title: Bantu peoples

text: On the coastal section of East Africa, a mixed Bantu community developed through contact with Muslim Arab and Persian traders, Zanzibar being an important part in the Indian Ocean slave trade. The Swahili culture that emerged from these exchanges evinces many Arab and Islamic influences not seen in traditional Bantu culture, as do the many Afro-Arab members of the Bantu Swahili people. With its original speech community centered on the coastal parts of Zanzibar, Kenya, and Tanzania – a seaboard referred to as the Swahili Coast – the Bantu Swahili language contains many Arabic loanwords as a result of these interactions. The Bantu migrations, and centuries later the Indian Ocean slave trade, brought Bantu influence to Madagascar, the Malagasy people showing Bantu admixture, and their Malagasy language Bantu loans. Toward the 18th and 19th centuries, the flow of Zanj slaves from Southeast Africa increased with the rise of the Sultanate of Zanzibar. With the arrival of European colonialists, the Zanzibar Sultanate came into direct trade conflict and competition with Portuguese and other Europeans along the Swahili Coast, leading eventually to the fall of the Sultanate and the end of slave trading on the Swahili Coast in the mid-20th century.


title: Bantu peoples

text: In the 1920s, relatively liberal South Africans, missionaries, and the small black intelligentsia began to use the term "Bantu" in preference to "Native". After World War II, the National Party governments adopted that usage officially, while the growing African nationalist movement and its liberal allies turned to the term "African" instead, so that "Bantu" became identified with the policies of apartheid. By the 1970s this so discredited "Bantu" as an ethno-racial designation that the apartheid government switched to the term "Black" in its official racial categorizations, restricting it to Bantu-speaking Africans, at about the same time that the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steve Biko and others were defining "Black" to mean all non-European South Africans (Bantus, Khoisan, Coloureds and Indians). In modern South Africa the word's connection to apartheid has become so discredited that it is only used in its original linguistic meaning.


title: Michael Connelly

text: Michael Joseph Connelly (born July 21, 1956) is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller.


title: Michael Connelly

text: Connelly is the bestselling author of 31 novels and one work of non-fiction, with over 74 million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into 40 languages. His first novel, "The Black Echo", won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly's 1997 novel, "Blood Work". In March 2011, the movie adaptation of Connelly's novel "The Lincoln Lawyer" starred Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller. Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.


title: Michael Connelly

text: Connelly was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the second oldest child of W. Michael Connelly, a property developer, and Mary Connelly, a homemaker. He is of Irish ancestry. According to Connelly, his father was a frustrated artist who encouraged his children to want to succeed in life and was a risk taker who alternated between success and failure in his pursuit of a career. Connelly's mother was a fan of crime fiction and introduced her son to the world of mystery novels.


title: Michael Connelly

text: At age 12, Connelly moved with his family from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School. At age 16, Connelly's interest in crime and mystery escalated when, on his way home from his work as a hotel dishwasher, he witnessed a man throw an object into a hedge. Connelly decided to investigate and found that the object was a gun wrapped in a lumberjack shirt. After putting the gun back, he followed the man to a bar and then left to go home to tell his father. Later that night, Connelly brought the police down to the bar, but the man was already gone. This event introduced Connelly to the world of police officers and their lives, impressing him with the way they worked.


title: Michael Connelly

text: Connelly had planned on following his father's early choice of career in building construction and started out at the University of Florida in Gainesville, at the Rinker School of Building Construction, studying construction management. After earning grades that were lower than expected, Connelly went to see Robert Altman's film "The Long Goodbye" (1973). The film, based on Raymond Chandler's eponymous 1953 novel, inspired Connelly to want to become a mystery writer. Connelly went home and read all of Chandler's works featuring Philip Marlowe, and decided to transfer to the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, major in journalism, and minor in creative writing.


title: Michael Connelly

text: After graduating from the University of Florida in 1980, Connelly got a job as a crime beat writer at the "Daytona Beach News Journal", where he worked for almost two years until he went to the "Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel" in 1981. There, he covered the crime beat during the South Florida cocaine wars. He stayed with the paper for a few years and in 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of the 1985 Delta Flight 191 plane crash, which story earned Connelly a place as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The honor also brought Connelly a job as a crime reporter at the "Los Angeles Times". He moved to California in 1987 with his wife Linda McCaleb, whom he met while in college and married in April 1984.


title: Michael Connelly

text: After moving to Los Angeles, Connelly went to see High Tower Court where Raymond Chandler's character Philip Marlowe had lived (in his 1942 novel "The High Window"), and Robert Altman had used for his film "The Long Goodbye" (1973). Connelly got the manager of the building to promise to phone him if the apartment ever became available. Ten years later, the manager tracked Connelly down, and Connelly decided to rent the place. This apartment served as a place to write for several years.


title: Michael Connelly

text: After three years at the "Los Angeles Times", Connelly wrote his first published novel, "The Black Echo" (1992), after previously writing two unfinished novels that he did not attempt to get published. He sold "The Black Echo" to Little, Brown to be published in 1992 and won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best first novel. The book is partly based on a true crime and is the first one featuring Connelly's primary recurring character, Los Angeles Police Department Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch, a man who, according to Connelly, shares few similarities with the author himself. Connelly named Bosch after the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, known for his paintings full of sin and redemption, such as the painting "Hell", a copy of which hangs on the office wall behind Connelly's computer. Connelly describes his own work as a big canvas with all the characters of his books floating across it as currents on a painting. Sometimes they are bound to collide, creating cross currents. This is something that Connelly creates by bringing back characters from previous books and letting them play a part in books written five or six years after first being introduced.


title: Michael Connelly

text: Connelly went on to write three more novels about Detective Bosch — "The Black Ice" (1993), "The Concrete Blonde" (1994), and "The Last Coyote" (1995) — before quitting his job as a reporter to write full-time.


title: Michael Connelly

text: Michael Connelly received a good deal of publicity in 1994, when President Bill Clinton came out of a bookstore carrying a copy of "The Concrete Blonde" in front of the waiting cameras. A meeting was set up between the two at Los Angeles International Airport.


title: Michael Connelly

text: In 1996, Connelly wrote "The Poet", his first book not to feature Bosch, instead the protagonist was reporter Jack McEvoy. The book was a success. In 1997, Connelly returned to Bosch in "Trunk Music" before writing another book, "Blood Work" (1997), about a different character, FBI agent Terry McCaleb. "Blood Work" was made into a film in 2002, directed by Clint Eastwood, who also played McCaleb, an agent with a transplanted heart, in pursuit of his donor's murderer. The book came together after one of Connelly's friends had a heart transplant and he saw what his friend was going through with survivor's guilt after the surgery. When asked if he had anything against the changes made to fit the big screen, Connelly simply replied: "If you take their money, it's their turn to tell the story".


title: Michael Connelly

text: Connelly wrote another book featuring Bosch, "Angels Flight" (1999), before writing "Void Moon" (2000), a free-standing book about Las Vegas thief Cassie Black. In 2001, "A Darkness More Than Night" was published, in which Connelly united Bosch and McCaleb to solve a crime together, before releasing two books in 2002. The first, "City of Bones", was the eighth Bosch novel, and the other, "Chasing the Dime", was a non-series novel. In 2001, Connelly left California for Tampa Bay, Florida, together with his wife and daughter, so that both he and his wife could be closer to their families. His novels still took place in Los Angeles.


title: Michael Connelly

text: In 2003, another Bosch novel, "Lost Light", was published. With this book, a CD was released, "Dark Sacred Night, the Music of Harry Bosch", featuring some of the jazz music that both Connelly and the fictional character Bosch listen to. While writing Connelly listens exclusively to instrumental jazz, though, because it does not have intrusive vocals, and because the improvisational playing inspires his writing. "The Narrows", published in 2004, was a sequel to "The Poet" but featured Bosch instead of McEvoy. Together with this book, a DVD was released called "Blue Neon Night: Michael Connelly's Los Angeles", in which film Connelly presents some of the places in Los Angeles that are frequently featured in his books.


title: Michael Connelly

text: "The Closers", published in May 2005, was the 11th Bosch novel. It was followed by "The Lincoln Lawyer" in October, Connelly's first legal novel; it features defense attorney Mickey Haller, Bosch's half-brother. The book was made into a film in 2011, starring Matthew McConaughey as Haller. After releasing "Crime Beat" (2004), a non-fiction book about Connelly's experiences as a crime reporter, Connelly went back to Bosch with "Echo Park" (2006). This book sets its opening scene in the High Tower Apartment that Connelly rented and wrote from. His next Bosch story, "The Overlook", was originally published as a multi-part series in the "New York Times Magazine". After some editing, it was published as a novel in 2007. In October 2008, Connelly wrote "The Brass Verdict", which brought together Bosch and Haller for the first time. He followed that with "The Scarecrow" (May 2009), which brought back McEvoy as the lead character. "9 Dragons", a novel taking Bosch to Hong Kong, was published in October 2009. "The Reversal" (October 2010), reunites Bosch & Haller as they work together under the banner of the state on the retrial of a child murderer. The Haller novel "The Fifth Witness" was published in 2011.


title: Michael Connelly

text: "The Drop", which refers in part to the "Deferred Retirement Option Plan" that was described in the novel "The Brass Verdict" (2008), was published in November 2011. The next Bosch novel was "The Black Box" (2012). Connelly's subsequent novel, a legal thriller, was a return to Haller: "The Gods of Guilt" (2013). His next book returned to Bosch in "The Burning Room" (2014), and then Connelly used Haller as a main supporting character in the Bosch novels "The Crossing" (2015) and "The Wrong Side of Goodbye" (2016).


