Laura Sarabia, 29, chief of staff to President Gustavo Petro, during an interview at the Palacio de Nariño in Bogotá, Colombia, May 12, 2023. Santiago Mesa

Nanny Marelbys Meza was subjected to a lie detector test in January for stealing thousands of dollars from the home of her then-employer and Colombian chief of staff, Laura Sarabia. The case shocked public opinion when it was exposed in Semana magazine in May and contributed to the downfall of President Gustavo Petro’s right-hand man. Far from media attention, Sarabia reserved the details of his version of events for when he testified before prosecutors, which took place on Wednesday. His lawyer told Caracol Radio on Thursday that the robbery included several official documents belonging to the President of the Republic. It was not just a personal loss but a national security issue, he claimed.

Sarabia reiterated that the amount of money stolen was US$7,000 (about 30 million pesos). According to his version, it was not the more than $35,000 (150 million pesos) that former ambassador Armando Benedetti mentioned in leaked audio recordings. And even less half a million dollars belonging to the president, as a source reserved for Semana magazine assured a few days ago. The former chief of staff assures that the money came from the overnight allowance she received for business trips to Europe and that she was using it to pay off some debts on her credit card.

The defense provided the prosecutor with some bank documents showing Sarabia had to apply for a 50 million pesos ($12,000) loan after the robbery. The attorney wishes to state that it is not plausible that a person in need of a loan is someone who has easy access to thousands or millions of dollars.

The former chief of staff also reported that the thief took the money and official documents in a black bag. The briefcase, which contained the tickets and which also contained clothing, was never stolen and is still in her possession with the former officer.

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The fall of Sarabia was a severe blow to Gustavo Petro’s government. Not only because of the use of a lie detector, which the presidency justified from the start with the argument that the logs indicated that it was used when someone close to the president was robbed. The biggest problem was the allegations of illegal wiretapping of two employees and the explosive and careless manner in which the revelations were gradually made.

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Benedetti’s audio recordings showed the violence with which the former ambassador regularly addressed his former adviser, who was part of his team when he was a senator. He was beside himself with jealousy that she now had more power. “You’re worth nothing”, “I still haven’t treated anyone as badly as I can”, “Now I’m threatening you”, “Idiot”, “You owe me everything, everything!”, “You are a Ridiculous in front of people from all over the world,” were some of the phrases he said to her.

Both Benedetti and Sarabia left the government three weeks ago. “While the investigation is ongoing, my dear and esteemed official and the Venezuelan ambassador are retiring from the government,” Petro announced in an act of promoting army officers. The former ambassador at one point threatened further disclosures related to the funding of last year’s presidential campaign. But then he said he spoke because of “anger and drunkenness” and remained silent. This Friday, however, the public prosecutor’s office is waiting for his presentation of the facts.

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Religious freedom is “under threat in almost every third country in the world,” says the Catholic organization Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) in a report released on Thursday, which found a “sharp deterioration” in most of those countries over the past two years .

• Also read: Dug up after 4 years: the body of a nun with no traces of decomposition

“We count 61 countries where citizens have experienced serious violations of religious freedom,” writes ACN, which listed 62 countries in its previous report.

According to the EDA, the internal situation has deteriorated in 47 countries and improved in only nine since the last report.

As an international foundation under papal law, the ACN examines the situation of all religious communities in 196 countries every two years. For the 16th edition of her report, which covers the period from May 2021 to December 2022, she worked with around 30 academics, missionaries, human rights activists and journalists.

In the last two years, “persecutions” (assassination attempts, deportations, exiles, conversions and forced marriages, dispossessions) have been counted in 28 countries (51.6% of the world’s population), compared to 26 in 2021. “Of these 28 countries, 13 are in Africa, where the situation has deteriorated sharply in many regions.” China and India were also “among the worst violations of religious freedom”.

In addition, according to the AED, “discrimination” (denial or restriction of access to employment, emergency assistance, justice, real estate) occurred in 33 other countries (36 in 2021). “In 13 of those countries, the situation has deteriorated.”

Religious freedom is being attacked either by “authoritarian governments,” by “Islamist extremism,” or by “ethno-religious nationalism,” the organization lists.

