Punctuated by their 8-3 road victory Wednesday night over Nashville, the Norfolk Tides are headed to the International League playoffs for the first time since 2015.

Capitalizing on a new format that rewards the season’s first-half champion, the Tides (46-23) took the title with five games to go in the first half. The last team that could mathematically catch them, the St. Paul Saints, lost 5-4 earlier Wednesday night at Toledo, opening the door for Norfolk’s opportunity.

The Tides celebrated with champagne in their clubhouse as plastic covered the lockers in Nashville, Tennessee, the home of the Milwaukee Brewers’ top farm club.

The two guys at the top of Norfolk’s lineup were beginning major league rehabilitation assignments. Neither had a hit until the ninth inning, when Cedric Mullins slugged a two-run homer for the Tides’ final runs. Bouncing back from an injury to his right groin, Mullins was 1 for 5, while Ryan Mountcastle (vertigo) was 0 for 5 with three strikeouts. Mountcastle hadn’t played a minor league game since 2019, when Baltimore promoted him from the Tides.

Norfolk took the lead in the 20-team league early in the season and never relinquished it.

In September, the Tides will play a best-of-three series — all at Harbor Park — against the team with the best second-half record for the IL Governors’ Cup. If the Tides also have the best second-half mark, they’ll face the team with the next-best second-half record.

The Tides will seek their first title since 1985, when their players included IL All-Star outfielder Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics executive portrayed by Brad Pitt in the movie “Moneyball.” Some of the New York Mets’ 1986 World Series-winning team was part of that Tidewater Tides squad.

Colton Cowser socked a home run in the first inning for Norfolk, but the Sounds took a 2-1 edge in the third on Brice Turang’s two-run single.

The Tides went ahead to stay with a three-run fourth. Connor Norby brought home Cowser and Jordan Westburg with a two-run triple to center field, then scored on newcomer Cesar Prieto’s sacrifice fly to right.

Alex Jackson’s RBI double in the sixth but Nashville’s deficit to 4-3, though the Tides threw him out at third on relay from center fielder Mullins to shortstop Westburg to Prieto.

Norfolk gained breathing room in the ninth. Heston Kjerstad slugged a triple off the wall and scored on Norby’s sacrifice fly. Maverick Handley lined a single to bring home Prieto before Mullins’ blast to right-center.

The Tides ended the game with a flourish. With the bases loaded and Nick Vespi pitching, Nashville’s Eddy Alvarez lined to Mountcastle at first base. He threw to Prieto to double off Josh VanMeter for the final out.

The series, scheduled for six games, will continue with a doubleheader at 6:35 Thursday.

By JONEL ALECCIA and LAURA UNGAR (Associated Press)

For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer “lab-grown” meat to the nation’s restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves.

The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn’t come from slaughtered animals — what’s now being referred to as “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates.

The move launches a new era of meat production aimed at eliminating harm to animals and drastically reducing the environmental impacts of grazing, growing feed for animals and animal waste.

“Instead of all of that land and all of that water that’s used to feed all of these animals that are slaughtered, we can do it in a different way,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and chief executive of Eat Just, which operates Good Meat.

The companies received approvals for federal inspections required to sell meat and poultry in the U.S. The action came months after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration deemed that products from both companies are safe to eat. A manufacturing company called Joinn Biologics, which works with Good Meat, was also cleared to make the products.

Cultivated meat is grown in steel tanks, using cells that come from a living animal, a fertilized egg or a special bank of stored cells. In Upside’s case, it comes out in large sheets that are then formed into shapes like chicken cutlets and sausages. Good Meat, which already sells cultivated meat in Singapore, the first country to allow it, turns masses of chicken cells into cutlets, nuggets, shredded meat and satays.

But don’t look for this novel meat in U.S. grocery stores anytime soon. Cultivated chicken is much more expensive than meat from whole, farmed birds and cannot yet be produced on the scale of traditional meat, said Ricardo San Martin, director of the Alt:Meat Lab at University of California Berkeley.

The companies plan to serve the new food first in exclusive restaurants: Upside has partnered with a San Francisco restaurant called Bar Crenn, while Good Meat dishes will be served at a Washington, D.C., restaurant run by chef and owner Jose Andrés.

Company officials are quick to note the products are meat, not substitutes like the Impossible Burger or offerings from Beyond Meat, which are made from plant proteins and other ingredients.

Globally, more than 150 companies are focusing on meat from cells, not only chicken but pork, lamb, fish and beef, which scientists say has the biggest impact on the environment.

