#Cave diving is fraught with danger, but the reward is sights like nothing else on Earth. The light fades as divers disappear farther into a cave system, until the greenish hue from their flashlight is all that’s visible, bouncing off walls, picking out creatures humans might never have seen before, and illuminating a world otherwise confined to total darkness.

These caverns can extend for hundreds of miles, dangerous, otherworldly mazes unlike anywhere else on Earth.

Any cave diver is well aware of the dangers involved in exploring these alien zones. In a 2024 documentary, “Diving Into the Darkness,” veteran Canadian cave diver Jill Heinerth recalls swimming “through the graves of my friends all the time. That list is well over a hundred people.”

The dangers of this highly specialized discipline were underscored once again this month when five Italian divers died while exploring the Vaavu Atoll caves in the Maldives on May 14, and Maldivian military diver Sgt. Mohamed Mahudhee also died attempting to recover their bodies.

Diving instructor Gianluca Benedetti’s body was found at the mouth of the cave, and the other four divers — Monica Montefalcone, an associate professor of ecology at the University of Genoa; her daughter, Giorgia Sommacal; Federico Gualtieri, a marine biologist; and Muriel Oddenino, a researcher — were all found in the deepest part of the cave system.

But even though they are acutely aware of the dangers, something constantly draws back cave divers who dedicate, and sometimes sacrifice, their lives to exploring these strange underwater worlds.

Navigating only with flashlights and a guideline — the thin thread that allows divers to find their way back to the cave entrance — they glimpse another side to life on Earth.

Cave divers often describe their chosen habitat as space-like, a whole other world filled with stalagmites, stalactites and alien-like creatures. Diving in these underwater cave systems is like “swimming through the veins of Mother Earth,” said Heinerth, who has completed more than 8,000 dives.

“Astronauts have that overview effect where they talk about looking back on the great blue planet, and they can never look at Earth the same way again,” she told CNN on Tuesday. “I guess I’m having a similar effect from being inside the planet … I’m literally within the sustenance of the planet that’s supplying the water for humanity, wildlife and even all of the industries we require for our modern life.”
‘All the things that could go wrong’

So many things can go wrong during a cave dive. Equipment can fail; guidelines can break; visibility can become nigh on impossible. And, if things go wrong, you cannot just ascend to the surface as in other types of scuba diving. You are reliant on your own wits, and your dive buddy.

While exploring these systems, cave divers will routinely squeeze through incredibly tight spaces. Sometimes, “my shoulders are scraping the ceiling and my belly is on the floor, and I can see less than a metre in high flow as the sand and silt is blasting me in the face,” Heinerth said.

So, before any dive, before she does anything else, Heinerth will “rehearse all of those things that could go wrong, all of the things that could kill me in this environment.”

“Like, what if this hose suddenly breaks and I’m losing gas, can I reach this valve in the gear that I’m wearing today?” she says.

“But it’s also a deep self-assessment. Am I ready to do such a dive? And the last two questions I ask myself are, ‘Am I ready for self-rescue today with the gear that I have in the environment that I’m in?’ and ‘Am I willing and able to conduct a buddy rescue in the same situation?’”

At the same time, she added, cave divers are normally incredibly well-trained and prepared for any scenario.

“The last step I take is I leave the emotions on the surface … You really have to stay in a pragmatic brain ready to deal with any situation that can occur,” she said.

It isn’t yet known why the five Italian divers never surfaced from their dive in the Maldives, though an investigation is underway to establish what happened — and how they all reached such depths.

The group had permission to dive deeper than the 30 metres (98 feet) to which recreational dives in the Maldives are normally restricted, local authorities said.

But it still isn’t clear whether they went deeper than planned, or if they had the appropriate equipment for such a technical, risky dive.

Caves like these are a rarity in the Maldives, Vladimir Tochilov, a technical diving instructor who has explored this system before, told CNN. It’s only 200 metres (656 feet) long and consists of several halls, but its depth “requires serious, serious training.”
Underwater treasure troves

#Underwater cave systems are treasure troves of information, providing an important source of data for #biologists, #physicists, #paleontologists and #historians.

“These caves are like museums of natural history, providing information on the Earth’s past climate, on animals that live their entire life in the darkness, and also on ancient #civilizations that have viewed these places as portals to another world,” Heinerth said.

Some cave systems host endemic species, meaning that they are found in no other place on the planet. By documenting such species, cave divers have helped inform our understanding of the planet’s evolutionary history.

Heinerth has visited some caves that no other human has ever explored, and probably never will again. As an underwater photographer, “bringing back images from these places that makes people’s jaws drop is very fulfilling because it gives me a chance to share the adventure,” she said.

Always, however, she is wary of the dangers. “My choices about risks will not just affect me, but it’ll be my family, my community,” she said. “So we need to learn from accidents, communicate honestly about what went wrong and how we can prevent them in the future.”

