So I don't think there's too many frustrations. But we know the issues, we know what we have to improve. And if we can improve them. I think Andrea is right. I think we can win races this year. And we can be competitive with these other two teams ahead of us. But that's an if. And you know, we have to work hard to improve the car in some of these certain areas, which have been a big challenge for us over the last many years, not just for years, but last many years. But if we can, then I'm confident we can have some good races.

Journalist Questions:

Q1 (Ian Parkes – New York Times):. I don't know if any of you drivers have had an opportunity to inspect the track as yet. But Charles mentioned it earlier, and a couple of other drivers have mentioned it in their media sessions earlier today, that the track has been painted. What does that means pecifically? Do you know? Does it cause any concerns? What issues are you expecting from such a track?

Lando: I have no idea. So I think we have to wait and see honestly, I think that's something new, something we don't think we've seen before, so hard to predict exactly what's going to happen. So I honestly have no idea. So I'll see you tomorrow.

Q2 (Michael Butterworth – Xinhua News Agency) To all the drivers briefly. It's been a while since we've been to the Shanghai circuit. Just keen to hear your thoughts on it. And any particular features that make it especially challenging or memorable for you?

Lando: I always raced here once, but I didn't finish the race. So not the best memories. But yeah, it was still in my first season. So everything was new back then. But it's always been a cool track to drive. Definitely was not my back then. But excited to give it another crack and see what we can do this weekend.

Q3 (Henry Clark – Daily Mail) I was wondering, obviously a lot of tracks that we come to, it's only been a year or so since you've last been here. But for everyone here there has been no race for at least five years. I was wondering what are the unique challenges that brings? Does that make this weekend particularly exciting? Or are there extra worries that come with that?

Lando: I guess just excited. Always excited for every weekend, but especially when you haven't been to a place for a while. For me, I didn't get a proper experience of it back in 2019. So things have changed. I'm a very different driver to what I was back then.

So I'm excited to see what it brings and how the whole weekend pans out I think anyway being a Sprint race and having two opportunities to try and nail the set-up for the first quali and then the set-up for the second quali. I think also there is plenty of opportunity. So I don't think it’s not going to be exciting for anyone. I think there's a lot of opportunities on the table, there's a lot of things that can go wrong at the same time, so excited for all of it.

Q4 (Henry Clark – Daily Mail) With all due respect to some of the more senior drivers, a question to a couple of the younger guys on the panel. When you see Fernando committing his future to racing well into his 40s, how impressive is that dedication? How much does it take to keep doing that? And also, do you see yourselves wanting to race for as long as that in your own careers?

Lando: I’d better be careful what I say. I think it takes a lot of dedication. I don't think anyone thinks Fernando lacks that in any way. I think he shows that with everything that he does in life. Whether it's at the track or away from the track, you know, in different sports or whatever. So it depends what you want to do. Everyone is different.

It's rare that you see someone commit for so long in any sport, you know, he's probably one of the oldest guys competing at the top of any sport in the world and I think to be able to do that at the level that he has done and continues to do, you're probably never going to potentially see it again, you know within Formula 1 and if you do, it's going be extremely rare.

So yeah, I think a lot of respect for that kind of thing. I have no idea if I want to do it in 20 years’ time, if I'm still going strong, but I love where I am now and I continue to do such a thing. Yeah, we'll see.

[ranfused4ever]

Video source: Xinhua News Agency

[blueiscoool]

Lavish 2,200-year-old King Tomb Discovered in China

Archaeologists have unearthed a luxurious 2,200-year-old tomb in eastern China, the largest, highest-ranking, and most structurally complex ever unearthed, which may have belonged to an emperor of the state of Chu during a critical period in Chinese history.

Chu was one of the seven Warring States, along with Qin, Han, Wei, Zhao, Qi, and Yan. The unification of these states is recognized as the start of modern China.

The 2,200-year-old Wuwangdun tomb, which is situated in the Anhui Province of East China’s city of Huainan, has yielded over 1,000 artifacts, including figurines, musical instruments, bronze goods, and everyday utensils and lacquerware artifacts, dating to about 220 BC.

At Wuwangdun, one of the largest-scale Chu state archaeological sites, researchers previously uncovered a cemetery spanning 1.5sqkm, with a chariot and sacrifice pits and a tomb, believed to be that of the cemetery’s owner.

The tomb is thought to be the highest-level ancient Chu state tomb ever excavated, and its vast scale, intricate structure, and rich contents suggest it belonged to the state’s emperor.

According to information obtained by the Global Times newspaper from the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Anhui Province, based on the size and scale of the tomb, as well as historical records, it is estimated that the owner of the tomb may be King Kaolie of Chu. However, a more accurate determination of the tomb’s occupant will require further extraction of artifacts and analyses of textual evidence.

Meanwhile, the tomb had been looted multiple times throughout history. Anhui was permitted by the NCHA in 2019 to excavate the tomb and salvage its archaeological remains. An official start to the excavation work was made a year later, and it was recognized as a national project to use archaeological research to determine the origins of Chinese civilization.

The Wuwangdun tomb complex, which covers an area of over 140 square kilometers, includes sacrificial pits, chariot and horse pits, accompanying graves, and the main burial chamber (Tomb No. 1). Tomb No. 1 is a large, nearly square, vertical pit tomb with sides that are about 50 meters long. There is a 42-meter-long, sloping tomb passage on the east side.

Around the pit, eight side chambers were found, and a central coffin chamber with several layers of planks covering it was also found. 443 coffin lid planks and the 78 bamboo mats that covered them have been removed thus far. On the planks of the coffin lid, there were about 1,000 ink-drawn characters that represented the locations and purposes of each side chamber.

“The findings can provide an overall picture of the political, economic, cultural, technological and social conditions of the Chu state in the Warring States period,” Gong Xicheng, an archaeologist part of the excavation told Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

“The findings can help us learn about the historical evolution as well as the formation of a unified nation and its culture,” he added.

These discoveries provide systematic archaeological data for studying the high-level tomb system in the Chu state during the late Warring States period (475BC-221BC).

To discover while also preserving the unearthed remains archaeologists worked within a special low-oxygen laboratory built at the site.