Upside, based in Berkeley, operates a 70,000-square-foot building in nearby Emeryville. On a recent Tuesday, visitors entered a gleaming commercial kitchen where chef Jess Weaver was sauteeing a cultivated chicken filet in a white wine butter sauce with tomatoes, capers and green onions.

The finished chicken breast product was slightly paler than the grocery store version. Otherwise it looked, cooked, smelled and tasted like any other pan-fried poultry.

“The most common response we get is, ‘Oh, it tastes like chicken,’” said Amy Chen, Upside’s chief operating officer.

Good Meat, based in Alameda, operates a 100,000-square-foot plant, where chef Zach Tyndall dished up a smoked chicken salad on a sunny June afternoon. He followed it with a chicken “thigh” served on a bed of potato puree with a mushroom-vegetable demi-glace and tiny purple cauliflower florets. The Good Meat chicken product will come pre-cooked, requiring only heating to use in a range of dishes.

Chen acknowledged that many consumers are skeptical, even squeamish, about the thought of eating chicken grown from cells.

“We call it the ‘ick factor,’” she said.

The sentiment was echoed in a recent poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Half of U.S. adults said that they are unlikely to try meat grown using cells from animals. When asked to choose from a list of reasons for their reluctance, most who said they’d be unlikely to try it said “it just sounds weird.” About half said they don’t think it would be safe.

But once people understand how the meat is made, they’re more accepting, Chen said. And once they taste it, they’re usually sold.

“It is the meat that you’ve always known and loved,” she said.

Cultivated meat begins with cells. Upside experts take cells from live animals, choosing those most likely to taste good and to reproduce quickly and consistently, forming high-quality meat, Chen said. Good Meat products are created from a master cell bank formed from a commercially available chicken cell line.

Once the cell lines are selected, they’re combined with a broth-like mixture that includes the amino acids, fatty acids, sugars, salts, vitamins and other elements cells need to grow. Inside the tanks, called cultivators, the cells grow, proliferating quickly. At Upside, muscle and connective tissue cells grow together, forming large sheets. After about three weeks, the sheets of poultry cells are removed from the tanks and formed into cutlets, sausages or other foods. Good Meat cells grow into large masses, which are shaped into a range of meat products.

Both firms emphasized that initial production will be limited. The Emeryville facility can produce up to 50,000 pounds of cultivated meat products a year, though the goal is to expand to 400,000 pounds per year, Upside officials said. Good Meat officials wouldn’t estimate a production goal.

By comparison, the U.S. produces about 50 billion pounds of chicken per year.

It could take a few years before consumers see the products in more restaurants and seven to 10 years before they hit the wider market, said Sebastian Bohn, who specializes in cell-based foods at CRB, a Missouri firm that designs and builds facilities for pharmaceutical, biotech and food companies.

Cost will be another sticking point. Neither Upside nor Good Meat officials would reveal the price of a single chicken cutlet, saying only that it’s been reduced by orders of magnitude since the firms began offering demonstrations. Eventually, the price is expected to mirror high-end organic chicken, which sells for up to $20 per pound.

San Martin said he’s concerned that cultivated meat may wind up being an alternative to traditional meat for rich people, but will do little for the environment if it remains a niche product.

“If some high-end or affluent people want to eat this instead of a chicken, it’s good,” he said. “Will that mean you will feed chicken to poor people? I honestly don’t see it.”

Tetrick said he shares critics’ concerns about the challenges of producing an affordable, novel meat product for the world. But he emphasized that traditional meat production is so damaging to the planet it requires an alternative — preferably one that doesn’t require giving up meat all together.

“I miss meat,” said Tetrick, who grew up in Alabama eating chicken wings and barbecue. “There should be a different way that people can enjoy chicken and beef and pork with their families.”

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By MARY CLARE JALONICK (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House voted Wednesday to censure California Rep. Adam Schiff for comments he made several years ago about investigations into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, rebuking the Democrat and frequent critic of the former president along party lines.

Schiff becomes the 25th House lawmaker to be censured. He was defiant ahead of the vote, saying he will wear the formal disapproval as a “badge of honor” and charging his GOP colleagues of doing the former president’s bidding.

“I will not yield,” Schiff, who is running for the Senate in his home state, said during debate over the measure. “Not one inch.”

When it was time for Schiff to come to the front of the chamber to be formally censured, immediately after the vote, the normally solemn ceremony turned into more of a celebratory atmosphere. Dozens of Democrats crowded to the front, clapping and cheering for Schiff and patting him on the back. They chanted “No!,” “Shame!” and “Adam! Adam!”