title: Michael Connelly

text: Connelly has won nearly every major award given to mystery writers, including the Edgar Award, Anthony Award, Macavity Award, "Los Angeles Times" Best Mystery/Thriller Award, Shamus Award, Dilys Award, Nero Award, Barry Award, Audie Award, Ridley Award, Maltese Falcon Award (Japan), .38 Caliber Award (France), the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière (France) and Premio Bancarella Award (Italy). In 2012, "The Black Box" won the world's most lucrative crime fiction award, the RBA Prize for Crime Writing worth €125,000.


title: Michael Connelly

text: When starting a book, he says, the story is not always clear, but Connelly has “a hunch” as to where it is going. The books often reference real-world events, such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the September 11 attacks. Events that might seem of minor significance are included in some of the books, because of Connelly’s personal interest in them. For example, "City of Bones", in which Detective Bosch investigates the murder of an 11-year-old boy, was written during Connelly's early years as a father of a daughter, and it hit close to home. According to Connelly, he didn't mean to write about the biggest fear of his life; it just came out that way.


title: Michael Connelly

text: Detective Bosch's life usually changes in harmony with Connelly's own life. When Connelly moved 3,000 miles across the country, Bosch's experiences sent him in a new direction in "City of Bones", written at that time. According to Connelly, his "real" job is to write about Bosch, and he brought McCaleb and Bosch together in "A Darkness More Than Night" in order to look at Bosch from another perspective and to keep the character interesting.


title: Michael Connelly

text: Connelly often changes perspectives between characters in his novels. In "Void Moon", Connelly frequently alternates between following protagonist Cassie Black and antagonist Jack Karch. In "Fair Warning", Connelly outright changes the overarching perspective of the book on occasion, regularly following protagonist Jack McEvoy in a first-person point of view while occasionally branching away from his story to follow the antagonists in third-person.


title: Michael Connelly

text: Every character in the list below, with one exception, has appeared in a Harry Bosch book. All of Michael Connelly's novels occur in the same fictional universe and character crossovers are common.


title: Long COVID

text: Long COVID or long-haul COVID (also known as post-COVID-19 syndrome, post-COVID-19 condition, post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), or chronic COVID syndrome (CCS)) is a condition characterized by long-term health problems persisting or appearing after the typical recovery period of COVID-19. Although studies into long COVID are under way, there is no consensus on the definition of the term.


title: Long COVID

text: Long COVID has been described as having the potential to affect nearly every organ system, causing further conditions (sequelae) including respiratory system disorders, nervous system and neurocognitive disorders, mental health disorders, metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, musculoskeletal pain, and anemia.


title: Long COVID

text: The most commonly reported symptoms of long COVID are fatigue and memory problems. Many other symptoms have also been reported, including malaise, headaches, shortness of breath, anosmia (loss of smell), parosmia (distorted smell), muscle weakness, low-grade fever, and cognitive dysfunction. Overall, it is considered by default to be a diagnosis of exclusion.


title: Long COVID

text: Estimates of the prevalence of long COVID vary based on definition, population studied, time period studied, and methodology, generally ranging between 5% and 50%. Health systems in some countries and jurisdictions have been mobilized to deal with this group of patients by creating specialized clinics and providing advice.


title: Long COVID

text: "Long COVID" is a patient-created term which was reportedly first used in May 2020 as a hashtag on Twitter by Elisa Perego, an archaeologist at University College London.


title: Long COVID

text: Long COVID has no single, strict definition. It is normal and expected that people who experience severe symptoms or complications such as post-intensive care syndrome or secondary infections will take longer to recover than people who did not require hospitalization (called "mild COVID-19") and had no such complications. It can be difficult to determine whether an individual's set of ongoing symptoms represents a normal, prolonged convalescence, or extended 'long COVID'. One rule of thumb is that long COVID represents symptoms that have been present for longer than two months, though there is no reason to believe that this choice of cutoff is specific to infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.


title: Long COVID

text: The World Health Organization (WHO) established a clinical case definition in October 2021, published in the journal "The Lancet Infectious Diseases":


title: Long COVID

text: The British National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) divides COVID-19 into three clinical case definitions:


title: Long COVID

text: NICE describes the term "long COVID", which it uses "in addition to the clinical case definitions", as "commonly used to describe signs and symptoms that continue or develop after acute COVID-19. It includes both ongoing symptomatic COVID-19 (from four to twelve weeks) and post-COVID-19 syndrome (12 weeks or more)".


title: Long COVID

text: NICE defines post-COVID-19 syndrome as "Signs and symptoms that develop during or after an infection consistent with COVID‑19, continue for more than 12 weeks and are not explained by an alternative diagnosis. It usually presents with clusters of symptoms, often overlapping, which can fluctuate and change over time and can affect any system in the body. Post‑COVID‑19 syndrome may be considered before 12 weeks while the possibility of an alternative underlying disease is also being assessed".


title: Long COVID

text: In February 2021, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins indicated long COVID symptoms for individuals who "don't recover fully over a period of a few weeks" be collectively referred to as "Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection" (PASC). The NIH listed long COVID symptoms of fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, sleep disorders, intermittent fevers, gastrointestinal symptoms, anxiety, and depression. Symptoms can persist for months and can range from mild to incapacitating, with new symptoms arising well after the time of infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) term "Post-Covid Conditions" qualifies long Covid as symptoms four or more weeks after first infection.


title: Long COVID

text: A multinational online survey with 3,762 adult participants with illness lasting more than 28 days found that recovery takes longer than 35 weeks for 91% of them. On average, participants experienced 56 symptoms (standard deviation ± 25.5) in nine organ systems. Symptoms varied over time, and the most common symptoms after six months were fatigue, post-exertional malaise and cognitive dysfunction.


title: Long COVID

text: Symptom relapse occurred in 86% of adult participants triggered by physical or mental effort or by stress. Three groups of symptoms were identified: initial symptoms that peak in the first two to three weeks and then subside; stable symptoms; and symptoms that increase markedly in the first two months and then stabilize.


title: Long COVID

text: Estimates of the prevalence of long COVID vary widely. The estimates depend on the definition of long COVID and the population studied. An April 2022 meta-analysis estimated that the pooled prevalence of post-COVID conditions was 43%, with estimates ranging between 9% and 81%. People who had been hospitalised with COVID saw a higher prevalence of 54%, while this number dropped to 34% for nonhospitalised people. Prevalence generally decreased with a longer follow-up time. In people age 0–18 years the prevalence of long COVID conditions – like mood symptoms, CFS and sleep disorders – appears to be at ~25% overall.


title: Long COVID

text: In a large population cohort study in Scotland, 42% of respondents said they had not fully recovered after 6 to 18 months after catching COVID, and 6% indicated they had not recovered at all. The risk of long COVID was associated with disease severity; people with asymptomatic infection did not have increased risk of long COVID symptoms compared to people who had never been infected. Those that had been hospitalised had 4.6 times higher odds of no recovery compared to nonhopitalised people.


title: Long COVID

text: In June 2022, a CDC study based on electronic health records showed that "one in five COVID-19 survivors aged 18–64 years and one in four survivors aged ≥65 years experienced at least one incident condition that might be attributable to previous COVID-19" or long COVID. An analysis of private healthcare claims showed that of 78,252 patients diagnosed with 'long COVID', 75.8% had not been hospitalized for COVID-19.


title: Long COVID

text: Long COVID is uncommon in children and their features differ from adults: In a retrospective cohort study from October 2022 of almost 660,000 US children tested for SARS-CoV-2 by antigen or polymerase chain reaction, the incidence of at least 1 systemic, syndromic, or medication feature of long COVID (1-6 months afterwards) was 42% among viral test–positive children versus 38% among viral test–negative children, that is there was an incidence proportion difference of only 3.7%. Long COVID was identified more in those cared for intensive care unit during the acute illness phase, children younger than 5 years, and those with complex chronic conditions. Neurological symptoms, such as headache, vertigo, and paresthesiae were not significant findings in this study, as opposed to in adults.


title: Long COVID

text: A 2021 study from the UK Office for National Statistics with 20,000 participants, including children and adults, found that, in children who tested positive, at least one symptom persisted after five weeks in 9.8% of children aged two to eleven years and in 13% of children aged 12 to 16 years.


title: Long COVID

text: A 2022 University College London study in the UK, found that children ages 11–17 who had a positive PCR test were more likely to have three or more symptoms three months after their diagnosis compared to those with a negative test.


title: Long COVID

text: It is currently unknown why most people recover fully within two to three weeks and others experience symptoms for weeks or months longer. The exact processes that cause long COVID remain uncertain, but research has established that long COVID is associated with changes in fatty acid metabolism and mitochondrial dysfunction.


title: Long COVID

text: A March 2021 review article cited the following pathophysiological processes as the predominant causes of long COVID:


title: Long COVID

text: In October 2020, a review by the United Kingdom's National Institute for Health and Care Research hypothesized that ongoing long COVID symptoms may be due to four syndromes:


title: Long COVID

text: Long COVID is similar to post-Ebola syndrome and the post-infection syndromes seen in chikungunya and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which is often triggered by infection and immune activation and was previously also known as "post-viral fatigue". The pathophysiology of long COVID may be similar to these other conditions. Some long COVID patients in Canada have been diagnosed with ME/CFS, a "debilitating, multi-system neurological disease that is believed to be triggered by an infectious illness in the majority of cases". There is need for more research into ME/CFS; Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the US government, said that COVID-19 is a "well-identified etiologic agent that should be very helpful now in getting us to be able to understand [ME/CFS]".