By Leman Altuntaş.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Ruling parties in Brazil and China sign cooperation agreement

Brazil’s Workers’ Party and the Communist Party of China (CPC) signed an agreement on Wednesday to strengthen their cooperation and increase the number of high-level visits to both countries.

The two-page agreement states that Brazil and China are the largest developing countries in their respective hemispheres and mutual “strategic global partners.” The parties pledge to uphold “the principles of independence and self-determination, full equality, mutual respect, and non-interference in internal affairs.”

Both parties also pledged to “strengthen permanent strategic communication on prominent regional and international issues.” In April, heads of state Xi Jinping and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed an agreement under which state news agencies Xinhua and EBC will jointly publish stories and a limited number of photos each month.

Congresswoman Gleisi Hoffmann, the Workers’ Party national chair, said in a video message that the visit of high-ranking Chinese Politburo officials to Brasília demonstrated the importance of the Workers’ Party to the CPC and to China-Brazil relations. “We now want to have a closer relationship, especially in party leadership, organizational experience, communication, and political education,” she said.

Continue reading.

[accio-victuuri]

wang yibo - xinhua news agency interview

Wang Yibo, a torchbearer of the Paris Olympics and a young Chinese actor, said in an interview with Xinhua News Agency: I think it is a very special experience. I am honored and happy to be a torchbearer at night. I hope they (athletes) can enjoy the competition stage, and then cheer for better results.

[zvaigzdelasas]

China’s global infrastructure strategy stood out as a main talking point in his meetings with Guyanese President Irfaan Ali and Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili on Friday and his Indonesian counterpart Joko Widodo on Thursday.[...]

Xi told Garibashvili that China was ready to push forward with building the belt and road with Georgia. He added that Beijing welcomed more exports from the country and encouraged more Chinese companies to invest there.

Xi said the two countries were set to announce that bilateral relations would be upgraded to a “strategic partnership” during Garibashvili’s trip to China, according to state news agency Xinhua. China and Georgia ratified a free-trade agreement in 2017 – Beijing’s first with a former Soviet state. Georgia applied for EU membership last year and has launched a bid to join Nato. In the meeting with his Guyanese counterpart, Xi said Beijing was willing to further align the belt and road strategy and the South American nation’s low-carbon development strategy.[...]

China signed belt and road cooperation agreements with Georgia in 2015 and Guyana in 2018.[...]

In the meeting with Widodo, Xi hailed the two “like-minded” Asian neighbours, which had made “major achievements” in aligning Beijing’s belt and road plan and Jakarta’s global maritime axis, a strategy to develop port infrastructure and strengthen maritime security.

Indonesia was where Xi launched the idea of the “21st century Maritime Silk Road” a decade ago, one of the two major pillars of the belt and road.

Widodo said that the high-speed railway linking Jakarta and Bandung – a cornerstone project of the belt and road – would come into operation on schedule next month. [...]

Xi also met and discussed the belt and road with Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ghazouani and Burundian President Evariste Ndayishimiye on Friday. China and Mauritania signed a cooperation plan to jointly promote building the belt and road on Friday.[...]

Beijing announced on Monday that Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka would also attend the opening ceremony, but he later had to cancel the visit to China after falling and hurting his head.

28 Jul 23

[trustednewstribune]

4 Dead, 60 Injured As "Strongest Earthquake In 25 Years" Hits Taiwan

At least four people were killed and nearly 60 injured Wednesday by a powerful earthquake in Taiwan that damaged dozens of buildings and prompted tsunami warnings that extended to Japan and the Philippines before being lifted.

Officials said the quake was the strongest to shake the island in decades, and warned of more tremors in the days ahead.

"The earthquake is close to land and it's shallow. It's felt all over Taiwan and offshore islands," said Wu Chien-fu, director of Taipei's Central Weather Administration's Seismology Center.

Strict building regulations and disaster awareness appear to have staved off a major catastrophe for the island, which is regularly hit by earthquakes as it lies near the junction of two tectonic plates.

Wu said the quake was the strongest since a 7.6-magnitude struck in September 1999, killing around 2,400 people in the deadliest natural disaster in the island's history.

Wednesday's magnitude-7.4 quake struck just before 8:00 am local time (0000 GMT), with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) putting the epicentre 18 kilometres (11 miles) south of Taiwan's Hualien City, at a depth of 34.8 kilometres.

Three people among a group of seven on an early-morning hike through the hills that surround the city were crushed to death by boulders loosened by the earthquake, officials said.

Separately, a truck driver died when his vehicle was hit by a landslide as it approached a tunnel in the area.

Social media was awash with shared video and images from around the country of buildings swaying as the quake struck.

"I wanted to run out, but I wasn't dressed. That was so strong," said Kelvin Hwang, a guest at a hotel in the capital, Taipei, who sought shelter in the lift lobby on the ninth floor.

Dramatic images were shown on local TV of multi-storey structures in Hualien and elsewhere tilting after it ended, while a warehouse in New Taipei City crumbled.

Local TV channels showed bulldozers clearing rocks along roads to Hualien, a mountain-ringed coastal city of around 100,000 people that was cut off by landslides.

President Tsai Ing-wen called for local and central government agencies to coordinate with each other, and said that the national army would also be providing support.

The National Fire Agency confirmed the death toll, adding nearly 60 people had been treated for quake-related injuries.

Regional impact - In Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines, authorities initially issued a tsunami warning but by around 10 am (0200 GMT), the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the threat had "largely passed".

In the capital, the metro briefly stopped running but resumed within an hour, while residents received warnings from their local borough chiefs to check for any gas leaks.

Taiwan is regularly hit by earthquakes as the island lies near the junction of two tectonic plates, while nearby Japan experiences around 1,500 jolts every year.

Across the Taiwan Strait, social media users in China's eastern Fujian province, which borders Guangdong in the south, and elsewhere said they also felt strong tremors.

Residents of Hong Kong also reported feeling the earthquake.

China, which claims self-ruled Taiwan as a renegade province, was "paying close attention" to the quake and "willing to provide disaster relief assistance", state news agency Xinhua said.

Fabrication at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company -- the world's biggest chip maker -- was briefly interrupted at some plants, a company official told AFP, while work at construction sites for new plants was halted for the day.

The vast majority of quakes around the area are mild, although the damage they cause varies according to the depth of the epicentre below the Earth's surface and its location.

