Your briefing on Thursday
A critical stage in the search for a submarine
A submarine that disappeared over the weekend while diving to the wreckage of the Titanic may have only a few hours of oxygen left as rescue teams desperately search the North Atlantic for the missing ship. The area is about twice the size of Connecticut and more than two miles deep.
The submarine, called the Titan, contains a finite amount of oxygen and has no way to generate more. Once it is expended, the five passengers on board would run out of air to breathe. The craft is estimated to have started on Sunday with about 96 hours of breathing air supply for what should have been a two and a half hour journey.
Bangs heard under the waves of the North Atlantic yesterday and Tuesday have become the focus of the search: Remotely operated vehicles have been looking for the source of the sounds and a team of experts are investigating the sounds to determine if they could have come from the missing ship, according to the US Coast Guard.
Slow progress in Ukraine’s advance
Ukrainian leaders are trying to temper expectations for the country’s counter-offensive, now in its third week, saying the battle to drive out Russian troops will be a tough slog, not a lightning-fast advance. Ukraine has so far recaptured only a few villages in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, with progress often measured in metres, not miles.
“Some people want some kind of Hollywood movie, but it doesn’t really work that way,” Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday. He insisted that he remain confident and suggested that expectations of quick success were unrealistic.
Military analysts have said it would take weeks or months, not days, to gauge the success of Ukraine’s offensive, warning that the battle would be long and bloody. But anticipation of the operation, including among allies, has increased as Ukraine spent months amassing powerful Western-supplied weapons and training tens of thousands of soldiers for the campaign.
To assure: Officials in Kiev and some of their supporters abroad worry that if the long-awaited counter-offensive fails to produce significant gains, Ukraine’s western allies could lose patience by pouring billions of dollars into the war, and put pressure on Kiev to come to a negotiated settlement that would leave Russia holding vast tracts of conquered land.
estimates: Economists and Ukrainian officials say rebuilding Ukraine’s devastated infrastructure will cost at least $400 billion.
Explosion rocks in the center of Paris
At least 37 people were injured, four of them critically, after an explosion ripped through an apartment building in Paris’s 5th arrondissement, causing the building to partially collapse, French authorities said. The cause of the explosion, which shook the neighborhood with a loud bang, was not immediately clear.
More than 300 firefighters were on the scene and were able to prevent the flames from spreading to neighboring buildings, which were nevertheless “destabilized” and evacuated as a precaution, officials said.
Videos and photos posted on social media appeared to show that the top of the building had blown away and the street below was littered with rubble. Some witnesses said they smelled gas shortly before the explosion.
THE LAST NEWS
Around the world
An eerie synchronicity arises from watching “The Wizard of Oz” while listening to Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon.” If you start the album at exactly the right time, the music and lyrics match the images of the film exactly.
Charlie Savage, a Washington correspondent for The Times, has an odd connection to this combination. In 1995, at the age of 19, he wrote the first article about it as a summer intern at a local newspaper. “It never occurred to me to link these two works,” he writes. “But through a strange kind of accident, I played a key role in the beginning of it becoming a cultural phenomenon.”
Lives lived
Haim Roet, a Holocaust survivor who remembered the millions of Jewish victims of the Nazis by speaking their names, died last month at the age of 90.
SPORTS NEWS FROM ATHLETICS
Does Saudi Arabia fund Chelsea? That of the Premier League club trying to raise funds also raised eyebrows.
The football superstar’s mother: Kylian Mbappe’s mother, Fayza Lamariis one of the most powerful women in sports and one of the most powerful dealmakers.
From the time: A two-day camp trains current and former NBA players in the lucrative arts of broadcasting, podcasting, and throwing verbal bombs at the camera.
ART AND IDEAS
A secret in their spots
Each fall, monarch butterflies fly more than 2,000 miles from Canada to central Mexico. Less than a third survive the journey. Researchers found a common trait among those that make it: The edges of their orange-and-black wings tend to have slightly more white spots.
“Nobody even knew what these spots were for in monarchs,” says Andy Davis, a biologist at the University of Georgia. “Suddenly it seems like they are really important.”
The researchers’ working theory is that the spots reduce drag by creating heating and cooling at the wing edge, which can create tiny vortices of rising air. The difference is subtle: The successful butterflies were only about 3 percent spottier. But the scientists suspect that a slight reduction in drag could still improve flight capabilities — with potential implications for aircraft design.