The first people to dive down to the Titanic in nearly 15 years say some of the wreck is deteriorating rapidly. Over the course of five submersible dives, an international team of deep-sea explorers surveyed the sunken ship, which lies 3,800m down in the Atlantic. While parts of the wreck were in surprisingly good condition, other features had been lost to the sea.

The worst decay was seen on the starboard side of the officers’ quarters. Titanic historian Parks Stephenson said some of what he saw during the dive was “shocking”. “The captain’s bathtub is a favourite image among Titanic enthusiasts – and that’s now gone,” he said. “That whole deck house on that side is collapsing, taking with it the state rooms. And that deterioration is going to continue advancing.”

He said the sloping lounge roof of the bow section would probably be the next part to be lost, obscuring views of the ship’s interior. “Titanic is returning to nature,” he added. Strong ocean currents, salt corrosion and metal-eating bacteria are attacking the ship.(BBC)…[+]

A 64-year-old woman and her grand­daugh­ter, 20, were ar­rest­ed af­ter po­lice of­fi­cers found an as­sault ri­fle at her home in San­ta Cruz, Trinidad. Ac­cord­ing to a po­lice re­port, of­fi­cers of the North East­ern Di­vi­sion Task Force re­ceived in­for­ma­tion that a house in Sun Val­ley Ex­ten­sion, Low­er San­ta Cruz was be­ing used to store weapons.

The of­fi­cers went at about 6 pm on Sun­day where they ex­e­cut­ed a search and found an AK47 as­sault ri­fle with two mag­a­zines and 68 rounds of am­mu­ni­tion. The pen­sion­er and her grand­daugh­ter were sub­se­quent­ly de­tained for ques­tion­ing. No charges were laid up to press time on Mon­day.(Trinidad Guardian)…[+]

One of the island’s top plastic surgeons is advocating the establishment of a specialist registry in light of a significant increase in the demand for body contour surgeries across the island. Senior plastic surgeon at the University Hospital of the West Indies Dr Guyan Arscott also wants the Government to format legislation that would facilitate this registry, something, he said, the Jamaica Medical Council has been working on for some time now.

The issue came to the fore at yesterday’s Jamaica Observer Monday Exchangewhere Arscott told reporters that legislation to decide who can perform this procedure does not exist. Body contour surgery, Arscott said, includes surgery on the breast, liposuction of the stomach, back, buttocks, and thighs, among other areas.

“If we try to educate the public of what is available then they have a choice, and if I tell you that we have a training programme at the university with doctors…then the patient at least has a choice [about who operates on them],” he said.

“Not only can any other doctor go out there and inject whatever, but there are instances in this country where non-doctors and in fact even non-nurses fly into this country and inject all sorts of materials into buttocks all over the place,” Dr Arscott told editors and reporters at the Exchange held at the newspaper’s Beechwood Avenue headquarters in Kingston.(stabroek news)…[+]

Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has signalled he may abandon controversial plans to make his son ambassador to the United States, amid a fierce political backlash and growing signs Congress may block the move. “I’m not going to subject my son to failure,” Bolsonaro told reporters on Tuesday in what was the first public hint he may be reconsidering his nomination.

Bolsonaro’s bid to hand control of Brazil’s Washington DC embassy to his 35-year-old son, Eduardo, has outraged Brazil’s foreign service and set off a domestic political firestorm. A report prepared for senators who need to approve Bolsonaro’s move concluded it amounted to nepotism and identified three distinctly undemocratic precedents where leaders had made their children ambassadors: in Saudi Arabia, Chad and Uzbekistan.

Eduardo Bolsonaro’s appointment must be approved by a simple majority in Brazil’s 81-member senate, where such proposals are seldom challenged. But there are growing indications senators may block the nomination.(TheGuardian)…[+]

A 21-year-old woman acquitted of the aggravated murder of her baby in El Salvador has called on her supporters to fight for others like her. A judge said there was no evidence that Evelyn Hernández had killed her child, which was found dead in the septic tank of the toilet where she gave birth.

His ruling contradicted that of a 2017 trial, during which Ms Hernández was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years. Women’s groups hope the ruling will set a precedent for other jailed women. “I ask that justice and freedom be done for the other women,” Ms Hernández said, referring to at least 17 women who are currently in jail over similar cases. El Salvador has one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the world. Abortion is illegal in all circumstances and those found guilty face between two and eight years in jail.

But in many instances, including the case against Ms Hernández, the charge is changed to one of aggravated homicide, which carries a minimum sentence of 30 years. Evelyn Hernández was charged with aggravated murder, with prosecutors arguing that she had killed her baby in 2016. She has always maintained her innocence, saying that she had been raped by a gang member and had no idea that she was pregnant.(BBC)…[+]

The UK government has said rules allowing EU nationals to live and work freely in the UK will end in the event of a no-deal Brexit on 31 October. Theresa May had considered extending freedom of movement to 2021 or allowing EU citizens to stay for three months before applying for a longer stay.