#Moscow will appeal to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over the violation of Russians' rights in the Baltic states, as Russia's attempts to resolve the issue through negotiations have been unsuccessful, the Russian Foreign Ministry told the Izvestia newspaper.

"We have repeatedly called on Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to hold themselves accountable internationally for these ongoing violations. However, the authorities of these countries refuse to cease their unlawful policies, and all attempts to resolve the differences through negotiations have proven fruitless. Therefore, we will obviously have to take our claims to court by appealing to the UN's principal judicial body," the ministry stated.

The ministry clarified that it is working to draw the UN's attention to the repression of public figures and human rights defenders of the Russian-speaking population in the Baltic states.

"Under the trumped-up pretext of combating 'Russian propaganda,' the purge of any 'dissent' from the Latvian information space continues," the Russian Foreign Ministry noted.

#Global #markets and major trading partners can expect updates on Indonesia’s new commodity export policy within weeks as the government works on the legal and structural rollout of its new centralized export agency

‘The perfect storm’: Why food experts don’t think the price of beef is coming back down anytime soon.

Throwing a steak on the grill is something Anastasia Ginou considers a “treat” these days. As she’s looking through the selection of options at her local butcher shop, she’s now looking more at the price than the type of cut, eventually choosing one that’s much cheaper than the rest.

“The price of beef has gone so high that I can still get the nutrition with a lower cut piece of meat and not break the bank,” Ginou, who grabbed a bavette steak, known to be a more budget-friendly cut, told CTV News Saturday.

“I would say I’ve reduced my beef intake by about half, if not a little bit more,” Ginou added. “I’ve been adding, into my diet, more lentils and beans to get the protein. It’s almost like a treat nowadays to have a really nice piece of meat.”

Beef costs continue to soar across Canada, with March’s prices showing a 12.7 percent increase year-over-year compared to the same month last year, according to Statistics Canada. In comparison, the price of chicken went up 7.5 per cent and pork’s prices had increased 6.2 per cent compared to March of 2025.

“All proteins have gone up, mostly because beef prices have gone up so much,” Michael von Massow, a food economist with the University of Guelph told CTV News Saturday. He added that the price of chicken and pork going up is directly tied to the price of beef rising, since chicken and pork is now more in demand from those Canadians who find beef too expensive.

“Barbecuing this year is going to be more expensive than barbecuing was last year.”

The price of beef in the last five years has soared nearly 65 per cent, when comparing Statistics Canada data from March 2021 to March of this year.

Food experts say severe droughts have affected the pastures cows feed on, resulting in farmers being forced to buy more expensive grain and fewer cattle to offset the rising costs of feeding them.

The good news, according to von Massow, is that 2026 saw an increase in the number of cows being added to Canadian herds for the first time in years, with Statistics Canada showing the number of cattle and calves increasing 2.5 per cent compared to a year earlier.

The bad news is that the cattle and calves supply chain is not like other products and takes years to rebuild.

“It almost makes the situation worse, because instead of that animal going into the supply chain and becoming beef… it has been withheld, and raised, fed for a couple of years and bred,” said von Massow. “Then it’ll have a calf. That takes some time.”

“We’re seeing farmers get some optimism and say ‘well, we’ve recovered a bit of the equity we lost when prices were low, so we can maybe afford to keep that animal, reduce our revenue a little bit and start increasing the herd so that we have a larger breeding stock that that improves the supply in the future,’” added Massow. “What we’re seeing is female calves are being retained instead of sold.”

What does that mean for consumers who are looking to see beef prices go down? Von Massow’s best guess is that we won’t see a downward trend in prices until at least late 2027.

“As the cow herd grows, there will be more calves born, and as more calves are born, then sometime in the next year to 18 months, those calves will come to the market… So, we will have a slight increase in supply over the next year or year-and-a-half,” added von Massow. But Saskatchewan Cattle Association chair, Chad Ross predicts it could take even longer than that until prices go back down to what they were about five years ago.

“Over history, our industry has been on a seven-year cycle from the top of the cycle to the bottom, it’s been about seven years,” Ross told CTV News. “As we go into 2033, it will start that downward trend as far as the prices that we receive as cow-calf producers.”

Ross added that Canadian ranchers are steadily leaving the industry, adding to the national cattle herd to shrink and contributing to the increase in beef prices.

“There’s been a huge exodus of those producers in our industry that bring us back to cow-calf numbers that are equivalent to the 1950s,” said Ross. “We combine that with the huge world demand for protein. That has been the perfect storm to have the high prices that the consumers are seeing in the grocery store.”

#Rubio tries to tackle a trust deficit between Washington and Delhi on first official India trip

#Hungary’s new Prime Minister Peter Magyar said he was hoping for economic growth of about 2% this year but put voters on notice that the state of public finances left by his predecessor made it impossible to make firm forecasts.

White House locked down after reports of shots fired nearby

New U.S. green card policy could impact Canadians seeking permanent residency: lawyer.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced Friday that foreigners living in the States on temporary visas, such as students, workers or visitors, must go through consular services in their home countries to apply instead of doing so inside the U.S., with some exceptions.