The severity of tsunamis -- vast and potentially destructive series of waves that can move at hundreds of kilometres per hour -- also depends on multiple factors.

Japan's biggest earthquake on record was a massive 9.0-magnitude undersea jolt in March 2011 off Japan's northeast coast, which triggered a tsunami that left around 18,500 people dead or missing.

The 2011 catastrophe also sent three reactors into meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, causing Japan's worst post-war disaster and the most serious nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

Japan saw a major quake on New Year's Day this year, when a 7.5-magnitude tremor hit the Noto Peninsula and killed more than 230 people, many of them when older buildings collapsed.

[theoscout]

This article is behind a paywall so I'll add it under a 'read more'

I already removed a bunch of unnecessary stuff such as website formatting but if you go to the article you'll see images and stuff.

Points of interest:

Stockton Rush throwing a tantrum and freaking out his guests because he went against instructions and got the sub stuck under a boat

"give him the fucking controller"

Rush ignoring safety instructions from David Lochridge aka the guy who got fired for saying the sub was dangerous but giving him the controller after he couldn't unjam the sub after an hour

Lochridge getting the sub out in 15 minutes

everyone in the submarine community including Susan Kasey (the article writer) watching Stockton Rush like a horror movie

they warned him but couldn't do shit :(

really a lot of the stuff in the previous article I reblogged but daaaammmn if you read between the lines this thing is scathing lol

THE ABYSS

The Titan Submersible Disaster Was Years in the Making, New Details Reveal

To many in the tight-knit deep-sea exploration community, OceanGate’s submersible dives were reckless and often dangerous, writes best-selling author Susan Casey.

By Susan Casey

August 17, 2023

OceanGate’s Titan submersible prior to its final dive on a mission to see the Titanic wreckage.OceanGate Expeditions/Handout via Xinhua News Agency.

41.73º N, 49.95º W, North Atlantic Ocean, June 18, 2023

Fate cleared up the weather, blew off the fog, and calmed the waves, as the submersible and its five passengers dived through the surface waters and fell into another world. They entered the deep ocean’s uppermost layer, known as the twilight zone, passing creatures glimmering with bioluminescence, tiny fish with enormous teeth. Then they entered the midnight zone, where larger creatures ghost by like alien moons. Two miles down, they entered the abyssal zone—so named because it’s the literal abyss.

Deeper means heavier: pressures of 5,000, then 6,000 pounds per square inch. As it descended, the submersible was gripped in a tightening vise. Maybe they heard a noise then, maybe they heard an alarm.

I hope they watched the abyss with awe through their viewport, because I’d like to think their last sights were magnificent ones.

As the world now knows, Stockton Rush touted himself as a maverick, a disrupter, a breaker of rules. So far out on the visionary curve that, for him, safety regulations were mere suggestions. “If you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating,” he declared at the 2022 GeekWire Summit. “If you’re operating within a known environment, as most submersible manufacturers do, they don’t break things. To me, the more stuff you’ve broken, the more innovative you’ve been.”

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In a culture that has adopted the ridiculous mantra “move fast and break things,” that type of arrogance can get a person far. But in the deep ocean, the price of admission is humility—and it’s nonnegotiable. The abyss doesn’t care if you went to Princeton, or that your ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence. If you want to go down into her world, she sets the rules.

And her rules are strict, befitting the gravitas of the realm. To descend into the ocean’s abyssal zone—the waters from 10,000 to 20,000 feet—is a serious affair, and because of the annihilating pressures, far more challenging than rocketing into space. The subs that dive into this realm (there aren’t many) are tested and tested and tested. Every component is checked for flaws in a pressure chamber and checked again—and every step of this process is certified by an independent marine classification society. This assurance of safety is known as “classing” a sub. Deep-sea submersibles are constructed of the strongest and most predictable materials, as determined by the laws of physics.

In the abyss, that means passengers typically sit inside a titanium (or steel) pressure hull, forged into a perfect sphere—the only shape that distributes pressure symmetrically. That means adding crush-resistant syntactic foam around the sphere for buoyancy and protection, to offset the weight of the titanium. That means redundancy upon redundancy, with no single point of failure. It means a safety plan, a rescue plan, an acute situational awareness at all times.

It means respect for the forces in the deep ocean. Which Stockton Rush didn’t have.

Stockton Rush in front of his Antipodes submersible EyePress News/Shutterstock.

Unfortunately, June 18, 2023, wasn’t the first time I’d heard of Rush, or his company OceanGate, or his monstrosity of a sub. He and the Titan had been a topic of conversation talked about with real fear, on many occasions, by numerous people I met over the course of five years while reporting my book The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean. I heard discussions about the Titan as a tragedy-in-waiting on research ships, during deep-sea expeditions, in submersible hangars, at marine science conferences. I had my own troubling encounter with OceanGate in 2018 and had been watching it with concern ever since.

Everyone I met in the small, tight-knit world of manned submersibles was aware of the Titan. Everyone watched in disbelief as Rush built a five-person cylindrical pressure hull out of filament-wound carbon fiber, an unpredictable material that is known to fail suddenly and catastrophically under pressure.

It was as though we were watching a horror movie unfold in slow motion, knowing that whatever happened next wouldn’t be pretty. But like screaming at the screen, nothing that came out of anyone’s mouth made any difference to the ending.

In December 2015, two years before the Titan was built, Rush had lowered a one third scale model of his 4,000-meter-sub-to-be into a pressure chamber and watched it implode at 4,000 psi, a pressure equivalent to only 2,740 meters. The test’s stated goal was to “validate that the pressure vessel design is capable of withstanding an external pressure of 6,000 psi—corresponding to…a depth of about 4,200 meters.” He might have changed course then, stood back for a moment and reconsidered. But he didn’t. Instead, OceanGate issued a press release stating that the test had been a resounding success because it “demonstrates that the benefits of carbon fiber are real.”

Rush didn’t even break stride. He ran right on ahead, plowing hard into his director of marine operations, David Lochridge. Lochridge had emigrated from Scotland to work for OceanGate—selling his home in Glasgow, moving to Washington State with his wife and seven-year-old daughter. Unlike many of his new colleagues, Lochridge was an established undersea pro: a submersible and remote-operated-vehicle pilot, a marine engineer, an underwater inspector for the oil and gas industry. He’d piloted rescue subs for the British navy to save men trapped aboard downed military submarines.