In their opinion, “a combination of terrorist attacks, destruction of cultural heritage and religious symbols (Turkey, Syria), manipulation of the electoral system (Nigeria, Iraq), mass surveillance (China), dissemination of anti-conversion measures and financial restrictions (South Africa). East Asia and the Middle East) has increased oppression of all faith communities.”

The NGO notes an “increasing persecution of Muslims, also by other Muslims”, especially “between Sunnis and Shiites” and refers in particular to the situation of the Hazara community in Afghanistan.

It also notes that “reported attacks on the Jewish community in the West have increased following the Covid-19-related lockdown.” “Reported anti-Semitic hate crimes in OSCE countries increased from 582 in 2019 to 1,367 in 2021.” Those figures come from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, she told AFP.

The US Coast Guard has confirmed the deaths of the Titanic Five and now the world’s attention is turned to the possible recovery of the Titanic submersible wreckage and victims.

The 21-foot-long Titan lost contact with its mothership on Sunday as it sank about 12,500 feet toward the seabed — where parts of the ship were found by a remote-controlled rescue submarine near the liner’s wreckage on Thursday.

However, the likely pounds per square inch or PSI exerted by the water pressure at these depths make recovery very unlikely.

The search for a missing submersible near the wreck of the Titanic has ended – the five people on board are now also believed to be missing

The 21-foot-long Titan lost contact with its mothership on Sunday as it sank about 12,500 feet toward the seabed — where parts of the ship were found by a remote-controlled rescue submarine on Thursday

How big is the pressure at the PSI site?

While some animals can survive at extreme depths thanks to adaptations, humans can only go about 400 feet without the help of modern technology

Following Thursday’s discovery, a hull fracture is believed to have caused the small five-person boat to implode on itself while the occupants were still on board.

Expressed in atmospheres — a unit of measure used to quantify pressure by comparing it to sea level pressure (1 atmosphere) — the water pressure at the site of the Titanic wreck is about 400 atmospheres, or 400 times the pressure most people are used to.

In pounds per square inch (PSI), another more well-known unit of pressure, the pressure at these depths is about 6,000 PSI. For reference, sea level pressure is about 14.7 psi.

dr Nicolai Roterman, a deep-sea ecologist at the University of Portsmouth, said that if such an accident had happened, the pressure would have killed the occupants instantly – a theory that has been corroborated multiple times by scientists familiar with such issues.

“If there were any hull breach, given the pressure of more than 5,500 pounds per square inch exerted by the ocean at a depth of 3,800 m (12,467 feet), the occupants would succumb to the sea almost instantly,” Roterman said.

Florida-based lead researcher Steve Somlyody came to an almost identical assessment Thursday, telling Fox News the passengers “didn’t even know it happened.”

“The pressure down there at 4,000 meters is pretty high. “About 5,800 PSI at Titanic depth,” he said. “If they had any leak, it would lead to an implosion, and that would be instantaneous, very instantaneous.”

Greg Stone, a California-based oceanographer who has been on similar submersibles, added, “When there’s a pressure failure, it happens very quickly and is over in a second.”

Where is the wreck of the Titanic?

The wreck of the Titanic (12,500 feet) is well below the water pressure that humans can survive. Experts say that if the hull is damaged, the probability of survival is almost zero

Long lost in an area of ​​the Atlantic Ocean near Newfoundland dubbed “Iceberg Alley,” much of Titanic’s hull was found in 1985 on the seabed near where she sank more than 70 years earlier was.

The barnacle-covered boat was found about 400 miles off the Canadian coast and more than two miles below the sea’s surface — where pressure conditions become problematic.

However, nearly 40 years after its discovery, only a handful of people have actually seen the lost ship, which set sail from Southampton for New York City in April 1912 before sinking.

What’s more, the wreck is left in place as salvage is difficult at such depths – where pressures are more than 10 times what even the most experienced deep-sea divers could withstand.

Will they ever be able to recover the bodies?

Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman were aboard the ill-fated Titan alongside British billionaire Hamish Harding. All three are presumed dead after the ship imploded almost 12,500 feet below the waterline

French explorer PH Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush are among those trapped on the submersible

With the five souls’ fates most likely sealed, search officers now face the looming task of locating and possibly recovering the remains. That might be a foolish undertaking, however – given that the intense pressure at such a depth would make a salvage a slow and tedious process and most likely there would not be much left to retrieve

With the fate of the five souls sealed, search officers now face the looming task of locating and possibly recovering the remains.