title: Long COVID

text: Xenon MRI is being used to study long COVID, because it provides patients and physicians with explanations for previously unexplained observations. Xenon MRI can measure gas exchange and provide information on how much air is taken up by a patient's bloodstream, which is being researched in long-haul COVID patients.


title: Long COVID

text: Xenon MRI can quantify three components of lung function: ventilation, barrier tissue uptake and gas exchange. Xenon-129 is soluble in pulmonary tissue, which allows the evaluation of lung functions such as perfusion and gas exchange (an advantage over helium). Ventilation measures how the air is distributed in the lung and can provide the locations of potentially compromised lung areas if no xenon reaches those areas. Barrier tissue uptake and gas exchange measure how much air diffuses across the alveolar-capillary membrane. Xenon MRI helps determine how well air is taken in by the lungs, absorbed into lung tissue, and taken up by the blood.


title: Long COVID

text: A September 2021 study published in "The Lancet" found that having two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine halved the odds of long COVID. However, a May 2022 study published by "Nature" that examined VA Saint Louis Health Care System records from January to December 2021 of more than 13 million people, including 34,000 people vaccinated against COVID-19 who had breakthrough infections, found that COVID-19 vaccination reduced long COVID risk by about 15%. Another study found the odds of developing long covid is reduced by 75% with 2 vaccines and by 85% with 3 doses.


title: Long COVID

text: , there is no established pharmaceutical treatments for long COVID. There are however trials in progress for possible treatments.


title: Long COVID

text: Management of long COVID depends on symptoms, with current guidelines recommending multidisciplinary rehabilitation to improve symptoms and quality of life. Rest, planning and prioritising is advised for people with fatigue. People who suffer from post-exertional system exacarbation may benefit from activity management with pacing. People with allergic-type symptoms such as rashes on the skin may benefit from antihistamines. Patients should also be routinely screened for mental health conditions, such as post-traumatic stress, which has been associated with fatigue severity.


title: Long COVID

text: In October 2020, a guide published by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) says that ongoing post-COVID-19 infection symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath and chest pain will require management by GPs, in addition to the more severe conditions already documented.


title: Long COVID

text: In December 2021, research by a health economics expert at Deakin University suggests that even without fully understanding the Omicron variant's effects yet, a further 10,000 to 133,000 long COVID cases are likely to emerge on top of the current approximately 9450 in New South Wales and 19,800 in Victoria, after border and other restrictions had been recently lifted. The RACGP released new guidelines for general practitioners to manage a large number of new long COVID patients.


title: Long COVID

text: In October 2020, the DATCOV Hospital Surveillance Department of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) looked into a partnership with the International Severe Acute Respiratory and emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC) (an open-access research and data resource) in order to conduct clinical research into the impact PASC may have within the South African context. As of 30 January 2021, the project has yet to receive ethical approval for the commencement of data collection. Ethics approval was granted on 3 February 2021 and formal data collection began on 8 February 2021.


title: Long COVID

text: In Britain, the National Health Service set up specialist clinics for the treatment of long COVID. The four Chief Medical Officers of the UK were warned of academic concern over long COVID on 21 September 2020 in a letter written by Trisha Greenhalgh published in "The BMJ" signed by academics including David Hunter, Martin McKee, Susan Michie, Melinda Mills, Christina Pagel, Stephen Reicher, Gabriel Scally, Devi Sridhar, Charles Tannock, Yee Whye Teh, and Harry Burns, former CMO for Scotland.


title: Long COVID

text: In October 2020, NHS England's head Simon Stevens announced the NHS had committed £10 million to be spent that year on setting up long COVID clinics to assess patients' physical, cognitive, and psychological conditions and to provide specialist treatment. Future clinical guidelines were announced, with further research on 10,000 patients planned and a designated task-force to be set up, along with an online rehabilitation service – "Your Covid Recovery". The clinics include a variety of medical professionals and therapists, with the aim of providing "joined-up care for physical and mental health". NHS Long COVID clinics have been found to positively impact quality of life and support the management of symptoms, although further research is required to improve these services.


title: Long COVID

text: The National Institute for Health Research has allocated funding for research into the mechanisms behind symptoms of long COVID.


title: Long COVID

text: In December 2020, University College London Hospitals (UCLH) opened a second long COVID clinic at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery for patients with post-COVID neurological issues. The first clinic had opened in May, primarily focused on respiratory problems, but both clinics refer patients to other specialists where needed, including cardiologists, physiotherapists and psychiatrists. By March 2021 there were 69 long COVID clinics in the English NHS, mostly focussing on assessing patients, with more planned to open. There were fears that community rehabilitation services did not have capacity to manage large numbers of referrals.


title: Long COVID

text: On 18 December 2020, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) published a guide to the management of long COVID. The guideline was reviewed by representatives of the UK doctors #longcovid group, an online support group for COVID long-haulers, who said that it could be improved by introducing a more comprehensive description of the clinical features and physical nature of long COVID, among other changes.


title: Long COVID

text: In November 2021 complaints were reported from NHS staff that neither their employers nor their trades unions were supportive, though the British Medical Association was pushing for long COVID to be classed as an occupational disease.


title: Long COVID

text: In May 2022 demand for occupational therapy led rehabilitation services in Britain was reported to have increased by 82% over the previous six months as occupational therapists were supporting people whose needs have become more complex because of delays in treatment brought about by the pandemic. Half of occupational therapists surveyed were supporting people affected by lasting Covid symptoms.


title: Long COVID

text: On 23 February 2021, the National Institutes of Health director, Francis Collins, announced a major initiative to identify the causes and ultimately the means of prevention and treatment of people who have long COVID. Part of this initiative includes the creation of the COVID-19 Project, which will gather data on neurological symptoms associated with PASC.


title: Long COVID

text: On 28 April 2021, the Subcommittee on Health of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing about long COVID. In February 2022, it was announced that at least sixty-six hospitals and health systems had launched COVID recovery programs to aid patients who experience long term or lingering symptoms.


title: Long COVID

text: Some people experiencing long COVID have formed groups on social media sites. In many of these groups, individuals express frustration and their sense that their problems have been dismissed by medical professionals.