When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy started to read the resolution out loud, as is tradition after a censure, Democrats heckled him to the point that he stopped and gave up, leaving the chamber.

“Censure all of us,” one Democrat yelled.

Schiff, the former Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the lead prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial, has long been a top Republican political target. Soon after taking back the majority this year, Republicans blocked him from sitting on the intelligence panel.

More than 20 Republicans voted with Democrats last week to block the censure resolution, but they changed their votes this week after the measure’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, removed a provision that could have fined Schiff $16 million if the House Ethics Committee determined he lied. Several of the Republicans who voted against the resolution last week said they opposed fining a member of Congress in that manner.

The final vote on Wednesday was 213-209 along party lines, with a handful of members voting present.

The revised resolution says Schiff held positions of power during Trump’s presidency and “abused this trust by saying there was evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.” Schiff was one of the most outspoken critics of the former president as both the Justice Department and the Republican-led House launched investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia in 2017. Both investigations concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election but neither found evidence of a criminal conspiracy.

“Representative Schiff purposely deceived his Committee, Congress, and the American people,” the resolution said.

The House has only censured two other lawmakers in the last 20 years. Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona was censured in 2021 for tweeting an animated video that depicted him striking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., with a sword. Former Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York was censured in 2010 for serious financial and campaign misconduct.

The censure itself carries no practical effect, except to provide a historic footnote that marks a lawmaker’s career. But the GOP resolution would also launch an ethics investigation into Schiff’s conduct.

While Schiff did not initiate the 2017 congressional investigation into Trump’s Russia ties — then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a Republican who later became one of Trump’s most ardent defenders, started it — Republicans arguing in favor of his censure Wednesday blamed him for what they said was the fallout of that probe, and of the separate investigation started that same year by Trump’s own Justice Department.

Luna said that Schiff’s comments that there was evidence against Trump “ripped apart American families across the country” and that he was “permanently destroying family relationships.” Several blamed him for the more than $30 million spent by then-special counsel Robert Mueller, who led the Justice Department probe.

Schiff said the censure resolution “would accuse me of omnipotence, the leader of some a vast Deep State conspiracy, and of course, it is nonsense.”

Democrats aggressively defended their colleague. Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who led Trump’s second impeachment, called the effort an “embarrassing revenge tour on behalf of Donald Trump.”

Mueller, who led the two-year Justice Department investigation, determined that Russia intervened on the campaign’s behalf and that Trump’s campaign welcomed the help. But Mueller’s team did not find that the campaign conspired to sway the election, and the Justice Department did not recommend any criminal charges.

The House intelligence committee probe launched by Nunes similarly found that Russia intervened in the election but that there was no evidence of a criminal conspiracy. Schiff was the top Democrat on the panel at the time.

Schiff said last week that the censure resolution was “red meat” that McCarthy was throwing to his conference amid squabbles over government spending. Republicans are trying to show their fealty to Trump, Schiff said.

He said he warned the country during impeachment proceedings three years ago that Trump “would go on to do worse. And of course he did worse in the form of a violent attack on the Capitol.”

After Democrats won the House majority in 2018, the House impeached Trump for abuse of power after he threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine and urged the country’s president to investigate then-candidate Joe Biden. Schiff was the lead House prosecutor making the case for conviction to the Senate, arguing repeatedly that “right matters.” The Republican-led chamber ultimately acquitted him.

Trump was impeached a second time a year later, after he had left office, for his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. The Senate again acquitted Trump.

In the censure resolution against Schiff, Luna also cited a report released in May from special counsel John Durham that found that the FBI rushed into its investigation of Trump’s campaign and relied too much on raw and unconfirmed intelligence.

Durham said investigators repeatedly relied on “confirmation bias,” ignoring or rationalizing away evidence that undercut their premise of a Trump-Russia conspiracy as they pushed the probe forward. But he did not allege that political bias or partisanship were guiding factors for the FBI’s actions.

Trump had claimed that Durham’s report would reveal the “crime of the century” and expose a “deep state conspiracy” by high-ranking government officials to derail his candidacy and later his presidency. But the investigation yielded only one conviction — a guilty plea from a little-known FBI employee — and the only two other cases that were brought both ended in acquittals at trial.

On Wednesday, just before the vote, Schiff’s campaign sent out a fundraising email that said Luna had introduced “yet ANOTHER resolution to censure me.”