By January 2018, the Titan was nearly completed, soon to begin its sea trials. But first Lochridge—who according to his contract was responsible for “ensuring the safety of all crew and clients during submersible and surface operations”—would have to inspect the sub and pronounce it fit to dive. And that wasn’t going to happen.

Lochridge had been watching the sub’s progress with ratcheting alarm. He’d argued with OceanGate’s engineering director, Tony Nissen; OceanGate had responded by refusing to let Lochridge examine the work on the sub’s oxygen system, computer systems, acrylic viewport, O-rings, and the critical interfaces between its carbon fiber hull and titanium endcaps. Mating materials with such wildly divergent pressure tolerances was also…not advised. (Nissen did not respond to requests for comment.)

When Lochridge voiced his concerns, he was ignored. So he inspected the Titan as thoroughly as he could. Then he presented Rush and other OceanGate senior staff with a 10-page “Quality Control Inspection Report” that listed the sub’s problems and the steps needed to correct them. “Verbal communication of the key items I have addressed in my attached document have been dismissed on several occasions,” Lochridge wrote on the first page, “so I feel now I must make this report so there is an official record in place.” These issues, he added, were “significant in nature and must be addressed.”

“Titan could not get classed because it was built of the wrong material and it was built the wrong way. Once he made up his mind, he was on a path from which there was no return.”

Lochridge listed more than two dozen items that required immediate attention. These included missing bolts and improperly secured batteries, components zip-tied to the outside of the sub. O-ring grooves were machined incorrectly (which could allow water ingress), seals were loose, a highly flammable, petroleum-based material lined the Titan’s interior. Hosing looped around the sub’s exterior, creating an entanglement risk—especially at a site like the wreck of the Titanic, where spars, pipes, and wires protrude everywhere.

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Yet even those deficiencies paled in comparison to what Lochridge observed on the hull. The carbon fiber filament was visibly coming apart, riddled with air gaps, delaminations, and Swiss cheese holes—and there was no way to fix that short of tossing the hull in a dumpster. The manufacturing process for carbon fiber filament is exacting. Interwoven carbon fibers are wound around a cylinder and bonded with epoxy, then bagged in cellophane and cured in an oven for seven days. The goal is perfect consistency; any mistakes are baked in permanently.

Given that the hull would be “seeing such immense pressures not yet experienced on any known carbon hulled vehicle we run the risk of potential inter-laminar fatigue due to pressure cycling,” Lochridge wrote, “especially if we do have imperfections in the hull itself.” The hull would need to be scanned with thermal imaging or ultrasound to reveal the extent of its flaws. “Non-destructive inspection is required to be undertaken and subsequent results provided to myself prior to any in water Manned Dives commencing,” he added, digging in his heels on the scanning. This would reveal any weak spots and provide a baseline that could then be used to check for signs of fatigue after every dive.

Scanning the hull shouldn’t be a problem, should it? Lochridge noted in another document that OceanGate had previously stated the hull would be scanned. (Spoiler alert: The hull was never scanned. “The OceanGate engineering team does not plan to obtain a hull scan and does not believe the same to be readily available or particularly effective in any event,” the company’s lawyer, Thomas Gilman, wrote in March 2018. Instead, OceanGate would rely on “acoustic monitoring”—sensors on the Titan’s hull that would emit an alarm when the carbon fiber filaments were audibly breaking.)

Lochridge’s report was concise and technical, compiled by someone who clearly knew what he was talking about—the kind of document that in most companies would get a person promoted. Rush’s response was to fire Lochridge immediately, serve him and his wife with a lawsuit (although Carole Lochridge didn’t work at OceanGate or even in the submersible industry) for breach of contract, fraud, unjust enrichment, and misappropriation of trade secrets; threaten their immigration status; and seek to have them pay OceanGate’s legal fees.

In the lawsuit, OceanGate cited its grievances. According to the company, Lochridge had “manufactured a reason to be fired.” In 2016, he had “ ‘mooned’ through the large viewing window Tony Nissen and other members of the OceanGate engineering staff through [sic] with whom he had been arguing.” He had “repeatedly refused to accept the veracity of information provided by the Company’s lead engineer and repeatedly stated he did not approve of OceanGate’s research and development plans, insisting, for example that the company should obtain a scan of the hull of Titan’s experimental vessel prototype to detect potential flaws….”

Now unemployed, distressed by OceanGate’s allegations, and beset with legal bills, Lochridge was in a vulnerable position. He countersued for wrongful termination and sent his inspection report to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA, in turn, passed it to the Coast Guard.

OceanGate’s onetime director of marine operations, David Lochridge (foreground), who raised concerns about OceanGate’s engineering, speaks aboard the Cyclops 1.Andy Bronson/The Herald/AP.

Ironically, Lochridge had saved Rush from himself at least once before. In June 2016, Rush piloted OceanGate’s shallow-diving sub, the Cyclops 1, to the site of the Andrea Doria, a hulking 700-foot ocean liner and epic entanglement hazard that had sunk in 1956 off Nantucket, in a patch of the Atlantic known for its murky fog and seething currents. The ship lies in 240 feet of turbid water, cobwebbed with discarded fishing lines. At that depth, it is accessible (and just barely) to advanced scuba divers, 18 of whom have died there. Rush was headed down to “capture sonar images of the shipwreck” with Lochridge and three clients.

Word gets around in the deep-sea community. I learned of what happened next from two sub pilots from other companies, who both told me the same story on different occasions after hearing it from OceanGate personnel. I also reviewed correspondence related to OceanGate’s lawsuit against Lochridge and his wife, in which Lochridge describes the incident. (Lochridge declined to be interviewed.)

As chief pilot and the person responsible for operational safety, Lochridge had created a dive plan that included protocols for how to approach the wreck. Any entanglement hazard demands caution and vigilance: touching down at least 50 meters away and surveying the site before coming any closer. Rush disregarded these safety instructions. He landed too close, got tangled in the current, managed to wedge the sub beneath the Andrea Doria’s crumbling bow, and descended into a full-blown panic. Lochridge tried to take the helm, but Rush had refused to let him, melting down for over an hour until finally one of the clients shrieked, “Give him the fucking controller!” At which point Rush hurled the controller, a video-game joystick, at Lochridge’s head. Lochridge freed the sub in 15 minutes.