title: Long COVID

text: Founded by Lisa McCorkell and other scientists who are also long COVID patients, the Patient-Led Research Collaborative has carried out surveys to gather data on long COVID symptoms, and has received funding for five long Covid research projects led by patients themselves.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The wreck of the RMS "Titanic" lies at a depth of about , about south-southeast of the coast of Newfoundland. It lies in two main pieces about apart. The bow is still recognisable with many preserved interiors, despite deterioration and damage sustained hitting the sea floor. In contrast, the stern is completely ruined. A debris field around the wreck contains hundreds of thousands of items spilled from the ship as she sank. The bodies of the passengers and crew would have also been distributed across the sea bed, but have since been consumed by other organisms.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Many schemes have been proposed to raise "Titanic", including filling the wreck with ping-pong balls, injecting it with 180,000 tons of Vaseline, or using half a million tons of liquid nitrogen to encase it in an iceberg that would float to the surface. However, the wreck is too fragile to be raised and is now protected by a UNESCO convention.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Almost immediately after "Titanic" sank on 15 April 1912, proposals were advanced to salvage her from her resting place in the North Atlantic Ocean, despite her exact location and condition being unknown. The families of several wealthy victims of the disaster – the Guggenheims, Astors, and Wideners – formed a consortium and contracted the Merritt and Chapman Derrick and Wrecking Company to raise "Titanic". The project was soon abandoned as impractical as the divers could not even reach a significant fraction of the necessary depth, where the pressure is over . The lack of submarine technology at the time as well as the outbreak of World War I also put off such a project. The company considered dropping dynamite on the wreck to dislodge bodies which would float to the surface, but finally gave up after oceanographers suggested that the extreme pressure would have compressed the bodies into gelatinous lumps. In fact, this was incorrect. Whale falls, a phenomenon not discovered until 1987—coincidentally, by the same submersible used for the first crewed expedition to "Titanic" the year before—demonstrate that water-filled corpses, in this case cetaceans, can sink to the bottom essentially intact. The high pressure and low temperature of the water would have prevented significant quantities of gas forming during decomposition, preventing the bodies of "Titanic" victims from rising back to the surface.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In later years, numerous proposals were put forward to salvage "Titanic". However, all fell afoul of practical and technological difficulties, a lack of funding and, in many cases, a lack of understanding of the physical conditions at the wreck site. Charles Smith, a Denver architect, proposed in March 1914 to attach electromagnets to a submarine which would be irresistibly drawn to the wreck's steel hull. Having found its exact position, more electromagnets would be sent down from a fleet of barges which would winch "Titanic" to the surface. An estimated cost of US$1.5 million ($ today) and its impracticality meant that the idea was not put into practice. Another proposal involved raising "Titanic" by means of attaching balloons to her hull using electromagnets. Once enough balloons had been attached, the ship would float gently to the surface. Again, the idea got no further than the drawing board.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In the mid-1960s, a hosiery worker from Baldock, England, named Douglas Woolley devised a plan to find "Titanic" using a bathyscaphe and raise the wreck by inflating nylon balloons that would be attached to her hull. The declared objective was to "bring the wreck into Liverpool and convert it to a floating museum". The Titanic Salvage Company was established to manage the scheme and a group of businessmen from West Berlin set up an entity called Titanic-Tresor to support it financially. The project collapsed when its proponents found they could not overcome the problem of how the balloons would be inflated in the first place. Calculations showed that it could take ten years to generate enough gas to overcome the water pressure.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: A variety of audacious but equally impractical schemes were put forward during the 1970s. One proposal called for 180,000 tons of molten wax (or alternatively, Vaseline) to be pumped into "Titanic", lifting her to the surface. Another proposal involved filling "Titanic" with ping-pong balls, but overlooked the fact that the balls would be crushed by the pressure long before reaching the depth of the wreck. A similar idea involving the use of Benthos glass spheres, which could survive the pressure, was scuppered when the cost of the number of spheres required was put at over $238 million. An unemployed haulage contractor from Walsall named Arthur Hickey proposed to encase "Titanic" inside an iceberg, freezing the water around the wreck in a buoyant jacket of ice. The ice, being less dense than liquid water, would float to the surface and could be towed to shore. The BOC Group calculated that this would require half a million tons of liquid nitrogen to be pumped down to the sea bed. In his 1976 thriller "Raise the Titanic!", author Clive Cussler's hero Dirk Pitt repairs the holes in "Titanic"s hull, pumps it full of compressed air and succeeds in making it "leap out of the waves like a modern submarine blowing its ballast tanks", a scene depicted on the posters of the subsequent film of the book. Although this was an "artistically stimulating" highlight of the film, made using a model of "Titanic", it would not have been physically possible. At the time of the book's writing, it was still believed that she sank in one piece.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution had long been interested in finding "Titanic". Despite early negotiations with possible backers being abandoned when it emerged that they wanted to turn the wreck into souvenir paperweights, more sympathetic backers joined Ballard to form a company named Seasonics International Ltd. as a vehicle for rediscovering and exploring "Titanic". In October 1977, he made his first attempt to find the ship with the aid of the Alcoa Corporation's deep sea salvage vessel "Seaprobe". This was essentially a drillship with sonar equipment and cameras attached to the end of the drilling pipe. It could lift objects from the seabed using a remote-controlled mechanical claw. The expedition ended in failure when the drilling pipe broke, sending of pipe and worth of electronics plunging to the sea bed.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In 1978, The Walt Disney Company and "National Geographic" magazine considered mounting a joint expedition to find "Titanic", using the aluminium submersible "Aluminaut". "Titanic" would have been well within the submersible's depth limits, but the plans were abandoned for financial reasons.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The following year, the British billionaire financier and tycoon Sir James Goldsmith set up Seawise & Titanic Salvage Ltd. with the involvement of underwater diving and photographic experts. His aim was to use the publicity of finding "Titanic" to promote his newly established magazine, "NOW!". An expedition to the North Atlantic was scheduled for 1980 but was cancelled due to financial difficulties. A year later, "NOW!" folded after 84 issues with Goldsmith incurring huge financial losses.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Fred Koehler, an electronics repairman from Coral Gables, Florida, sold his electronics shop to finance the completion of a two-man deep-sea submersible called "Seacopter". He planned to dive to "Titanic", enter the hull and retrieve a fabulous collection of diamonds rumoured to be contained in the purser's safe. However, he was unable to obtain financial backing for his planned expedition. Another proposal involved using a semi-submersible platform mounted with cranes, resting on two watertight supertankers, that would winch the wreck off the seabed and carry it to shore. A proponent was quoted as saying, "It's like the Great Wall of China – given enough time and money and people, you can do anything." Time, money and people were not forthcoming and the proposal got no further than any of its predecessors.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: On 17 July 1980, an expedition sponsored by Texan oilman Jack Grimm set off from Port Everglades, Florida, in the research vessel "H.J.W. Fay". Grimm had previously sponsored expeditions to find Noah's Ark, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and the giant hole in the North Pole predicted by the pseudoscientific Hollow Earth hypothesis. To raise funds for his "Titanic" expedition, he obtained sponsorship from friends with whom he played poker, sold media rights through the William Morris Agency, commissioned a book, and obtained the services of Orson Welles to narrate a documentary. He acquired scientific support from Columbia University by donating $330,000 to the Lamont–Doherty Geological Observatory for the purchase of a wide-sweep sonar, in exchange for five years' use of the equipment and the services of technicians to support it. Drs. William B. Ryan of Columbia University and Fred Spiess of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California joined the expedition as consultants. They nearly stayed ashore when Grimm introduced them to a new consultant – a monkey called Titan, which was trained to point at a spot on the map to supposedly indicate where "Titanic" was. The scientists issued an ultimatum: "It's either us or the monkey." Grimm preferred the monkey, but was prevailed upon to leave it behind and take the scientists instead.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The results were inconclusive, as three weeks of surveying in almost continuous bad weather during July and August 1980 failed to find "Titanic". The problem was exacerbated by technological limitations; the Sea MARC sonar used by the expedition had a relatively low resolution and was a new and untested piece of equipment. It was nearly lost only 36 hours after it was first deployed when the tail was ripped off during a sharp turn, destroying the magnetometer, which would have been vital for detecting "Titanic"s hull. Nonetheless it managed to survey an area of some and identified 14 possible targets. A documentary of this expedition, featuring Orson Welles, was titled "Search for the Titanic" (1981).


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Grimm mounted a second expedition in June 1981 aboard the research vessel "Gyre", with Spiess and Ryan again joining the expedition. To increase their chances of finding the wreck, the team employed a much more capable sonar device, the Scripps Deep Tow. The weather was again very poor, but all 14 of the targets were successfully covered and found to be natural features. On the last day of the expedition, an object that looked like a propeller was found. Grimm announced on his return to Boston that "Titanic" had been found, but the scientists declined to endorse his identification. A documentary of this expedition, featuring James Drury, was titled "Return to the Titanic" (1981). This and the previous film were later combined into a single production, "In Search of Titanic" (1981).


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In July 1983, Grimm went back a third time with Ryan aboard the research vessel "Robert D. Conrad". Nothing was found and bad weather brought an early end to the expedition. The Sea MARC passed over "Titanic" but had failed to detect it, while Deep Tow passed within of the wreck.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: D. Michael Harris and Jack Grimm had failed to find "Titanic" but their expeditions did succeed in producing fairly detailed mapping of the area in which the ship had sunk. It was clear that the position given in "Titanic"s distress signals was inaccurate, which was a major expedition difficulty because it increased the search area's already-expansive size. Despite the failure of his 1977 expedition, Robert Ballard had not given up hope and devised new technologies and a new search strategy to tackle the problem. The new technology was a system called "Argo / Jason". This consisted of a remotely controlled deep-sea vehicle called "Argo", equipped with sonar and cameras and towed behind a ship, with a robot called "Jason" tethered to it that could roam the sea floor, take close-up images and gather specimens. The images from the system would be transmitted back to a control room on the towing vessel where they could be assessed immediately. Although it was designed for scientific purposes, it also had important military applications and the United States Navy agreed to sponsor the system's development, on condition that it was to be used to carry out a number of programmes—many still classified—for the Navy.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The Navy commissioned Ballard and his team to carry out a month-long expedition every year for four years, to keep "Argo / Jason" in good working condition. It agreed to Ballard's proposal to use some of the time to search for "Titanic" once the Navy's objectives had been met; the search would provide an ideal opportunity to test "Argo / Jason". In 1984 the Navy sent Ballard and "Argo" to map the wrecks of the sunken nuclear submarines and , lost in the North Atlantic at depths of up to . The expedition found the submarines and made an important discovery. As "Thresher" and "Scorpion" sank, debris spilled out from them across a wide area of the seabed and was sorted by the currents, so that light debris drifted furthest away from the site of the sinking. This "debris field" was far larger than the wrecks themselves. By following the comet-like trail of debris, the main pieces of wreckage could be found.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: A second expedition to map the wreck of "Scorpion" was mounted in 1985. Only twelve days of search time would be left at the end of the expedition to look for "Titanic". As Harris/Grimm's unsuccessful efforts had taken more than forty days, Ballard decided that extra help would be needed. He approached the French national oceanographic agency, IFREMER, with which Woods Hole had previously collaborated. The agency had recently developed a high-resolution side-scan sonar called SAR and agreed to send a research vessel, "Le Suroît", to survey the sea bed in the area where "Titanic" was believed to lie. The idea was for the French to use the sonar to find likely targets, and then for the Americans to use "Argo" to check out the targets and hopefully confirm whether they were in fact the wreck. The French team spent five weeks, from 5 July to 12 August 1985, "mowing the lawn" – sailing back and forth across the target area to scan the sea bed in a series of stripes. However, they found nothing; though it turned out that they had passed within a few hundred yards of "Titanic" in their first run.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Ballard realised that looking for the wreck itself using sonar was unlikely to be successful and adopted a different tactic, drawing on the experience of the surveys of "Thresher" and "Scorpion"; he would look for the debris field instead, using "Argo"s cameras rather than sonar. Whereas sonar could not distinguish man-made debris on the sea bed from natural objects, cameras could. The debris field would also be a far bigger target, stretching or longer, whereas "Titanic" itself was only wide. The search required round-the-clock towing of "Argo" back and forth above the sea bed, with shifts of watchers aboard the research vessel "Knorr" looking at the camera pictures for any sign of debris. After a week of fruitless searching, at 12.48 am on Sunday 1 September 1985, pieces of debris began to appear on "Knorr"s screens. One of them was identified as a boiler, identical to those shown in pictures from 1911. The following day, the main part of the wreck was found and "Argo" sent back the first pictures of "Titanic" since her sinking 73 years before. The discovery made headlines around the world.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Following his discovery of the wreck site, Ballard returned to "Titanic" in July 1986 aboard the research vessel RV "Atlantis II". Now the deep-diving submersible could take people back to "Titanic" for the first time since her sinking, and the remotely operated vehicle would allow the explorers to investigate the interior of the wreck. Another system, ANGUS, was used to carry out photo surveys of the debris field. "Jason Jr." descended the ruined Grand Staircase as far as B Deck, and photographed remarkably well preserved interiors, including some chandeliers still hanging from the ceilings.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Between 25 July and 10 September 1987, an expedition mounted by IFREMER and a consortium of American investors which included George Tulloch, G. Michael Harris, D. Michael Harris and Ralph White made 32 dives to "Titanic" using the submersible "Nautile". Controversially, they salvaged and brought ashore more than 1,800 objects. A joint Russian-Canadian-American expedition took place in 1991 using the research vessel and its two "MIR" submersibles. Sponsored by Stephen Low and IMAX, CBS, "National Geographic" and others, the expedition carried out extensive scientific research with a crew of 130 scientists and engineers. The "MIRs" carried out 17 dives, spending over 140 hours at the bottom, shooting of IMAX film. This was used to create the 1995 documentary film "Titanica", which was later released in the US on DVD in a re-edited version narrated by Leonard Nimoy.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: IFREMER and RMS Titanic Inc., the successors to the sponsors of the 1987 expedition, returned to the wreck with "Nautile" and the ROV "Robin" in June 1993. Over the course of fifteen days, "Nautile" made fifteen dives lasting between eight and twelve hours each. Another 800 artefacts were recovered during the expedition including a two-tonne piece of a reciprocating engine, a lifeboat davit and the steam whistle from the ship's forward funnel.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998 and 2000, RMS Titanic Inc. carried out an intensive series of dives that led to the recovery of over 4,000 items in the first two expeditions alone. The 1996 expedition controversially attempted to raise a section of "Titanic" itself, a section of the outer hull that originally comprised part of the wall of two first-class cabins on C Deck, extending down to D Deck. It weighed 20 tons, measured and had four portholes in it, three of which still had glass in them. The section had come loose either during the sinking or as a result of the impact with the sea bed.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Its recovery using diesel-filled flotation bags was turned into something of an entertainment event, with two cruise ships accompanying the expedition to the wreck site. Passengers were offered the chance, at $5,000 per person, to watch the recovery on television screens in their cabins while enjoying luxury accommodation, Las Vegas-style shows, and casino gambling aboard the ships. Various celebrities were recruited to enliven the proceedings, including Burt Reynolds, Debbie Reynolds and Buzz Aldrin, and "grand receptions" for VIPs were scheduled on-shore where the hull section would be displayed.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: However, the lift ended disastrously when rough weather caused the ropes supporting the bags to snap. At the moment the ropes broke, the hull section had been lifted to within only of the surface. It hurtled back down, embedding itself upright on the sea floor. The attempt was strongly criticised by marine archaeologists, scientists, and historians as a money-making publicity stunt; several publications compared the event to grave robbing, and Ballard called the event "a carnival" and stated that "We tried to put it to rest, but this perpetuates the tragedy." A second, successful attempt to lift the fragment was carried out in 1998. The so-called "Big Piece" was conserved in a laboratory in Santa Fe for two years before being put on display at the Luxor Las Vegas hotel and casino.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In 1995, Canadian director James Cameron chartered the "Akademik Mstislav Keldysh" and the "MIRs" to make 12 dives to "Titanic". He used the footage in his blockbuster 1997 film "Titanic". The discovery of the wreck and a "National Geographic" documentary of Ballard's 1986 expedition had inspired him to write a synopsis in 1987 of what eventually became the film: "Do story with bookends of present day scene of wreck using submersibles intercut with memories of a survivor and re-created scenes of the night of the sinking. A crucible of human values under stress."