“The vote and debate will happen imminently,” the email read, asking recipients to donate to help him fight back. “Once more, I have to be on the House floor to listen as MAGA Republicans push false and defamatory lies about me.”

Democrats also argued that the House censure resolution is an effort to distract from Trump’s recent indictment on federal charges of hoarding classified documents — several of which dealt with sensitive national security matters — and attempting to conceal them. House Republicans, most of whom are loyal to Trump, say the indictment is more evidence that the government is conspiring against the former president.

“This is not a serious resolution,” said Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., but political theater to “distract from Donald Trump’s history of transgressions and now indictments.”

A crew from Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City are racing against time in the search of the missing submersible Titan.

According to U.S. Coast Guard Northeast, a C-130 fixed wing search and rescue crew from the air station conducted two flights Monday and two flights Wednesday, scanning the ocean 900 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The Elizabeth City crew were called upon after the 21-foot submersible lost contact with its mother ship on Sunday as it descended to the wreck of the Titanic with five people aboard.

“This is an incredibly complex search operation, requiring both surface and subsurface elements,” said Capt. Jamie Frederick, First District Response Coordinator, during a press conference Wednesday.

The aerial surface search, Frederick said, is of an area approximately twice the size of Connecticut. The subsurface search is 2 1/2 miles deep.

“We also have to factor in the ever-changing weather conditions, currents and sea states that expand the search area every hour,” Frederick said.

The Northeastern Coast Guard command, which is leading the efforts, reported Wednesday morning that winds were 23 miles per hour, with gusts up to 30 miles per hour and 6-7-foot swells.

“All of our efforts are on finding the [submersible]. All I can tell you is that we have our nation’s best experts in the unified command and if we can get to [finding them], those experts would be looking at what the next course of action is,” Capt. Frederick said.

But time is running out. The Titan is expected to run out of oxygen around 6 a.m. Thursday.

“All of our efforts are on finding the [submersible]. All I can tell you is that we have our nation’s best experts in the unified command and if we can get to [finding them], those experts would be looking at what the next course of action is,” Frederick said.

Also participating in the search, is an international fleet of vessels and aircraft that includes crews from the U.S. Coast Guard First District, the Canadian Coast Guard, the Canadian Royal Navy, commercial ships and Canadian and Bahamian research teams.

When the search will conclude is uncertain.

“Sometimes you’re in a position where you have to make a tough decision,” Frederick said. “We’re not there yet.”

Caitlyn Burchett, [email protected]

By The Associated Press

A growing number of aircraft, ships and underwater equipment from the U.S., Canada and France searched Wednesday for a submersible vessel carrying five people that disappeared on its way to the wreckage of the Titanic.

The small craft named Titan, owned by undersea exploration company OceanGate Expeditions, has been chronicling the Titanic’s decay and the underwater ecosystem around it via yearly voyages since 2021.

The U.S. Coast Guard has been leading the search Titan since the Titan disappeared Sunday in a remote area of the North Atlantic Ocean.

Here’s what we know so far about the submersible and what’s being done to find it:

WHAT’S THE LATEST ON THE SEARCH?

A Canadian aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. Officials said they don’t know what made the sounds, and a robotic vessel scouring the area so far has “yielded negative results.” Additional remotely operated vessels were sent.

“The equipment that is onsite and coming is the most sophisticated in the world and certainly capable of reaching those depths,” said Sean Leet, chief executive of Canadian company Horizon Maritime.

As of Wednesday, searchers had covered an area twice the size of Connecticut in waters 2 1/2 miles deep.

WHEN AND WHERE DID THE TITAN GO MISSING?

The craft submerged Sunday morning, and its support vessel lost contact with it about an hour and 45 minutes later, according to the Coast Guard.

The vessel was reported overdue about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland, according to Canada’s Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The Titan was launched from an icebreaker that was hired by OceanGate and formerly operated by the Canadian Coast Guard. The ship has ferried dozens of people and the submersible craft to the North Atlantic wreck site, where the Titan has made multiple dives.

IS THERE ANY HOPE?

Experts say the best-case scenario would be finding the Titan on the ocean’s surface. It is equipped with safety systems to help it rise to the surface during an emergency even if everyone on board is unconscious.

If the Titan is stuck on the ocean floor, however, the occupants would eventually run out of oxygen and develop hypothermia from extreme cold. The vessel also could be caught in a fishing net or other entanglement. In those cases, the best chance to reach it could be to use a remotely operated robot on a fiber optic cable, said Jeff Karson, a professor emeritus of earth and environmental sciences at Syracuse University.