That might be a silly undertaking, however – given that the intense pressure at such a depth would make a salvage a slow and tedious process, and most likely there would not be much left to bring back to the surface.

To make matters worse, Titanic’s debris is spread over a kilometer and underwater currents could cause the remaining crew members to move from their underwater resting place.

Lawrence Brennan, a professor at Fordham University’s School of Law, described the situation to PBS as one of the worst-case scenarios.

To even attempt it, Brennan said, rescuers would need equipment that was “currently unavailable” and extremely expensive — which even then left little chance of finding anything of note other than more debris.

“Equipment for deep-sea oil drilling might work, but that equipment is probably not near the search site,” he said.

Hundreds of tankers could be banned from European ports as part of a new effort to crack down on illegal sales of Russian crude oil, which Western nations fear is helping fund the war in Ukraine.

After weeks of tense negotiations, EU countries on Wednesday finally signed the 11th package of sanctions against Moscow, due to be imposed in just over a year. But rather than introducing new restrictions, draft documents seen by POLITICO show Brussels is now focused on closing loopholes in existing rules, creating powers for secondary sanctions, and naming and shaming companies that break the rules.

“Attempts to circumvent EU restrictive measures have led to a sharp increase in fraudulent practices by ships transporting Russian crude oil and petroleum products,” the Council decision said.

Officials are concerned about the so-called shadow fleet of hundreds of old Russian oil tankers that may be bought at prices above the $60 a barrel price cap set by the G7 countries.

Many of the ships, which are typically owned by an opaque network of shell companies – many of which are reportedly linked to Greece – are said to have had their navigation systems switched off to hide the fact that they were docked in Russian ports, or fuel from other tankers assume sea to disguise its origin.

Measures proposed by the European Commission and agreed by member countries will ban ships suspected of these shady practices from entering EU ports “regardless of the flag under which they are registered”. Tankers must also notify authorities “at least 48 hours in advance” when planning a ship-to-ship transfer of oil within certain geographic areas.

According to Byron McKinney, a director at S&P Global Market Intelligence, “The package poses some potential challenge and added stress for companies on the compliance side, but I feel like it ended up being watered down.”

A “conservative” analysis by S&P estimates that a total of 167 tankers were involved in a ship-to-ship transshipment with a Russian ship and later called at an EU port.

Countries with large maritime industries such as Greece, Cyprus and Malta initially expressed reservations about plans to crack down on the practices, speculating they were doing so to protect their shipping companies.

“The new package is good, but is it radical? Probably not,” said Maria Shagina, a senior sanctions researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “The EU could possibly do more to inflict suffering on Russia, but we are at the point now where everyone is feeling a kind of tiredness – Greece and Hungary are haggling over the ‘list of names and shame’ and it’s a challenge, that one to hold the coalition together.”

“There’s a geographic split between the Poles and the Balts – who basically want a full embargo – and Germany, France and other states saying, ‘Well, we have to think about it, sanctions don’t hurt us any more than the target’ ” She said.

Russia has increased its oil exports to countries like India, China and Pakistan in recent months, while figures show the EU is importing crude-oil-refined fuel from these Asian countries.

In New Delhi, for example, shipments of Russian crude oil rose from about a million barrels a month to 63 million a month in April alone. In the meantime, diesel exports to the EU have increased tenfold and deliveries of kerosene have increased by more than 250 percent.

However, the deal does not breach sanctions rules as the G7 wanted to cut Russia’s gains while not destabilizing global oil markets.

In May, the International Energy Agency reported that despite price controls, Moscow’s crude oil shipments rose by 50,000 barrels a day to 8.3 million barrels, the highest level since the invasion of Ukraine.

“In fact, Russia could increase its volume to compensate for lost sales,” says the market analysis.

However, according to Maximillian Hess, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and author of a forthcoming book on Russia sanctions entitled Economic War, the oil price cap is having an effect.

“The performance of the Russian state and Russian political economy are really changing for the worse. Russia feels the pain. It cannot invest in its future. It runs on fumes.”

Despite increased oil production, Moscow’s fossil-fuel government revenues in May were about 36 percent lower than a year earlier, forcing the country to fill a growing gap if it wants to further increase funding for its armed forces.

Leonie Kijewski contributed to the reporting.