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The 2000 expedition by RMS Titanic Inc. carried out 28 dives during which over 800 artifacts were recovered, including the ship's engine telegraphs, perfume vials and watertight door gears.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In 2001, an American couple—David Leibowitz and Kimberly Miller—caused controversy when they were married aboard a submersible that had set down on the bow of "Titanic", in a deliberate echo of a famous scene from James Cameron's 1997 film. The wedding was essentially a publicity stunt, sponsored by a British company called SubSea Explorer which had offered a free dive to "Titanic" that Leibowitz had won. He asked whether his fiancée could come too and was told that she could—but only if she agreed to get married during the trip.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The same company also brought along Philip Littlejohn, the grandson of one of "Titanic"s surviving crew members, who became the first relative of a "Titanic" passenger or crew member to visit the wreck. Cameron himself also returned to "Titanic" in 2001 to carry out filming for Walt Disney Pictures' "Ghosts of the Abyss", filmed in 3D.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In 2003 and 2004, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration carried out two expeditions to "Titanic". The first, carried out between 22 June and 2 July 2003, performed four dives in two days. Its key aims were to assess the current condition of the wreck site and carry out scientific observations to support ongoing research. The stern section, which had previously received relatively little attention from explorers, was specifically targeted for analysis. The microbial colonies aboard "Titanic" were also a key focus of investigation. The second expedition, from 27 May – 12 June 2004, saw the return of Robert Ballard to "Titanic" nearly 20 years after he discovered it. The expedition spent 11 days on the wreck, carrying out high-resolution mapping using video and stereoscopic still images.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: 2005 saw two expeditions to the "Titanic". James Cameron returned for the third and last time to film "Last Mysteries of the Titanic". Another expedition searched for previously unseen pieces of wreckage, and led to the documentary "Titanic's Final Moments: Missing Pieces".


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: RMS Titanic Inc. mounted further expeditions to "Titanic" in 2004 and 2010, when the first comprehensive map of the entire debris field was produced. Two autonomous underwater vehicles—torpedo-shaped robots—repeatedly ran backward and forward across the debris field, taking sonar scans and over 130,000 high-resolution images. This enabled a detailed photomosaic of the debris field to be created for the first time, giving scientists a much clearer view of the dynamics of the ship's sinking. The expedition encountered difficulties: several hurricanes passed over the wreck site, and the "Remora" ROV was caught in a piece of wreckage. This same year saw the discovery of the new bacteria living in the rusticles on the "Titanic", "Halomonas titanicae".