Based on its 96-hour capacity, the vessel’s air supply could run out Thursday morning.

A breach of the Titan’s hull at depth would mean instant death from the heavy pressure in the deep ocean. Still, a U.S. Coast Guard official said the efforts to find the vessel remained a “search and rescue mission, 100 percent.”

Joyce Murray, Canada’s minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, echoed that sentiment.

“We have to retain hope as part of what we are doing as a human community to find the explorers and bring them to safety,” she said.

The Massachusetts Air National Guard member who is accused of sharing sensitive military secrets has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him.

Jack Teixeira, 21, of North Dighton, appeared in federal court in Worcester Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to all six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information relating to national defense a federal grand jury leveled against him six days before.

Teixeira was walked into Courtroom One right on time, 3:45 p.m., and offered his family seated in the front left benches a sustained smile, with a quick glance toward the media on the other side of the courtroom, as he was uncuffed. His attorneys waived a reading of his indictment.

When U.S. District Magistrate Judge David H. Hennessy asked if Teixeira understood that he had a right to remain silent, the defendant stooped to the microphone and said, “Yes, your honor.”

Teixeira now has three attorneys with the addition earlier this month of Manhattan-based Michael Bachrach, an attorney noted for “winning 284 counts of acquittal for Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first and thus far only Guantanamo Bay detainee to be transferred to civilian custody for trial,” according to his website.

Backrach was appointed to Teixeira’s case because he already has experience and clearance for reviewing classified documents.

The other two defense attorneys, Brendan Kelley and Allen Franco, are both of the Federal Public Defender Office in Boston. They have not yet received the top-secret security clearance necessary to review the documents Teixeira allegedly leaked online to a group of video gamers, but Kelly said that to his understanding, the security clearance request is being expedited.

Kelly also asked that Hennessy reconsider Teixeira’s detainment, but Hennessy reiterated his earlier arguments that the indictment and its implications could be attractive to foreign governments and that nothing has occurred that changes his mind.

Teixeira — who became a guardsman in 2019 and has held top-secret security clearance since 2021 — is the leader of a Discord server, which is what the gaming-dominated social media platform calls individual groups or forums, with about 50 members. The feds allege that in this group he posted more than 40 images of classified documents. The images were said to have been posted to the group between December 2022 and March.

“Jack Teixeira was entrusted by the United States government with access to classified national defense information — including information that reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to national security if shared,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland when the indictment was returned.

“Teixeira is charged with sharing information with users on a social media platform he knew were not entitled to receive it. In doing so, he is alleged to have violated U.S. law and endangered our national security,” he added.

This is a developing story.

By MARK PRATT (Associated Press)

BOSTON (AP) — Time is quickly running out in the search for a missing submersible that lost contact with its mother ship on Sunday as it descended to the wreck of the Titanic with five people aboard.

As an international fleet of surveillance vessels and aircraft forges ahead with ongoing search and rescue efforts, each passing second makes it less likely that the passengers on the Titan will be found alive as their oxygen supply is expected to run out by Thursday morning.

Even if the Titan is located in the North Atlantic, it could be nearly impossible to reach if it is stuck on the ocean floor at roughly 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) near the Titanic’s wreckage.

The five people on board are pilot Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, the company leading the expedition; British adventurer Hamish Harding; Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, a father and son from a prominent Pakistani family; and French undersea explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet.

There are several possible outcomes for the Titan and its passengers.

TITAN FOUND ON SURFACE

The Titan has built-in safety systems that help it rise to the surface in case of emergency including sandbags and lead pipes that can be released, as well as an inflatable balloon. The system was designed to work even if everyone on board is unconscious.

That would be the best case scenario, but even then there would not necessarily be any survivors, said Lawrence Brennan, a professor at Fordham University’s School of Law.

The Titan’s hatch cannot be unlocked from the inside, “so they will have to open the hatch and the bolts from the outside and rescue the people in there. That’s the best scenario, and I’m not sure it’s likely,” said Brennan, a retired Navy captain who has been involved in investigating and prosecuting cases involving submarine rescue ships.

VESSEL FOUND INTACT ON OCEAN FLOOR — NO SURVIVORS

If the Titan is stuck on the ocean floor the occupants would eventually run out of oxygen and develop hypothermia from extreme cold, according to experts.

Nargeolet, who has made more than 30 trips to the Titanic’s wreckage, explained to the Titanic Channel in a 2019 interview the possible dangers of being trapped in another submersible, called the Nautile, in the deep ocean.