The expedition had been planned to include 10 dives, but instead it ended abruptly, with OceanGate citing “adverse weather conditions.” After returning to shore in Boston, Rush held a press conference. “We were able to view the Andrea Doria area for nearly four hours, which is more than 10 times longer than scuba divers can,” he announced. The dive, OceanGate’s website noted, had “focused on the bow of the vessel.”

Writing this now, I feel a variety of emotions. Empathy, of course, for the families of those aboard the doomed Titan. Despair for the “mission specialists” whose trust in OceanGate was so misplaced: Shahzada Dawood, Suleman Dawood, and Hamish Harding. Sadness, because I knew and admired PH Nargeolet—a deep-sea icon whose expertise on the Titanic led to his fatal association with Rush. PH and I sailed together in the Pacific on the 2019 Five Deeps Expedition, when explorer Victor Vescovo piloted a revolutionary sub, the Limiting Factor, to the deepest spots in all five of the earth’s ocean basins. (Journalist Ben Taub was on the Five Deeps Expedition in the North Atlantic and wrote about it for The New Yorker.)

Vescovo had commissioned the Limiting Factor in 2015 and hired Nargeolet as his technical adviser to vet the sub’s design and build. Happily, PH didn’t have much to do. The Limiting Factor was built by Triton Submarines, a company known for its high quality and smart designs, whose cofounder and president, Patrick Lahey, is regarded as the world’s most experienced submersible pilot. Vescovo’s sub was certified—at great cost and difficulty, over several years, from inception to completion to sea trials to dives—by senior inspection engineer Jonathan Struwe from Det Norske Veritas (DNV), a Norway-based international marine classification society that is the gold standard for safety.

And my God, the testing. Every piece of the Limiting Factor was pressure-tested to 20,000 psi, equivalent to a depth of 43,000 feet—20 percent greater than full ocean depth. There was so much testing that Triton built its own state-of-the-art pressure chambers in Barcelona, Spain. The only high-powered pressure chamber large enough to fit the passenger sphere was located in St. Petersburg, Russia, so the four-ton titanium orb was shipped halfway around the world. For days the sphere was squeezed mercilessly, simulating repeated dives to depths beyond any existing on earth. Afterward, it showed zero evidence of fatigue. “Even millions of cycles would not adversely affect it,” Lahey told me. The crushing pressure only makes the sphere stronger.

When I boarded Vescovo’s ship in Tonga, I had already digested Nargeolet’s incredible résumé. It was given to me by Captain Don Walsh, Navy deep submergence pilot number one. He and Jacques Piccard made history by diving 35,800 feet to the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep, the ocean’s absolute nadir.

Struwe dived with Lahey to 35,800 feet—he wanted to, but also he had to. How else could he certify the Limiting Factor worthy of the first-ever DNV class approval for repeated dives to “unlimited depth”? Struwe was so integral to the sub’s success that Lahey considered him to be a codesigner.

All this made Rush look awfully foolish within the community as he trash-talked the classification societies. “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” he complained in a blog post. His sub was simply too advanced for the uninitiated. But Rush also used slippery language to infer to clients that the Titan would be classed: “As an interim step in the path to classification, we are working with a premier classing agency to validate Titan’s dive test plan.”

“He actually had the DNV logo up on his website for a time,” Lahey recalled in disgust. “I told Jonathan Struwe about it and he called Stockton and said, ‘Take it down, and take it down now.’ ”

When I boarded Vescovo’s ship in Tonga, I had already digested Nargeolet’s incredible five-page résumé. It was given to me by Captain Don Walsh, Navy deep submergence pilot number one. Walsh commanded the bathyscaphe Trieste in 1960, when he and Jacques Piccard made history by diving 35,800 feet to the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep, the ocean’s absolute nadir. Walsh was 87 years old when I met him in 2019; he had dedicated his entire legendary career to deep-sea science, engineering, and exploration. “PH is kind of my parallel on the French side,” he told me. “He’s a walking history. He can give you the European angle on deep exploration.”

Nargeolet had been a decorated commander in the French navy, the captain of France’s 6,000-meter sub, the Nautile, and the leader of his country’s deep submergence group. As commanding officer of the French navy’s explosive ordnance disposal team, he’d de-mined the English Channel, the North Sea, and the Suez Canal. And that was just on page one.

I felt awed to meet him, and a bit intimidated. But PH was a deeply humble man. He talked about how much he loved the ocean, how diving brought him a sense of peace beyond anything attainable on land. He described how the French pilots in the Nautile would stop for lunch on the seafloor, laying a tablecloth, breaking out silverware, and decanting a bottle of wine. What’s your favorite place to dive? I asked him. “Volcanic vents,” he replied without hesitation.

PH also loved the Titanic—he made his first manned dive to the wreck in 1987 and had revisited the site more than 30 times. No one knew the ship’s past and present as intimately as he did. (He would later write that from the moment he saw it, the Titanic had “placed itself at the center of my life.”) He laughed as he explained why he got a kick out of seeing the Titanic’s swimming pool: “Because it looks like it’s empty and it’s full of water! You don’t see the surface, you know?”

One morning, as the Limiting Factor was being launched, I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder: I was standing too close to the winch. Nargeolet guided me to a safer spot, cautioning me in his lovely French accent: “When something goes wrong, it goes wrong very fast.”

If empathy and sadness were the only emotions I felt, I’d be able to sleep better. But I am also angry. Angry at Rush’s disrespect for the deep ocean, a realm he professed to want to explore but in reality did not understand. Angry because five people are dead and many others were jeopardized (all of whom must feel like they’ve survived a game of Russian roulette) after Rush was warned for years that his sub wasn’t fit for purpose.

My anger is also personal, because when I first heard about OceanGate back in 2018, I was just beginning to learn about submersibles, just beginning to report my book. I didn’t yet know how reckless, how heedless, how insane the Titan was. I didn’t know that the 4,000-meter sub’s viewport was certified to only 1,300 meters. I wanted desperately to dive to abyssal depths but at the time couldn’t see a way to do it. The handful of vehicles in the world that can dive below 10,000 feet were all dedicated to science.