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Tourist and scientific visits to "Titanic" are still continuing; by April 2012, 100 years since the disaster and nearly 25 since the discovery of the wreck, around 140 people had visited. On 14 April 2012 (the 100th anniversary of the ship's sinking), the wreck of the "Titanic" became eligible for protection under the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. In the same month, Robert Ballard, the wreck's discoverer, announced a plan to preserve the wreck of the "Titanic" by using deep-sea robots to paint the wreck with anti-fouling paint, to help keep the wreck in its current state for all time. The proposed plan that Ballard announced has been outlined in a documentary made to time with the Titanic's 100th sinking anniversary called "Save the Titanic With Bob Ballard" where Ballard himself talks about how this proposed paint job on the wreck will work. Ballard says that he proposed to robotically clean and repaint the "Titanic" with a colour scheme mimicking rusticles because he saw "original anti-fouling paint on the ship's hull, which was still working even after 74 years on the seabed" when he visited the "Titanic" in 1986.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Commercial submersible tours of the wreck called "Titanic Survey Expeditions" were planned for 2019 by OceanGate, Inc., but it was later postponed to summer 2021. In August 2019, a team of explorers and scientists used deep-submergence vehicle Limiting Factor to visit the wreck, marking the first crewed dive to the ship in 14 years. Five dives took place over a period of eight days. The team used specially adapted cameras to capture the wreck in 4K resolution for the first time, and dedicated photogrammetry passes were performed to create highly accurate and photoreal 3D models of the wreck. Footage from the dive was used for a documentary film by Atlantic Productions. The documentary, "Back to the Titanic", aired on National Geographic in 2020.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The location of the wreck is a considerable distance from the location transmitted by the ship's wireless operators before she went down. "Titanic" is in two main pieces southeast of Mistaken Point, Newfoundland and Labrador. The boilers found by "Argo", which mark the point at which the ship went down, are about east of the stern. The two main parts of the wreck of "Titanic" present a striking contrast. Although fourteen survivors testified that the ship had broken apart as she sank, this testimony was discounted by the official inquiries, and it was supposed that the ship had sunk intact. It is now clear that the stresses on "Titanic" caused the ship to split apart between the second and third funnels at or just below the surface.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The bow section, which measures about long, is thought to have descended at an angle of about 45°. Its distance from the stern was caused by its planing forward horizontally by about for every of its descent. During the descent to the sea bed, the funnels were swept away, taking with them the rigging and large lengths of cables. These dragged along the boat deck, tearing away many of the davits and much of the other deck equipment. The foremast was also torn down, falling onto the port bridge area. The ship's wheelhouse was swept away, possibly after being hit by the falling foremast.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The bow hit the bottom at a speed of about , digging about deep into the mud, up to the base of the anchors. The impact bent the hull in two places and caused it to buckle downwards by about 10° under the forward well deck cranes and by about 4° under the forward expansion joint. When the bow section hit the sea bed, the weakened decks at the rear, where the ship had broken apart, collapsed on top of each other. The forward hatch cover was also blown off and landed a couple of hundred feet in front of the bow, possibly due to the force of water being pushed out as the bow impacted the bottom.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The area around the bridge is particularly badly damaged; as Robert Ballard has put it, it looks "as if it had been squashed by a giant's fist". The roof of the officers' quarters and the sides of the gymnasium appear pushed in, railings were bent outwards and vertical steel columns supporting the decks were bent into a C-shape. Charles R. Pellegrino has proposed that this was the result of a "down-blast" of water, caused by a slipstream that had followed the bow section as it fell towards the sea bed. According to Pellegrino's hypothesis, when the bow came to an abrupt halt the inertia of the slipstream caused a rapidly moving column of water weighing thousands of tons to strike the top of the wreck, striking it near the bridge. This, argues Pellegrino, caused large parts of the bow's interior to be demolished by surges of water and violent eddies kicked up by the wreck's sudden halt. The damage caused by the collision with the iceberg is not visible at the bow as it is buried under mud.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Despite the exterior devastation caused by the bow's descent and collision with the ocean floor, there are parts of the interior in reasonably good condition. The bow's slow flooding and its relatively smooth descent to the sea floor mitigated interior damage. The stairwell of the First-Class Grand Staircase between the Boat Deck and E Deck is an empty chasm within the wreck, providing a convenient point of access for ROVs. Dense rusticles hanging from the steel decking combined with the deep layers of silt that have accumulated in the interior make navigating the wreck disorienting.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Passenger staterooms have largely deteriorated because they were framed in perishable softwoods such as pine, leaving hanging electrical wire, light fixtures and debris interspersed with more durable items like brass bed frames, light fixtures, and marble-topped washstands. Woodwork with attachments like doorknobs, drawer-pulls or push-plates have survived in better condition because of the small electric charge emitted by metal which repels fish and other organisms. Hardwoods like teak and mahogany, the material for most stateroom furnishings, are more resistant to decay. Lavatories and bathrooms within the passenger quarters have resisted decay because they were framed in steel.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The only intact public rooms remaining in either the stern or bow sections are the First-Class Reception Room and Dining Saloon, both on D-Deck. Most of the Dining Saloon has collapsed because of its proximity to the break-up point midship, but the very forward part is accessible and the rectangular leaded glass windows, table bases, and ceiling lamps are noticeably preserved. The Reception Room with its leaded glass windows and mahogany panelling remains remarkably intact, although the ceiling is sagging and there is a deep layer of silt obstructing the floor. The Turkish Baths on F-Deck were found to be in excellent condition during their rediscovery in 2005, preserving the blue-green tiles, carved teak woodwork, and inlaid furniture. The Grand Staircase was likely destroyed during the sinking, but the surrounding first-class foyers and elevator entrances preserve many of the ormolu and crystal lamps, oak timbers, and oak-framed stanchions.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In addition to the passenger areas, crew areas like the firemen's mess, dormitories, parts of "Scotland Road" on E-Deck and the cargo holds on the Orlop Deck have also been explored. The "Ghosts of the Abyss" expedition in 2001 attempted to locate the famed Renault automobile belonging to William Carter, but the cargo was indistinguishable beneath the silt and rusticles.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The stern of the ship, which measures about long, was catastrophically damaged during the descent and landing on the sea bed. It had not fully filled with water when it sank, and the increasing water pressure caused trapped air pockets to implode, tearing apart the hull. It was loud enough that multiple survivors reported hearing explosions about ten seconds after the stern had sunk beneath the waves. Data from a sonar map made during a 2010 expedition showed that the stern rotated like a helicopter blade as it sank.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The rudder appears to have swung over to an angle of about 30 to 45° during the stern's descent, causing the section to follow a tight spiral to the bottom. It probably struck rudder-first, burying most of the rudder in the mud up to a depth of . The decks pancaked on top of each other and the hull plating splayed out to the sides of the shattered section. The pancaking is so severe that the combined height of the decks, which are piled up on top of the reciprocating engines, is now generally not more than about high. No individual deck is more than about high.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Large sections of the hull plating appear to have fallen off well before the wreck hit the bottom. One such section, thought to have been from the galleys, separated from the stern in one piece and landed nearby. The force of the water tore up the poop deck and folded it back on itself. The center propeller is totally buried, while the force of the impact caused the two wing propellers and shafts to be bent upwards by an angle of about 20°.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: A large V-shaped section of the ship just aft of midships, running from the keel upwards through Number 1 Boiler Room and upwards to cover the area under funnel numbers three and four, was believed to have disintegrated entirely when the ship broke up. This was one of the weakest parts of the ship as a result of the presence of two large open spaces – the forward end of the engine room and the aft First Class passenger staircase. The rest of this part of the ship are scattered across the seabed at distances of from the main part of the stern.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: During the 2010 expedition to map the wreck site, a major chunk of the deck house (the base of the third funnel) along with pieces of the third funnel were found. This showed that instead of simply disintegrating into a mass of debris, large sections of the ship broke off in chunks and that the ship broke in half between funnel numbers two and three, and not funnel numbers three and four. Five of the boilers from Number 1 Boiler Room came loose during its disintegration and landed in the debris field around the stern. Experts believe that this tight cluster of boilers marks the hypocenter of where the ship broke up 12,000 feet above. The rest of the boilers are still presumably located in the bow section.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: As "Titanic" broke apart, many objects and pieces of hull were scattered across the sea bed. There are two debris fields in the vicinity of the wreck, each between long, trailing in a southwesterly direction from the bow and stern. They cover an area of about . Most of the debris is concentrated near the stern section of "Titanic". It consists of thousands of objects from the interior of the ship, ranging from tons of coal spilled from ruptured bunkers to suitcases, clothes, corked wine bottles (many still intact despite the pressure), bathtubs, windows, washbasins, jugs, bowls, hand mirrors and numerous other personal effects. The debris field also includes numerous pieces of the ship itself, with the largest pieces of debris in the vicinity of the partially disintegrated stern section.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Prior to the discovery of "Titanic"s wreck, in addition to the common assumption that she had sunk in one piece, it had been widely believed that conditions at down would preserve the ship virtually intact. The water is bitterly cold at only about , there is no light, and the high pressure was thought to be likely to lower oxygen and salinity levels to the point that organisms would not be able to gain a foothold on the wreck. "Titanic" would effectively be in a deep freeze.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The reality has turned out to be very different, and the ship has increasingly deteriorated since she sank in April 1912. Her gradual decay is due to a number of different processes – physical, chemical and biological. She is situated on an undulating, gently sloping area of seabed in Titanic Canyon, which is swept by the western boundary current. Eddies from the current flow constantly across the wreck, scouring the sea bed and keeping sediment from building up over the hull. The current is strong and often changeable, gradually opening up holes in the ship's hull. Salt corrosion eats away at the hull, and it is also affected by galvanic corrosion.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The most dramatic deterioration has been caused by biological factors. It used to be thought that the depths of the ocean were a lifeless desert, but research carried out since the mid-1980s has found that the ocean floor is teeming with life and may rival the tropical rainforests for biodiversity. During the 1991 IMAX expedition, scientists were surprised by the variety of organisms that they found in and around "Titanic". A total of 28 species were observed, including sea anemones, crabs, shrimp, starfish, and rattail fish up to a yard (1 m) long. Much larger creatures have been glimpsed by explorers.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Some of "Titanic"s fauna has never been seen anywhere else; James Cameron's 2001 expedition discovered a previously unknown type of sea cucumber, lavender with a glowing row of phosphorescent "portholes" along its side. A newly discovered species of rust-eating bacterium found on the ship has been named "Halomonas titanicae", which has been found to cause rapid decay of the wreck. Henrietta Mann, who discovered the bacteria, has estimated that the "Titanic" will completely collapse possibly as soon as 2030. The Canadian geophysicist Steve Blasco has commented that the wreck "has become an oasis, a thriving ecosystem sitting in a vast desert". In mid-2016, the facilities of the Institut Laue-Langevin used neutron imaging to demonstrate that a molecule called ectoine is used by "Halomonas titanicae" to regulate fluid balance and cell volume to survive at such pressures and salinities.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Analysis by Henrietta Mann and Bhavleen Kaur, both of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in conjunction with other scientists and researchers of the University of Seville in Spain, has determined that the wreck of "Titanic" will not exist by 2037 and that preservation of "Titanic" is impossible. "Unfortunately, because Titanic is 2.3 miles [4.3 km] down, it is very difficult or impossible to preserve. It is film which will preserve it for history now," says Mann. "It has already lasted for 100 years, but eventually there will be nothing left but a rust stain on the bottom of the Atlantic... I think Titanic has maybe 15 or 20 years left. I don't think it will have too much longer than that." Other scientists estimated that "Titanic" would last no longer than 14 years, as of 2017.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The soft organic material aboard and dispersed onto the seabed around the hull would have been the first to disappear, rapidly devoured by fish and crustaceans. Wood-boring molluscs such as "Teredo" colonised the ship's decks and interior in huge numbers, eating away the wooden decking and other wooden objects such as furniture, panelling, doors and staircase banisters. When their food ran out they died, leaving behind calcareous tubes. The question of the victims' bodies is one that has often troubled explorers of the wreck site. When the debris field was surveyed in Robert Ballard's 1986 expedition, pairs of shoes were observed lying next to each other on the sea bed. The flesh, bones, and clothes had long since been consumed but the tannin in the shoes' leather had apparently resisted the bacteria, leaving the shoes as the only markers of where a body had once lain. Ballard has suggested that skeletons may remain deep within "Titanic"s hull, such as in the engine rooms or third-class cabins. This has been disputed by scientists, who have estimated that the bodies would have completely disappeared by the early 1940s at the latest.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In any event, the molluscs and scavengers did not consume everything organic. Some of the wooden objects on the ship and in the debris field have not been consumed, particularly those made of teak, a dense wood that seems to have resisted the borers. The first-class reception area off the ships Grand Staircase is still remarkably intact and furniture is still visible among the debris on the floor. Although most of the corridors have lost their walls, furniture is still in place in many cabins; in one, a mattress is still on the bed, with an intact and undamaged dresser behind it. Robert Ballard has suggested that areas within the ship or buried under debris, where scavengers may not have been able to reach, may still contain human remains. According to Charles Pellegrino, who dived on "Titanic" in 2001, a finger bone encircled by the partial remains of a wedding ring was found concreted to the bottom of a soup tureen that was retrieved from the debris field. It was returned to the sea bed on the next dive.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The longest-lasting inhabitants of "Titanic" are likely to be bacteria and archaea that have colonised the metal hull of the ship. They have produced "reddish-brown stalactites of rust [hanging] down as much as several feet, looking like long needle-like icicles", as Ballard has put it. The formations, which Ballard dubbed "rusticles", are extremely fragile and disintegrate in a cloud of particles if touched. The bacteria consume the iron in the hull, oxidising it and leaving rust particles behind as a waste product. To protect themselves from the seawater, they secrete an acidic viscous slime that flows where gravity takes it, carrying ferric oxides and hydroxides. These form the rusticles.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: When scientists were able to retrieve a rusticle, it was discovered that it was far more complex than had been imagined, with complex systems of roots infiltrating the metal, interior channels, bundles of fibres, pores and other structures. Charles Pellegrino comments that they seem more akin to "levels of tissue organization found in sponges or mosses and other members of the animal or plant kingdoms." The bacteria are estimated to be consuming "Titanic"s hull at the rate of per day, which is about per hour or per minute. Roy Collimore, a microbiologist, estimates that the bow alone now supports some 650 tons of rusticles, and that they will have devoured fifty per cent of the hull within 200 years.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Since "Titanic" wreck was discovered in 1985, radical changes have been observed in the marine ecosystem around the ship. The 1996 expedition recorded 75 per cent more brittle stars and sea cucumbers than Ballard's 1985 expedition, while crinoids and sea squirts had taken root all over the sea bed. Red krill had appeared, and an unknown organism had built numerous nests across the seabed from black pebbles. The amount of rusticles on the ship had increased greatly. Curiously, the same thing had happened over about the same timescale to the wreck of the German battleship "Bismarck", sunk at a depth of on the other side of the Atlantic. The mud around the ship was found to contain hundreds of different species of animals. The sudden explosion of life around "Titanic" may be a result of an increased amount of nutrients falling from the surface, possibly a result of human overfishing, eliminating fish that would otherwise have consumed the nutrients.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Many scientists, including Ballard, are concerned that visits by tourists in submersibles and the recovery of artefacts are causing the wreck to decay faster. Underwater bacteria have been eating away at "Titanic"s steel and transformed it into rust since the ship sank, but because of the extra damage caused by visitors, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that "the hull and structure of the ship may collapse to the ocean floor within the next 50 years." The promenade deck has deteriorated significantly in recent years, partly because of damage caused by submersibles landing on the ship. The mast has almost completely deteriorated and has been stripped of its bell and brass light.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Other damage includes a gash on the bow section where block letters once spelled "Titanic", part of the brass telemotor which once held the ship's wooden wheel is now twisted, and the crow's nest has completely deteriorated. Canadian director James Cameron is responsible for some of the more significant damage during his expedition to the ship in 1995 to acquire footage for his film "Titanic" two years later. One of the MIR submersibles used on the expedition collided with the hull, damaging both and leaving fragments of the submersible's propeller shroud scattered around the superstructure. Captain Smith's quarters were heavily damaged by the collapse of the external bulkhead, which exposed the cabin's interior.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Submersible dives in 2019 have found further deterioration of the wreck, including loss of the captain's bathtub.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: "Titanic"s discovery in 1985 sparked a debate over the ownership of the wreck and the valuable items inside and on the sea bed around it. Ballard and his crew did not bring up any artefacts from the wreck, considering such an act to be tantamount to grave robbing. Ballard has since argued strongly "that it be left unmolested by treasure seekers". As Ballard has put it, the development of deep-sea submersibles has made "the great pyramids of the deep ... accessible to man. He can either plunder them like the grave robbers of Egypt or protect them for the countless generations which will follow ours." However, within only two weeks of the discovery, a British insurance company claimed that it owned the wreck, and several more schemes to raise it were announced. A Belgian entrepreneur offered trips to "Titanic" for $25,000 a head. A British man named Douglas Faulkner-Woolley claims ownership of the Titanic, based on a "Late 1960s ruling" by the British Board of Trade which awarded him ownership of the wreck. The wreck had not been discovered at that time.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Spurred by Ballard's appeals for the wreck to be left alone, North Carolina Congressman Walter B. Jones, Sr. introduced the RMS Titanic Maritime Memorial Act in the United States House of Representatives in 1986. It called for strict scientific guidelines to be introduced to govern the exploration and salvage of "Titanic" and urged the United States Secretary of State to lobby Canada, the United Kingdom and France to pass similar legislation. It passed the House and Senate by an overwhelming majority and was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on 21 October 1986. However, the law has been ineffective as the wreck lies outside United States waters, and the Act was set aside by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Norfolk Division, in 1998. Although negotiations among the four countries were carried out between 1997 and 2000, the resulting "Agreement Concerning the Shipwrecked Vessel R.M.S. "Titanic"" has been ratified by only the US and the UK.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Only a few days after Ballard's discovery of the wreck, Jack Grimm—the author of the unsuccessful early 1980s attempts to find "Titanic"—claimed ownership of it on the grounds that he had allegedly been the first to find it. He announced that he intended to begin salvaging the wreck. He said that he "[couldn't] see them just lie there and be absorbed by the ocean floor. What possible harm can [salvaging] do to this mass of twisted steel?"