There is enough oxygen for four or five days, but that’s no help because it’s unlikely help will arrive in that time, he said. The biggest issue at the ocean floor is the water temperature of roughly 33 degrees.

Entanglement is also a danger that mission pilot Rush was aware of.

“What I worry about most are things that will stop me from being able to get to the surface — overhangs, fish nets, entanglement hazard,” he said in an interview with CBS News last year, adding that a good pilot can avoid those perils.

VESSEL FOUND INTACT WITH SURVIVORS

A Canadian military surveillance aircraft detected underwater noises in the area of the Titanic wreck, which might indicate that at least someone is alive on the Titan and trying to signal for help.

“We have to retain hope as part of what we are doing as a human community to find the explorers and bring them to safety,” Joyce Murray, Canada’s Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, said Wednesday.

The U.S. Coast Guard said they couldn’t say what was making the noises but they are searching the area where they were detected.

The noises are encouraging because submarine crews unable to communicate with the surface are taught to bang on their hull to be detected by sonar.

“It sends a message that you’re probably using military techniques to find me and this is how I’m saying it,” said Frank Owen, a submarine search and rescue expert.

The problem in that scenario is finding another vessel that can go deep enough for a rescue.

The best chance to reach the submersible could be to use a remotely operated robot on a fiber optic cable, said Jeff Karson, a professor emeritus of earth and environmental sciences at Syracuse University.

HULL BREACH

A breach of the Titan’s hull at depth would mean instant death from the heavy pressure in the deep ocean.

The water pressure 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) below the surface at the site of the Titanic wreck is roughly 400 atmospheres or 6,000 PSI.

CBS News journalist David Pogue said the vessel’s two communications systems stopped working about an hour and 45 minutes after the Titan submerged on Sunday.

“There are only two things that could mean. Either they lost all power or the ship developed a hull breach and it imploded instantly. Both of those are devastatingly hopeless,” Pogue told the Canadian CBC network on Tuesday.

NO HOPE OF SURVIVAL

Even when there is no hope of any occupants surviving because their oxygen is depleted, recovery of the vessel will be difficult.

One of the problems with locating the submersible could be that debris from the Titanic is spread out over a kilometer and some could be as big as the submersible itself, Karson said.

The submersible is essentially “another lump down there,” he said.

If it is on the bottom, what would be needed to retrieve it?

“Things that are not available presently,” said Brennan.

Equipment used for deepwater oil drilling could work, but that equipment likely isn’t anywhere near the search site, he said.

By PATRICK WHITTLE and HOLLY RAMER (Associated Press)

A Canadian surveillance vessel has detected more underwater noises in the area where rescuers are searching for a submersible that went missing in the North Atlantic while bringing five people down to the wreck of the Titanic, authorities said Wednesday.

Coast Guard officials were bringing in more ships and other vessels to search the more narrowly defined area, though the exact location and source of the sounds has not yet been determined. The full scope of the search was twice the size of Connecticut in waters 2 1/2 miles deep, said Captain Jamie Frederick of the First Coast Guard District.

“This is a search and rescue mission, 100%,” Frederick said. “We are smack dab in the middle of search and rescue and we’ll continue to put every available asset that we have in an effort to find the Titan and the crew members.”

Frederick said the noises were heard for a second day Wednesday, but “we don’t know what they are, to be frank.”

Retired Navy Capt. Carl Hartsfield, now the director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Systems Laboratory, told a news conference Wednesday that the sounds have been described as “banging noises,” but warned that search crews “have to put the whole picture together in context and they have to eliminate potential manmade sources other than the Titan.”

Even those who expressed some optimism warned that many obstacles remain: from pinpointing the vessel’s location, to reaching it with rescue equipment, to bringing it to the surface — assuming it’s still intact — before the passengers’ oxygen supply runs out.

The area of the North Atlantic where the Titan submersible went missing on Sunday is prone to fog and stormy conditions, making it an extremely challenging environment to conduct a search-and-rescue mission, said Donald Murphy, an oceanographer who served as chief scientist of the Coast Guard’s International Ice Patrol.

After a Canadian military surveillance aircraft detected underwater noises in the search area, a robotic vessel was sent to scour the region but had so far “yielded negative results,” the Coast Guard wrote on Twitter.

The Coast Guard did not elaborate on what rescuers believed the noises could be. The vessel is estimated to have as little as a day’s worth of oxygen left if it is still functioning.