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Then suddenly there was Rush, holding forth in the media about how his brilliant new sub would take people to see the Titanic and saying things like, “If three quarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?” and “I want to change the way humanity regards the deep ocean.” I wasn’t very interested in diving to the gruesome Titanic, but I was extremely interested in diving to 13,000 feet. Rush’s operation sounded like exactly what I was looking for.

I called OceanGate and spoke to a marketing executive, a young person I won’t name because they left the company long ago. The 2019 Titanic trips were nearly sold out, they told me, but there would be future expeditions even deeper: “The end goal is not 4,000 meters. We’re already building to go to 6,000 meters.” This was possible because of Rush’s many advanced innovations, they explained. The Titan’s pressure hull would be made of “space-grade” carbon fiber, monitored by an array of acoustic sensors. “Steel just implodes,” they said with assurance, as if this was something that had ever happened. “But carbon fiber gives a warning 1,500 meters before implosion. It makes very specific snapping sounds. There’s no other acoustic hull-monitoring system in the world.” True. No other deep-sea submersible in the world had such a system. Because no other deep-sea sub needed one.

Fortunately, I knew enough to speak to a few people before I got anywhere near the Titan. One phone call was all it took.

Terry Kerby, the veteran chief pilot of the University of Hawaii’s two deep-sea subs, the Pisces IV and the Pisces V, recoiled when I asked him what he thought about OceanGate. “Be careful of that,” he warned. “That guy has the whole submersible community really concerned. He’s just basically ignoring all the major engineering rules.” He paused to make sure this had sunk in, and then added emphatically: “Do not get into that sub. He is going to have a major accident.”

Kerby referred me to marine engineer Will Kohnen for a more detailed explanation of why the Titan was “just a disaster.” Kohnen is the chair of the Marine Technology Society’s Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee. He helped write the class rules for submersibles, owned and operated a company that manufactured submersibles, and had decades of experience in the field.

And Kohnen, a straight-shooting French Canadian, knew all about the Titan. “It’s been a challenge to deal with OceanGate,” he said with a sigh and then launched into a two- hour explanation of the reasons why. Carbon fiber is great under tension (stretching) but not compression (squeezing), he told me, offering an example: “You can use a rope to pull a car. But try pushing a car with a rope.”

The bottom line? A novel submersible design was welcome—but only if you were willing to do the herculean amount of testing to prove that it was safe, under the gimlet eye of a classification society. OceanGate decided that process would be too long and expensive, Kohnen said, “and they were just going to do whatever they wanted.”

His committee had recently written a letter to Rush—signed by Kohnen and 37 other industry leaders—expressing their “unanimous concern” about the Titan’s development and OceanGate’s “current ‘experimental’ approach.” Rush needed to stop pretending that he was working with DNV and start doing it, stop misleading the public, stop breaching “an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold.” The group concluded by asking Rush to “confirm that OceanGate can see the future benefit of its investment in adhering to industry accepted safety guidelines…” The letter, which has now been widely publicized, was a stern warning, the epistolary equivalent of being hauled into the principal’s office and smacked with a ruler.

Surely, people in the submersible world thought, Rush would come to his senses. Surely he wouldn’t actually go through with this?

Rush ignored the Marine Technology Society’s letter. He ignored the fact that it was signed—at the top—by Don Walsh. Don Walsh! If you know anything about the deep ocean, you know that when Don Walsh speaks, you shut up and listen.

“He doesn’t tell the truth, what’s his name—Rush,” Walsh observed to me. “He’s absolutely 14-karat self-certitude.”

“Have you met him?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” Walsh said tartly.

“What was your impression?”

Walsh chuckled. “Oh, he tolerated me. He was correct. He was polite. He really wanted to tell me how he was all out on the cutting edges of technology, places I couldn’t even imagine.”

Rush ignored the fact that the letter was signed by the cofounder of EYOS Expeditions, Rob McCallum, whom he’d known since 2009 and had tried unsuccessfully to hire for OceanGate’s Titanic operations. McCallum’s client list was awash in wealthy ocean explorers. He’d led seven expeditions to the Titanic with Russia’s two Mir submersibles and had dived to the wreck himself. When McCallum learned more about the Titan, he wanted nothing to do with it: “I’ve never allowed myself to be associated with an unclassed vehicle. Ever.”

Rush ignored the fact that the letter was signed by Terry Kerby, a former Coast Guard navigator who led the Hawaii Undersea Research Lab for 38 years and had made more than 900 sub dives in the Pacific. “You have enough to worry about if you’re exploring volcanoes or shipwrecks without having to worry about whether your submersible is going to survive,” Kerby told me.

“Would you ever agree to pilot a sub that wasn’t classed?” I asked.

“Never. Nope. No.”

Rush ignored the fact that the letter was signed by Patrick Lahey, a man who forgot more about manned subs yesterday than Rush would learn in his lifetime. Lahey had not only signed the letter and warned Rush repeatedly about the Titan’s dangers, he also quietly paid the Lochridges’ legal fees in the hope that the inspection report would be dissected in court and made public. But to Lahey’s “bitter disappointment,” Lochridge decided to settle, withdrawing his OSHA complaint and agreeing not to discuss OceanGate publicly in exchange for being left alone. “I think Stockton had really intimidated him and frightened him,” Lahey said. “I certainly would have continued that fight, because I believe you take something like that right to the end. But he didn’t want to, and I knew it wasn’t my decision.”

By spring 2018, it was evident that Rush’s deep-sea sub would never be certified. “Titan could not get classed because it was built of the wrong material and it was built the wrong way,” McCallum said. “So once Stockton made up his mind, he was on a path from which there was no return. He could have stopped, but he could never fix it.”

Rush was angry that McCallum had been steering EYOS’s clients away from diving in the Titan, though many had expressed interest. “I have given everyone the same honest advice which is that until a sub is classed, tested, and proven it should not be used for commercial deep dive operations,” McCallum wrote to Rush in March 2018. “4,000 [meters] down in the mid-Atlantic is not the kind of place you can cut corners.”