USCIS spokesperson Zach Kahler said the policy aims for the immigration system “to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes.”

“We’re returning to the original intent of the law to ensure aliens navigate our nation’s immigration system properly,” he said in a press release.

“Our system is designed for them to leave when their visit is over. Their visit should not function as the first step in the green card process.”

Joel Guberman, a lawyer and partner at Toronto-based immigration firm Guberman Appleby, said the policy came “out of left field.”

He said the only U.S. consulate in Canada that processes green card applications is located in Montreal, which will likely be overwhelmed with cases as a result of this new policy, resulting in long wait times stretching months or even years.

“Montreal is one of the slower processing posts in the world,” he said in a phone interview Saturday. “If you add to that the thousands of Canadians that will have to go to Montreal, you can imagine how long it’s going to be.”

Guberman said the policy could indefinitely separate Canadians married to Americans and are seeking U.S. permanent residency or those running businesses in the U.S. who must leave them behind to apply for a green card.

But he added that to some extent, Canadians are the least affected by the policy because Canadians can go to the U.S. without a visa and the distance isn’t as far compared to other countries.

“There are a lot of things that we can do to get into the United States legally,” he said. “But if you have to go back to Islamabad, or if you have to go to Shanghai, the processing time, even when you have an interview, could be weeks or months and you’re stuck outside the country.”

Guberman added he has several clients who could be impacted by the change, and he anticipates his firm will receive more inquiries in the coming days from Canadians living in the U.S. seeking permanent residency.

Meanwhile, David Garson, managing partner of Garson Immigration Law in Toronto, added that he also wasn’t expecting the policy change and was in “absolute shock” when he learned about it.

It’s not yet clear what exceptions could be made in this policy and what discretion immigration officials would have, he said.

“It also would be very subjective, in the sense that if you’re going to look at it and say, this person can change status but this person may not be able to change status, and the facts may be somewhat similar,” he said in a phone interview Saturday. “A decision is only realistically as good as the person who makes the decision.”

Garson added his firm will be closely monitoring for any new information or developments in the policy and how it could affect their clients in the coming days.

“If it’s walked back or changed or interpreted differently, then I have a better opportunity to give more accurate information,” he said. “In this type of situation, I’m always cautious not to catastrophize.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 23, 2026.

About $50 billion in wind-farm investments and 150,000 jobs are at risk from the Trump administration’s effective halt to approvals for new projects, a trade group said

#UN nuclear nonproliferation talks fail. Talks at the UN to reaffirm nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament goals failed on Friday, according to the leader of the talks, after four weeks of negotiations held amid low expectations.

Vietnam’s Do Hung Viet, the president of the conference, said that “despite our best efforts... it is my understanding that the conference is not in a position to achieve agreement on its substantive work.”

“I do not intend to put the document forward for adoption,” he added.

Negotiators were reviewing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the cornerstone of nuclear weapons control, amid fears of a renewed arms race. Previous reviews in 2015 and 2022 were also unsuccessful.

With expectations low, participants negotiated over a repeatedly reviewed and watered-down text, which they ultimately failed to adopt.

Experts pointed out that even in the absence of a review agreement for the third time in a row, the treaty continues to exist, but with diminished legitimacy.

“The text keeps on becoming less and less anchored in the realities of current conflicts and proliferation risks,” including North Korea and Iran, analyst Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group said before the outcome was announced.

The latest version of the text seen by AFP on Friday merely stated that Tehran must “never” develop nuclear weapons.

The paragraph was in brackets, signalling persistent disagreement, despite the removal of the reference to Iran’s “non-compliance” with its obligations that appeared in the first draft.

Also gone were expressions of concern about North Korea’s nuclear program, or even any mention of the “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula.

Gone as well was the direct call on the United States and Russia to begin negotiations on a successor to the New START treaty limiting Russian and American arsenals, which expired in February.

The diluted text still covered “the risk of a resumption of nuclear testing by Russia, China and the United States, the growth of arsenals, and attacks on nuclear infrastructure,” Heloise Fayet of the French Institute of International Relations said earlier on Friday.

Exactly why the review failed isn’t yet known.

“The majority of countries are indeed working in good faith for disarmament,” said Seth Shelden of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), commenting on the failure of the talks.

“But the small handful of nuclear-armed states, and certain of their allies, are undermining the NPT, frustrating disarmament efforts, expanding arsenals and provoking proliferation, and pointing the world toward catastrophe,” he added.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the nine nuclear-armed states -- Russia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea -- possessed 12,241 nuclear warheads in January 2025, 90 per cent of which were in American and Russian hands.

Some countries are modernizing their arsenals or even increasing their stockpiles.

The NPT, which entered into force in 1970 and has been signed by almost all states -- with notable exceptions including Israel, India and Pakistan -- aims to prevent proliferation, promote complete disarmament and encourage cooperation for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.