Three search vessels arrived on-scene Wednesday morning, including one that has side-scanning sonar capabilities. Authorities pushed to get salvage equipment to the scene in case the submersible is found.

The Coast Guard statement about detecting sounds underwater came after Rolling Stone reported that search teams heard “banging sounds in the area every 30 minutes.”

The report was encouraging to some experts because submarine crews unable to communicate with the surface are taught to bang on their submersible’s hull to be detected by sonar.

“It sends a message that you’re probably using military techniques to find me and this is how I’m saying it,” said Frank Owen, a submarine search and rescue expert. “So, that’s really encouraging if that’s the case.”

Richard Garriott de Cayeux, the president of The Explorers Club, wrote an open letter to his club’s adventurers, saying he had “much greater confidence” about the search after speaking to officials in Congress, the U.S. military and the White House.

However, no official has publicly suggested they know the source of the underwater noises.

Meanwhile, questions remain about how teams could reach the lost submersible, which could be as deep as about 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) below the surface near the watery tomb of the historic ocean liner. Newly uncovered allegations also suggest there had been significant warnings made about vessel safety during its development.

Lost aboard the vessel are pilot Stockton Rush, the CEO of the company leading the expedition. His passengers are a British adventurer, two members of a Pakistani business family and a Titanic expert.

Authorities reported the 22-foot carbon-fiber vessel overdue Sunday night, setting off the search in waters about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John’s.

The submersible had a four-day oxygen supply when it put to sea around 6 a.m. Sunday, according to David Concannon, an adviser to OceanGate Expeditions, which oversaw the mission.

Owen said the estimated 96-hour oxygen supply is a useful “target” for searchers, but is only based on a “nominal amount of consumption the average human might consume in doing certain things.” Owen said the diver on board the Titan would likely be advising passengers to “do anything to reduce your metabolic levels so that you can actually extend this 96 hours.”

Chris Brown, a British adventurer who paid a deposit to go on the Titan voyage but later withdrew because of what he called safety concerns, said word that the searchers have heard sounds is both good news and bad news.

“If the sounds are coming from below the water indicator then that indicates that they may be alive in the water, but now we’ve got time pressures in getting them up to the surface,” Brown told ABC’s “Good Morning America” Wednesday.

Brown has previously criticized the use of a simple commercially available video game controller to steer the Titan. But OceanGate has said that many of the vessel’s parts are off-the-shelf because they have proved to be dependable.

“It’s meant for a 16-year-old to throw it around,” and is “super durable,” Rush told the CBC in an interview last year while he demonstrated by throwing the controller around the Titan’s tiny cabin. He said a couple of spares are kept on board “just in case.”

The submersible had seven backup systems to return to the surface, including sandbags and lead pipes that drop off and an inflatable balloon.

Aaron Newman, who has been a passenger on the Titan, told NBC’s “Today” show Wednesday that if the submersible is below a couple hundred meters and without power, the passengers are in complete darkness and it’s cold.

“It was cold when we were at the bottom,” he said. “You had layered up. You had wool hats on and were doing everything to stay warm at the bottom.”

Jeff Karson, a professor emeritus of earth and environmental sciences at Syracuse University, said the temperature is just above freezing, and the vessel is too deep for human divers to get to it. The best chance to reach the submersible could be to use a remotely operated robot on a fiber optic cable, he said.

“I am sure it is horrible down there,” Karson said. “It is like being in a snow cave and hypothermia is a real danger.”

Meanwhile, documents show that OceanGate had been warned there might be catastrophic safety problems posed by the way the experimental vessel was developed.

David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of marine operations, said in a 2018 lawsuit that the company’s testing and certification was insufficient and would “subject passengers to potential extreme danger in an experimental submersible.”

The company insisted that Lochridge was “not an engineer and was not hired or asked to perform engineering services on the Titan.” The firm also says the vessel under development was a prototype, not the now-missing Titan.

The Marine Technology Society, which describes itself as “a professional group of ocean engineers, technologists, policy-makers, and educators,” also expressed concern that year in a letter to Rush, OceanGate’s chief executive. The society said it was critical that the company submit its prototype to tests overseen by an expert third party before launching in order to safeguard passengers. The New York Times first reported on those documents.

The search for the missing vessel has drawn international attention. In Dubai, where the missing British adventurer Hamish Harding lives, Crown Prince Hamadan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum wrote: “Dubai and its people pray for their safety and hopeful return home.”