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Titanic Ventures Inc., a Connecticut-based consortium, co-sponsored a survey and salvage operation in 1987 with the French oceanographic agency IFREMER. The expedition produced an outcry. "Titanic" survivor Eva Hart condemned what many saw as the looting of a mass grave: "To bring up those things from a mass sea grave just to make a few thousand pounds shows a dreadful insensitivity and greed. The grave should be left alone. They're simply going to do it as fortune hunters, vultures, pirates!"


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Public misgivings increased when, on 28 October 1987, a television program, "Return to the "Titanic" Live," was broadcast from the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris, hosted by Telly Savalas. In front of a live TV audience, a valise recovered from the sea bed was opened, revealing a number of personal items apparently belonging to Richard L. Beckwith of New York, who survived the sinking. A safe was also opened, revealing a few items of memorabilia and wet banknotes. The tone of the event was described by one commentator as "unsympathetic, lack[ing] dignity and finesse, and [with] all the superficial qualities of a 'media event'."


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: "New York Times" television critic John Corry called the event "a combination of the sacred and profane and sometimes the downright silly". Paul Heyer comments that it was "presented as a kind of deep sea striptease" and that Savalas "seemed haggard, missed several cues and at one point almost tripped over a chair". Controversy persisted after the broadcast when claims were made that the safe had been opened beforehand and that the show had been a fraud.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Marex-Titanic Inc. was formed in 1992 to launch an expedition to the "Titanic". Marex-Titanic's CEO was James Kollar. The company was a subsidiary of Marex International, an international marine salvage firm located in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1992 Marex made a bid to seize control of the artefacts and the wreck itself by suing Titanic Ventures, arguing that the latter had abandoned its claim by not returning to the wreck since the 1987 expedition. It claimed a superior right of salvage based on a "pill bottle" and hull fragment that were said to have been retrieved by Marex. Marex simultaneously sent a vessel, the "Sea Mussel", to carry out its own salvage operation.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: However, the Marex artefacts were alleged to have been illegally retrieved by the 1991 Russian-American-Canadian expedition and Marex was issued with a temporary injunction preventing it from carrying out its plans. In October 1992 the injunction was made permanent and the salvage claims of Titanic Ventures were upheld. The decision was later reversed by an appeals court but Marex's claims were not renewed. Even so, Titanic Ventures' control of the artefacts recovered in 1987 remained in question until 1993 when a French administrator in the Office of Maritime Affairs of the Ministry of Equipment, Transportation, and Tourism awarded the company title to the artefacts.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In May 1993, Titanic Ventures sold its interests in the salvage operations and artefacts to RMS Titanic Inc., a subsidiary of Premier Exhibitions Inc. headed by George Tulloch and Arnie Geller. It had to go through a laborious legal process of having itself legally recognised as the sole and exclusive salvager of the wreck. Its claim was opposed for a while by the Liverpool and London Steamship Protection and Indemnity Association, "Titanic"s former insurer, but was eventually settled. It was awarded ownership and salvaging rights by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on 7 June 1994 in a ruling that declared the company to be the "salvor in possession" of the wreck.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Litigation has continued over the artefacts in recent years. In a motion filed on 12 February 2004, RMS Titanic Inc. requested that the United States district court enter an order awarding it "title to all the artefacts (including portions of the hull) which are the subject of this action pursuant to the Law of Finds" or, in the alternative, a salvage award in the amount of $225 million. RMS Titanic Inc. excluded from its motion any claim for an award of title to the objects recovered in 1987, but it did request that the district court declare that, based on the French administrative action, "the artifacts raised during the 1987 expedition are independently owned by RMST." Following a hearing, the district court entered an order dated 2 July 2004, in which it refused to grant comity or recognise the 1993 decision of the French administrator, and rejected RMS Titanic Inc.'s claim that it should be awarded title to the items recovered since 1993 under the Maritime Law of Finds.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: RMS Titanic Inc. appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. In its decision of 31 January 2006 the court recognised "explicitly the appropriateness of applying maritime salvage law to historic wrecks such as that of "Titanic"" and denied the application of the Maritime Law of Finds. The court also ruled that the district court lacked jurisdiction over the "1987 artifacts", and therefore vacated that part of the court's 2 July 2004 order. In other words, according to this decision, RMS Titanic Inc. has ownership title to the objects awarded in the French decision (valued $16.5 million earlier) and continues to be salvor-in-possession of the "Titanic" wreck. The Court of Appeals remanded the case to the District Court to determine the salvage award ($225 million requested by RMS Titanic Inc.).