Those options have now been dropped, in favour of a new approach to be set out later. Boris Johnson said the UK would not “become hostile to immigration”.

The PM added that “immigration into the UK will be democratically controlled”.

However, the Three Million group, which campaigns for the rights of EU citizens living in the UK said: “Ending freedom of movement without putting legal provisions in place for those EU citizens who have not yet successfully applied through the settlement scheme will mean that millions of lawful citizens will have their legal status removed overnight.”

Freedom of movement allows EU citizens to live and work in other European Union countries. In a statement, the Home Office said: “EU citizens and their families still have until at least December 2020 to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme and one million people have already been granted status.(BBC)…[+]

A woman and her child were the first two cases confirmed with Ebola in Congo’s South Kivu region last week, opening a new front in the fight against the outbreak.

Health officials said on Friday that the latest cases were more than 700 km (430 miles) south of where the outbreak was first detected. Ebola has killed at least 1,900 people in Democratic Republic of Congo over the past year. This is the second biggest toll ever and militia violence combined with local resistance have made the outbreak harder to contain.

The 24-year-old woman had been identified as a high-risk contact of another Ebola case in Beni, more than 700 km north, last month, according to a government statement issued on Friday. She traveled by bus, boat and road with her two children to Mwenga, in South Kivu, where she died on Tuesday night, according to a slide from a presentation by health officials.

The woman had been vaccinated, the slide said. The Ebola response team, headed by the Congolese government, identified 120 contacts and vaccinated 20 on Thursday, the slide showed. The latest cases show the difficulty of containing the latest Ebola outbreak, which has continued to spread in eastern Congo despite the deployment of a highly effective vaccine. (Reuters)…[+]

Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith says de­spite his achieve­ments over the last year in of­fice, mur­ders and the fear of crime con­tin­ues to be his biggest chal­lenges.

The mur­der count for this year has equalled the last year’s fig­ure with the lat­est killing tak­ing place on Thurs­day night in Mor­vant. Grif­fith ac­knowl­edged that had it not been for the good work of his of­fi­cers, it could have been worse.

“There have been some sit­u­a­tions where based on prop­er in­tel­li­gence and prop­er op­er­a­tions some­times over 10-15 per­sons could have been killed in one night,” said Grif­fith. “Per­sons will try to crit­i­cise the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice based on what you would have seen with the homi­cide rate, but I can as­sure you that the homi­cide rate in re­la­tion to the pop­u­la­tion if you look at the num­ber of firearms we have and the oth­er sig­nif­i­cant fac­tors that we en­counter on a dai­ly ba­sis. The homi­cide rate could be well have been over 1,000 per an­num,” said Grif­fith.(Stabroeknews)…[+]

Strong winds, accompanied by heavy rains blew the roofs of 15 homes, five in Point Fortin and ten in the Penal/Debe area on Thursday. Point Fortin mayor Abdon Mason said there are also reports of downed electricity lines and fallen trees in Egypt Village, Warden Road and in the vicinity of Heritage Petrotrin Company Ltd (formerly Petrotrin).

There have been no reports of injuries. “There were two episodes of strong winds, one around 12.45 pm and another around 2.30 pm. The second one came with a force and that’s when the damage was done,” Mason said.

He said he and the Disaster Management Unit (DMU) were on the ground assessing the damage while trying to provide assistance for approximately 25 people who are presently affected. He said the owners of two houses in Southern Gardens, one in Dam Road, Egypt Village, another Stafford Street, Warden Road and a fifth in Fanny Village would have suffered major losses as all household and electronic items were water-logged. He said one of the roof’s which blew off landed on the roof of a nearby house also causing some damage.(Trinidad Newsday)…[+]

“There were 15 of us on the boat and I am the only one alive,” says Mohammed Adam Oga from his hospital bed in Malta. The migrants had each paid a smuggler $700 (£575; €630) to make the journey from Libya to Europe in the scorching heat of the Central Mediterranean.

Then their fuel ran out. Then their food. Then their water. He is the sole survivor, he says, of the passengers, including a pregnant woman, who attempted the arduous journey in one of the deadliest stretches of water in the world.

“We were at sea for 11 days. We started drinking sea water. After five days, two people died. Then every day, two more died.” He was picked up in Maltese waters on Monday after the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, spotted a dinghy adrift at sea. Footage of the rescue by Malta’s armed forces showed him slumped over a man’s body, before he was airlifted to hospital. “God sent the Maltese to save me,” he told Times of Malta, while being attached to a drip and too weak to walk.(BBC)…[+]