A previous Titan submersible dive to the Titanic was aborted due to an apparent mechanical failure, one of the mission’s passengers has said.

Fred Hagen had paid a fee to go on a dive in the Titan in 2021, two years before it imploded and killed all five passengers onboard.

He told a US Coast Guard panel investigating the tragedy on Friday that his trip was aborted underwater when the Titan began malfunctioning and it was clear they weren’t going to reach the Titanic wreck site.

“We realised that all it could do was spin around in circles, making right turns,” Mr Hagen said. “At this juncture, we obviously weren’t going to be able to navigate to the Titanic.”

He said the Titan resurfaced and the mission was scrapped.

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A Republican backed by Donald Trump in his bid to be North Carolina’s governor denied reports he called himself a “black nazi” on an online message board.

CNN reported Thursday that Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson posted racial and sexual comments on a pornography website more than a decade ago.

In a video posted on social media, the Republican nominee said he would not leave the race over “salacious tabloid lies”.

“We are staying in this race. We are in it to win it. And we know that with your help, we will.”

Follow the latest on the US election here

Mr Robinson also referenced the CNN report and said: “Let me reassure you the things that you will see in that story – those are not the words of Mark Robinson.

“You know my words. You know my character.”

The US outlet reported Mr Robson wrote of being aroused by a memory of “peeping” women in gym showers when he was 14.

He was also said to have used a racial slur when discussing civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, referred to himself as a “black nazi,” and said: “I’d take Hitler over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now.”

CNN said it matched details of the account on the pornographic website forum to other online accounts held by Robinson by comparing usernames, a known email address and his full name.

Sky News has not verified whether the account is linked to Mr Robinson.

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Eight minutes after the report was published on Thursday, vice president Kamala Harris’ campaign started sharing videos of Donald Trump praising Mr Robinson.

One video from the campaign on X shows the former president at a March rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he called the lieutenant governor “Martin Luther King times two”.

“I think you’re better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two,” Mr Trump said.

Scott Lassiter, a GOP Senate candidate in a swing district in the state, called on Mr Robinson to “suspend his campaign to allow a quality candidate to finish this race”.

Mr Trump’s campaign also appeared to be distancing itself from Mr Robinson.

The ex-president did not refer to the controversy when he addressed Jewish donors on Thursday night, instead vowing to be ‘the best friend Jewish Americans ever had”.

This election is about the big and the small – as small as anything can be in the USA.

The big number first – our Sky News poll tracker now gives Kamala Harris a three-point lead over Donald Trump nationwide.

That number has been getting bigger – it looks like we can now see a bounce from last week’s debate, one that is being sustained.

And it could get bigger still: bear in mind that our poll tracker includes polls conducted pre-debate.

As they are replaced in our tracker by new polls, her lead may improve.

Three points are substantial: for context, a week after the Biden-Trump debate, widely seen as a disaster for Biden, Trump was polling 3.3 points higher than Biden – a similar gap.

So why aren’t we talking about Trump being in as much trouble?

Some of that has to do with the narrative and momentum around Biden at the time, especially the idea that things would only get worse.

But Trump also has some strengths that Biden did not.

First, as we talked about earlier this week, Harris needs a big nationwide polling lead to ensure she wins a small number of swing states.

Three points are no guarantee of that.

And that’s the other point about the small.

This is about specific voters in specific places, with different demographics and economies.

There are three geographic groupings for the swing states – the southeast (Georgia and North Carolina), the northeast (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin), and the southwest (Nevada and Arizona).

Ipsos has done polling around the issues that voters in those three regions think are the most important, though.

They’re strikingly similar, enough to aggregate them together.

Democracy means “threats to democracy and the dangers of extreme polarisation” and the economy will mean different things in the rust belt northeast vs the agricultural southeast.

But there are clear priorities.

And those swing state voters have clear ideas about which candidate can best deal with those issues.

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There are some local variations though.

The southwest rates Trump even higher on the economy and immigration, and the southeast thinks he would be better for democracy.

That’s the good news for Donald Trump.

In the smaller places where the votes really matter, he’s seen as the best candidate on the issues that really matter.

But let’s finish with another big-picture finding: Harris’s net favourability continues to be way ahead of Trump’s.

So, big vs small: how they interact will decide the election.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling, we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.