Also on today’s menu:
Half Of Migrants Off Canary Islands Believed Drowned
Supreme Court: Navajo Treaty Does Not Guarantee Water
Native Tribes Left Out Of Nuclear Mitigation Talks
The U.S. Coast Guard has determined that the Titan submersible vessel that was planning to explore the Titanic shipwreck, but lost contact with its research vessel shortly after its departure on June 18, sustained a catastrophic implosion that killed its five occupants.
Searchers found debris from the submersible roughly 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic wreckage, the U.S. Coast Guard said. Canadian, U.S., and French ships took part in the search.
OceanGate, the company that operated the dive, called the five people who died “true explorers” who “shared a distinct spirit of adventure”. The men on board were Stockton Rush, the 61-year-old chief executive officer of OceanGate, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son, Suleman, 19, British businessman Hamish Harding, 58, and Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a 77-year-old former French navy diver and explorer.
Once the wreckage was found, the U.S. Navy revealed that its military acoustic detection system, designed to spot enemy submarines, heard what it suspected was the Titan submersible implosion hours after the submersible began its voyage. While the Navy could not say with certainty that the sound came from the Titan, officials said the suspicions helped to narrow the search area.
Half Of Migrants Off Canary Islands Believed Drowned
The charities Walking Borders and Alarm Phone say that more than 30 migrants may have drowned after their boat sank in the Atlantic Ocean off the Canary Islands. The boat was carrying around 60 people. Both organisations monitor migrant boats.
Spanish authorities said rescue workers found the bodies of a minor and a man, and rescued 24 other people.
The boat sank about 100 miles southeast of Gran Canaria on June 21. A Spanish rescue service ship, the Guardamar Caliope, was about an hour’s sail from the dinghy on the evening of June 20, but Moroccan officials who had taken over the search did not seek its aid, instead dispatching a patrol boat that did not arrive for 10 hours after a Spanish rescue plane had spotted the people, Reuters reports.
Supreme Court: Navajo Treaty Does Not Guarantee Water
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Navajo Nation in a dispute over whether federal treaties establishing the tribe’s reservation as their “permanent home” required the government to provide a sufficient water supply. Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the treaty does not require the government to “take affirmative steps to secure water for the Navajos — for example, by assessing the Tribe’s water needs, developing a plan to secure the needed water, and potentially building pipelines, pumps, wells, or other water infrastructure.”
Kavanaugh said it is difficult issue because “Allocating water in the arid regions of the American West is often a zero-sum situation” that is best left “to Congress and the President … to enact appropriations laws and to otherwise update federal law as they see fit in light of the competing contemporary needs for water.”
Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado, along with water districts in California draw their water supplies from the Colorado River. In their 5-4 ruling, the justices agreed with Colorado’s argument that siding with the Navajo Nation would undermine existing state water agreements and disrupt the management of the river. The Biden administration had said that, if the court were to come down in favor of the Navajo Nation, the federal government could face lawsuits from many other tribes.
Native Tribes Left Out Of Nuclear Mitigation Talks
The U.S. Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Washington State Department of Ecology have left three federally recognized tribes out of confidential negotiations on plans for the handling of some 56 million gallons of radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks in the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, part of their ancestral lands.
Hanford produced more than two-thirds of the plutonium for U.S. nuclear weapons, including the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. Production ceased in 1989, and the mission shifted to cleaning up the chemical and radioactive waste left behind.
The Yakama Nation, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and Nez Perce Tribe had fished, hunted, gathered, and lived in that area of Washington prior to European colonization, but the tribes ceded the land to the U.S. government in 1855 treaties that assured them of continued access. While the EPA and Ecology department have said the tribes eventually will have opportunities to discuss the new plans for the Hanford cleanup, Mason Murphy, program manager for the Confederated Tribes’ Energy and Environmental Sciences program, said the tribes also had no say in the original 1989 cleanup agreement.
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