Others aboard include Pakistani nationals Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, whose eponymous firm invests across the country. In Pakistan’s port city of Karachi, employees at his firms said they prayed for the two’s safe return, as did government officials. French explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henry Nargeolet also was on the vessel.

Retired Navy Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, who is now deputy director of the Institute for Security Policy and Law at Syracuse University, said the disappearance of the submersible underscores the dangers associated with operating in deep water and the recreational exploration of the sea and space, “two environments where in recent past we’ve seen people operate in hazardous, potentially lethal environments,” Murrett said.

“I think some people believe that because modern technology is so good, that you can do things like this and not have accidents, but that’s just not the case,” he said.

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Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed to this report.

By HALELUYA HADERO (The Associated Press)

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon was sued Wednesday by Federal Trade Commission for what it called a yearslong effort to enroll consumers without consent into its Prime program and making it difficult for them to cancel their subscriptions.

In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, the agency accused Amazon of using deceptive designs, known as “dark patterns,” to deceive consumers into enrolling in the program. It said the option to purchase items on Amazon without subscribing to Prime was more difficult in many cases. It also said that consumers were sometimes presented with a button to complete their transactions — which didn’t clearly state it would also enroll them into Prime.

Internally, Amazon called the process “Iliad,” a reference to the ancient Greek poem about lengthy siege of Troy during the Trojan war.

Company leaders slowed or rejected changes that made canceling the subscription easier, the complaint said. It argued those patterns were in violation of the FTC Act and another law called the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act.

Launched in 2005, Prime has more than 200 million members worldwide who pay $139 a year, or $14.99 a month, for faster shipping and other perks, such as free delivery, returns and the streaming service Prime Video. In the first three months of this year, Amazon reported it made $9.6 billion from subscriptions, a 17% jump from the same period last year.

In a news release announcing the lawsuit, the FTC said though its complaint is significantly redacted, it contains “a number of allegations” that backs up its accusations against Amazon. It also accused the company of attempting to hinder the agency’s investigation into Prime, which began in 2021, in several instances.

“Amazon tricked and trapped people into recurring subscriptions without their consent, not only frustrating users but also costing them significant money,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a prepared statement. “These manipulative tactics harm consumers and law-abiding businesses alike.”

In the past two years, the agency has been ramping up its enforcement against deceptive sign-up and cancellation tactics that could manipulate consumers into buying products or services they don’t want. In December, it said Epic Games Inc., the maker of the popular Fortnite video game, would pay $245 million in customer refunds for deceptive payment methods. In November, the telecom company Vonage settled a similar case for $100 million.

The lawsuit also comes as Amazon is facing heightened regulatory scrutiny as it moves to expand its e-commerce dominance and dip its toes into other markets, including groceries and health care.

Some anti-monopoly groups celebrated the lawsuit on Wednesday shortly after the FTC’s announcement. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday, but NetChoice, a tech lobbying group that counts the online retailer as one of its members, released a statement calling the lawsuit absurd.

“The complaint is that Amazon encourages people to use Amazon Prime – this is like going after Kroger for promoting its rewards program or Costco for its membership club,” Carl Szabo, the group’s vice president and general counsel, said in a statement. “It is abundantly clear that the FTC is a runaway agency in need of greater oversight. Congress must engage in robust oversight to rein in the FTC by cutting funding and investigating its ethical lapses and abuse of power.”

The industry group also pointed to Khan’s prior criticism of Amazon, and accused her of using the lawsuit “to attack American businesses she doesn’t like.”

Khan, 34, burst onto the antitrust scene in 2017 with her massive scholarly work as a Yale law student, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” In 2021, Amazon asked unsuccessfully that she remove herself from separate antitrust investigations into its business, arguing that her public criticism of the company’s market power before she joined the government makes it impossible for her to be impartial.

The U.S. and Amazon have traded barbs for over the investigation.

Last year, Amazon accused the FTC of harassing its executives, including founder Jeff Bezos, as the agency sought to get the company’s top brass to testify as part of the probe.

The tech giant has also faced other lawsuits accusing its Prime cancelation process of being too complicated. While under scrutiny from the FTC, the company in March provided consumers with instructions on how to cancel their Prime memberships in a blog post.

The lawsuit follows another Amazon-related win by the agency just a few weeks ago. Earlier this month, Amazon agreed to pay a $25 million civil penalty to settle allegations it violated a child privacy law for storing kids’ voice and location data recorded by its popular Alexa voice assistant. It also agreed to pay $5.8 million in customer refunds for alleged privacy violations involving its doorbell camera Ring.