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: On 24 March 2009, it was revealed that the fate of 5,900 artefacts retrieved from the wreck would rest with a U.S. District Judge's decision. The ruling was later issued in two decisions on 12 August 2010 and 15 August 2011. As announced in 2009, the judge ruled that RMS Titanic Inc. owned the artefacts and her decision dealt with the status of the wreck as well as establishing a monitoring system to check future activity upon the wreck site. On 12 August 2010, Judge Rebecca Beach Smith granted RMS Titanic, Inc. fair market value for the artefacts but deferred ruling on their ownership and the conditions for their preservation, possible disposition and exhibition until a further decision could be reached.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: On 15 August 2011, Judge Smith granted title to thousands of artefacts from the "Titanic", that RMS Titanic Inc. did not already own under a French court decision concerning the first group of salvaged artefacts, to RMS Titanic Inc. subject to a detailed list of conditions concerning preservation and disposition of the items. The artefacts can be sold only to a company that would abide by the lengthy list of conditions and restrictions. RMS Titanic Inc. can profit from the artefacts through exhibiting them.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: RMS Titanic Inc. has also attempted to secure exclusive physical access to the wreck site. In 1996, it obtained a court order finding that it had "the exclusive right to take any and all types of photographic images of the "Titanic" wreck and wreck site." It obtained another order in 1998 against Deep Ocean Expeditions and Chris Haver, a British Virgin Islands corporation that aimed to run tourist trips to "Titanic" at a cost of $32,000 per person (it now charges $60,000). This was overturned in March 1999 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which ruled that the law of salvage did not extend to obtaining exclusive rights to view, visit and photograph a wreck.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The court pointed out that "Titanic" is "located in a public place" in international waters, rather than in a private or controllable location to which access could be restricted by the owner. Granting such a right would also create a perverse incentive; since the aim of salvage is to carry out a salvage operation, leaving property in place so that it could be photographed would run counter to this objective.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: RMS Titanic Inc. has attracted considerable controversy for its approach to "Titanic". Two rival camps have formed following the wreck's discovery: the "conservationists", championed by RMS Titanic Inc.'s George Tulloch (who died in 2004), and the "protectionists", whose most prominent advocate is Robert Ballard. The first camp has argued that artefacts from around the wreck should be recovered and conserved, while the latter camp argues that the entire wreck site should have been left undisturbed as a mass grave. Both camps agree that the wreck itself should not be salvaged – though RMS Titanic Inc. did not stick to its proclaimed "hands-off" policy when it managed to demolish "Titanic"s crow's nest in the course of retrieving the bell. Its predecessor Titanic Ventures agreed with IFREMER that it would not sell any of the artefacts but would put them on public display, for which it could charge an entry fee.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Tulloch's approach has undoubtedly resulted in outcomes that would not have been possible otherwise. In 1991, he presented Edith Brown Haisman, a 96-year-old survivor of the disaster, with her father's pocket watch which had been retrieved from the sea bed. She had last seen it on 15 April 1912 when he waved goodbye to his wife and daughter as they left aboard lifeboat 14. They never saw him again and he presumably went down with the ship. The watch was loaned to Haisman "for life"; when she died four years later it was reclaimed by RMS Titanic Inc.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: On another occasion, a steamer trunk spotted in the debris field was found to contain three musical instruments, a deck of playing cards, a diary belonging to one Howard Irwin, and a bundle of letters from his girlfriend Pearl Shuttle. It was first thought that Irwin, a musician and professional gambler, had boarded the ship under a false identity. There was no record of him being among the passengers, even though a ticket had been purchased for him. It turned out that he had stayed ashore but his trunk had been brought aboard the ship by his friend Henry Sutehall, who was among the victims of the disaster. The fragile contents of the trunk were preserved due to the interior being starved of oxygen, which prevented bacteria from consuming the paper. Very few other shipwrecks have yielded readable paper.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: On the other hand, the heavily commercialised approach of RMS Titanic Inc. has caused repeated controversy and many have argued that salvaging "Titanic" is an inherently disrespectful act. The wreck site has been called a "tomb and a reliquary", a "gravestone for the 1,500 people who died" and "hallowed ground". "Titanic" historians John Eaton and Charles Haas argue that the salvagers are little more than "plunderers and armchair salvage experts" and others have characterised them as "grave robbers". The "Return to "Titanic"... Live!" television show in 1987 was widely condemned as a "circus", though the 1987 expedition's scientific and financial leaders had no control over the show.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In a particularly controversial episode, RMS Titanic Inc. sold some 80,000 lumps of coal retrieved from the debris field in order to fund the rumoured $17 million cost of lifting the "Big Piece" of the ship's hull. It attempted to get around the no-sale agreement with IFREMER by charging the new owners a $25 "fee" to act as "conservators", in order to claim that the coal lumps had not actually been sold. This attracted strong criticism from all sides. Nonetheless, in 1999 Tulloch was ousted by the company's shareholders and was replaced by Arnie Geller, who promised a more aggressive approach to making a profit. The company declared that it had an "absolute right" to sell recovered gold, coins and currency. It was prevented from doing this by a court order in the United States and IFREMER withdrew its co-operation and its submersibles, threatening a lawsuit.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: In January 2020, the United Kingdom and United States governments announced that they had agreed to protect the wreckage of the "Titanic". The agreement, signed by the British government in 2003, came into effect after being ratified by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the end of 2019. UK Maritime Minister, Nus Ghani, said the UK would work with Canada and France to bring "even more protection" to the wreckage.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: Objects from "Titanic" have been exhibited for many years, though only a few were retrieved before the discovery of the wreck in 1985. The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia has a collection of wooden fragments and an intact deckchair plucked from the sea by the Canadian search vessels that recovered the victims' bodies. Various other museums, including the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and the SeaCity Museum in Southampton, have objects donated by survivors and relatives of victims, including some items that were retrieved from the bodies of victims.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: More donated "Titanic" artefacts are to be found in the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool and the Titanic Historical Society's museum in Indian Orchard, Springfield, Massachusetts. The latter's collection includes items such as the life jacket of Madeleine Astor, the wife of millionaire "Titanic" victim John Jacob Astor IV, a rivet which was removed from the hull before "Titanic" went to sea, an ice warning which never reached the bridge, a restaurant menu and a sample square of carpet from a First Class stateroom.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: RMS Titanic Inc. organises large-scale exhibitions around the world of artefacts retrieved from the wreck site. After minor exhibitions were held in Paris and Scandinavia, the first major exhibition of recovered artefacts was held at the National Maritime Museum in 1994–95. It was hugely popular, drawing an average of 21,000 visitors a week during the year-long exhibition. Since then, RMS Titanic Inc. has established a large-scale permanent exhibition of "Titanic" artefacts at the Luxor hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The exhibit is the home of the "Big Piece" of the hull retrieved in 1998 and features conserved items including luggage, "Titanic"s whistles, floor tiles and an unopened bottle of champagne. The exhibit includes a full-scale replica of the ship's Grand Staircase and part of the Promenade Deck, and even a mock-up of the iceberg. It also runs a travelling exhibition called "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition" which has opened in various cities around the world and has been seen by over 20 million people. The exhibition typically runs for six to nine months featuring a combination of artefacts, reconstructions and displays of the ship, her passengers and crew and the disaster itself. In a similar fashion to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., visitors are given a "boarding pass" in the name of an individual passenger at the start of the exhibition. They do not discover the fate of their assigned passenger until the end.


title: Wreck of the Titanic

text: The vast majority of the relics retrieved by various groups from the "Titanic" were owned by Premier Exhibitions which operated RMS Titanic Inc. and filed for bankruptcy in 2016. In late August 2018, the groups vying to purchase the 5,500 relics included one by museums in England and Northern Ireland, with assistance from James Cameron and some financial support from National Geographic. Oceanographer Robert Ballard said he favoured this bid since it would ensure that the memorabilia would be permanently displayed in Belfast and in Greenwich. A decision as to the outcome was to be made by a United States district court judge in the case titled "RMS Titanic Inc., 16-02230, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Middle District of Florida (Jacksonville)". On October 18, 2018, a judge approved the sale of artefacts to a private investor group.


title: Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (; born 21 November 1970), often referred to as Sheikh Mansour, is an Emirati politician who is the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, minister of presidential affairs, billionaire and member of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi. He is the brother of the current President of the UAE, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and is married to one of the daughters of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai.


title: Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: He is involved in various government-run companies in the UAE. He is chairman of the Ministerial Development Council, the Emirates Investment Authority and the Emirates Racing Authority. He sits on the Supreme Petroleum Council and the Supreme Council for Financial and Economic Affairs. Mansour is a member of the boards of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA). He is vice chairman of Mubadala Investment Company, the Emirati state-owned sovereign wealth fund. He is chairman of the UAE central bank.


title: Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan

text: He is also the owner of the Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG), an investment company for the Abu Dhabi royal family, that acquired Manchester City Football Club in September 2008. He immediately handed all responsibility and ownership to Khaldoon Al Mubarak and the City Football Group which has overseen a significant transformation at the club since then. The club have won six top flight league titles for the first time since 1968; City's first Premier League titles. On 21 May 2013, Major League Soccer of the United States announced that its second New York City club, to be called New York City FC, would begin play in the 2015 season and be majority-owned by Mansour in association with brothers Hal and Hank Steinbrenner.