“It is my hope that when you cite OceanGate’s missing classification that you also offer the following,” Rush replied in a sour email. “1) that this need is expressly your opinion, 2) that there has never been a fatality in an unclassed sub, (3) that there are subs in current commercial operation that are not classed, (4) and that Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and SpaceX all follow the same ethos [False: They had to get FAA approval] and relevant and respective industry certification paths.” He concluded by lecturing McCallum: “Industry attempts to disparage innovative business, operational and design approaches will not help advance subsea exploration.”

PH Nargeolet, who died in the Titan implosion, poses next to a miniature of the Titanic, his life’s obsession.JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images.

At Kohnen’s invitation, I attended the Marine Technology Society’s 2019 meeting. By that time Rush had been ignoring its letter for a year. “The program is an overview of manned submersible operations worldwide,” Kohnen said, addressing the group. “Today we’re doing the deep submersible review work.” This consisted of an alphabetical rundown of every deep sub and the status of its operations. When he got to the letter O, Kohnen cleared his throat. “Anybody here from OceanGate?” (Silence.) “No?”

OceanGate’s recalcitrance was like smog hovering over the conference room. During a coffee break, I heard the Titan mentioned in the same breath as the UC3 Nautilus, a creepy Danish sub whose owner had killed and dismembered journalist Kim Wall on a dive. In a corner, two marine engineers were worked up, and I caught a snatch of their conversation: “When it’s compressing it can actually buckle,” one engineer said in an exasperated tone, referring to Rush’s carbon fiber hull. “Like if you stand on an empty soda can.” The other engineer snorted and said: “I wouldn’t get into that thing for any amount of money.”

Clearly, Rush would do as he pleased. He would register the Titan in the Bahamas and sail from a Canadian port into international waters, thus skirting Coast Guard regulations that any commercial sub must be classed. OceanGate’s lawyer, Thomas Gilman, emphasized in a legal filing against the Lochridges that the Titan “will operate exclusively outside the territorial waters of the United States.”

Anyway, Rush wasn’t carrying paying customers—he was enlisting “mission specialists.” This wasn’t some cute marketing ploy, like American Airlines giving a kid a set of plastic pilot’s wings. In maritime law, crew receive much lighter protections than commercial passengers—and to Rush’s mind, calling them mission specialists and putting them to work on the ship made them crew. On a podcast, CBS reporter David Pogue noted that, in advance of shooting his segment on the 2022 Titanic expedition, OceanGate had emailed him “a document that basically said, ‘In thy news reporting thou shalt not use the terms ‘tourists, customers, or passengers.’ The term is mission specialists.”

So, yes. Many people felt that a catastrophe was brewing with the Titan, but at the same time everybody’s hands were tied.

On the Titan’s second deep test dive in April 2019—an attempt to reach 4,000 meters in the Bahamas—the sub protested with such bloodcurdling cracking and gunshot noises that its descent was halted at 3,760 meters. Rush was the pilot, and he had taken three passengers on this highly risky plunge. One of them was Karl Stanley, a seasoned submersible pilot who would later describe the noises as “the hull yelling at you.” Stanley was no stranger to risk: He’d built his own experimental unclassed sub and operated it in Honduras. But even he was so rattled by the dive that he wrote several emails to Rush urging him to postpone the Titan’s commercial debut, less than two months away.

The carbon fiber was breaking down, Stanley believed: “I think that hull has a defect near that flange that will only get worse. The only question in my mind is will it fail catastrophically or not.” He advised Rush to step back and conduct 50 unmanned test dives before any other humans got into the sub. True to form, Rush dismissed the advice—“One experiential data point is not sufficient to determine the integrity of the hull”—telling Stanley to “keep your opinions to yourself.”

When the world learned of the Titan’s disappearance on June 18, no one I know in deep-sea circles believed that it was simply lost, floating somewhere, unseen because—the mind reels—it didn’t have an emergency beacon. “The fear was collapse,” Lahey said bluntly. “The fear was always pressure hull failure with that craft.”

“I remember him saying at one point to me that one of the reasons why he had me on that dive was he expected that I would be able to keep my mouth shut about anything that was of a sensitive nature,” Stanley told me in a phone interview.

“Like what?” I asked.

“I don’t think he wanted everybody knowing about the cracking sounds.”

Shortly after that, Rush did make an accommodation to reality. He sent out a press release heralding the Titan’s “History Making Deep-Sea Dive to 3,760 Meters with Four Crew Members,” and then a month later canceled the 2019 Titanic expedition. (He had previously scrubbed the 2018 expedition, claiming that the Titan had been hit by lightning.) Now, Rush was off to build a new hull.

Surely, people in the submersible world thought, Rush would come to his senses. Surely he wouldn’t actually go through with this?

But he did. 2020 was a write-off because of COVID. In 2021, Rush took his first group of “mission specialists” to the Titanic—and with him now, as part of his team, was PH Nargeolet.

It’s not that Nargeolet's friends didn’t try to stop him. “Oh, we…we all tried,” Lahey said. “I tried so hard to tell him not to go out there. I fucking begged him, ‘Don’t go out there, man.’ ”

It’s that Nargeolet knew everything they were saying was true and wanted to go anyway. “Maybe it’s better if I’m out there,” Lahey recalls Nargeolet saying. “I can help them from doing something stupid or people getting hurt.” In the implosion’s aftermath, the French newspaper Le Figaro would report that Nargeolet had told his family that he was wary of the Titan’s carbon fiber hull and its oversized viewport, assessing them as potential weak spots. “He was a little skeptical about this new technology, but also intrigued by the idea of piloting something new,” a colleague of Nargeolet's, marine archaeologist Michel L’Hour, explained to the paper. “It was difficult for him to consider a mission on the Titanic without participating in it himself.”

Now the reports are emerging about the plague of problems on OceanGate’s 2021 and 2022 Titanic expeditions; more dives scrubbed or aborted than completed—for an assortment of reasons from major to minor. A communications system that never much worked. Battery problems, electrical problems, sonar problems, navigation problems. A thruster installed backward. Ballast weights that wouldn’t release. (On one dive, Rush instructed the Titan’s occupants to rock the sub back and forth at abyssal depths in an attempt to dislodge the sewer pipes he used to achieve negative buoyancy.) Getting all the way down to the seafloor and then fumbling around for hours trying to find the wreck. (“I mean, how do you not find a 50,000 ton ship?” Lahey asked me, incredulous, in July 2022.)

One group had been trapped inside the sub for 27 hours, stuck on the balky launch and recovery platform. Other “mission specialists” were sealed inside the sub for up to five hours before it launched, sweltering in sauna-like conditions. Arthur Loibl, a German businessman who dove in 2021, described it to the Associated Press as a “kamikaze operation.”

Fair is fair: Some people did get to see the Titanic and live to tell about it. Plenty more left disappointed, having spent an extremely expensive week in their branded OceanGate clothing, doing chores on an industrial ship. (OceanGate’s Titanic expedition 2023 promotional video, now removed from the internet, showed “mission specialists” wiping down ballast pipes and cleaning the sub.) And when Rush offered them 300-foot consolation dives in the harbor, even those were often canceled or aborted.

Sadly, those problems now seem quaint.

When the world learned of the Titan’s disappearance on June 18, no one I know in deep-sea circles believed that it was simply lost, floating somewhere, unseen because—the mind reels—it didn’t have an emergency beacon. No one believed that its passengers were slowly running out of oxygen. If the sub were entangled amid the Titanic wreck, that wouldn’t explain why its tracking and communications signals had vanished simultaneously at 3,347 meters. “The fear was collapse,” Lahey said bluntly. “The fear was always pressure hull failure with that craft.”

But the families didn’t know, and the public didn’t know, and it would be ghastly not to hope for some slim chance of survival, some possible miracle. But which was better to hope for? That they perished in an implosion at supersonic speed—or that they were alive with hardly a chance of being found, left to suffocate for four days in a sub that had all the comforts of an MRI machine?

“When I found out that they were bolted in…” Kerby told me, his voice anguished. “They couldn’t even evacuate and fire a flare. You know, there’s a really good reason for those [hatch] towers. It gives everyone a chance to make it out.”

“The lack of the hatch in the OceanGate design was a serious deviation from any and all submersible design safety guidelines that exist today,” Kohnen wrote in an email, seconding Kerby. “All subs need to have hatches.”

No knowledge of the tragedy was preparation enough for watching television coverage of the Titan’s entrails being craned off the recovery ship Horizon Arctic. Eight-inch-thick titanium bonding rings—bent. Snarls of cables, mangled debris, sheared metal, torn exterior panels: They seemed to have been wrenched from Grendel’s claws in some mythical undersea battle. But no, it was simply math. A cold equation showing what the pressure of 6,000 psi does to an object unprepared to meet it.

One person involved in the recovery effort, who wishes to remain anonymous, told me that the wreckage itself was proof that no one aboard the sub had suffered: “From what I saw of all the remaining bits and pieces, it was so violent and so fast.”

The abyss doesn’t care if you went to Princeton or that your ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence. If you want to go down into her world, she sets the rules.

“What did the carbon fiber look like?” I asked.

“There was no piece I saw anywhere that had its original five-inch thickness,” he said. “Just shards and bits…. It was truly catastrophic. It was shredded.”

Now, back on land, he was still processing what he’d seen. “I think people don’t actually understand just how forceful the ocean is. They think of the ocean as going to the beach and sticking their toes in the sand and watching waves come in, and stuff like that,” he reflected. “They haven’t a clue.”

“Is there any possible reason the Titan could have imploded other than its design and construction were unsuitable for diving to 4,000 meters?” I asked Jarl Stromer, the manager of class and regulatory compliance for Triton Submarines. Stromer, who has worked in the industry since 1987, began his career as a senior engineer at the American Bureau of Shipping. He’s an expert on the rules, codes, and standards for every type of manned sub—the nuts and bolts of undersea safety.

“No,” he replied flatly. “OceanGate bears full responsibility for the design, fabrication, testing, inspection, operation, maintenance, catastrophic failure of the Titan submersible and the deaths of all five people on board.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In the beginning, OceanGate’s mission had seemed so promising: “Founded in Everett, Washington in 2009, the company provides manned submersible services to reach ocean depths previously unavailable to most individuals and organizations.” But there’s a vast chasm between intention and execution—and pieces of the Titan now lie at the bottom of it.

After the tragedy OceanGate went dark, suspending its operations. Its website and social media channels were suddenly gone, its promotional videos deleted. Emails sent to the company received this reply: “Thank you for reaching out. OceanGate is unable to provide any additional information at this time.” Phone calls were greeted with a disconnection notice.

Only one person familiar with OceanGate’s thinking would speak to me on the record: Guillermo Söhnlein, who cofounded the company with Rush. And Söhnlein left that post in 2013. “So I don’t have any direct knowledge or experience with the development of the Titan. I’ve never dived in Titan. I’ve never been on the Titanic expedition,” he told me. “All I know is, I know Stockton, and I know the founding of OceanGate, and I know how we operated for the first few years.”

Okay, then. What should people know about Rush? “I think he did see himself in the same vein as these disruptive innovators,” Söhnlein said. “Like Thomas Edison, or any of these guys who just found a way of pushing humanity forward for the good of humanity—not necessarily for himself. He didn’t need the money. He certainly didn’t need to work and spend hundreds of hours on OceanGate. You know, he was doing this to help humanity. At least that’s what I think was personally driving him.”

Before the Titan’s last descent, there hadn’t been a fatal accident in a human-occupied submersible for nearly 50 years—despite a 2,000 percent increase in the annual number of dives in that period. In the 93-year history of manned deep-sea exploration, no submersible had ever imploded. “Ultimately it comes down to not just technology,” Kohnen told me, “but the rigor of the nerdy, detailed engineering that goes behind it, to determine that things are predictable.”

“This disaster validates the approach the industry has always taken,” McCallum agreed. “Stockton could have been held in check by professional engineers, independent oversight, and a genuine culture of safety. That he wasn’t will be the subject of much investigation. For those within OceanGate that enabled this culture there should be a long period of self-reflection. This tragedy was predicted. It was avoidable. It was inevitable. It must never be allowed to happen again.”

Those rules Rush so disdained? They had been refined, honed, universally adopted—and they had worked. Submersibles had earned their title as the world’s least risky mode of transportation even as they operated in the world’s riskiest environment. Because there is one last rule that every deep-sea explorer knows: The goal is not to dive. 

The goal is to dive, and to come back. This story has been updated.  CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the provenance of the UC3 Nautilus. It was a Danish submarine. 

Susan Casey

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