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CNN
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Marine archaeologists have discovered that two shipwrecks in Costa Rica are the remains of Danish slave ships missing for centuries — a finding that restores the ancestral lineage of an entire Costa Rican community more than 300 years after the vessels’ occupants reached its shores.

The wrecks had long been known to sit in shallow waters off Cahuita National Park, on Costa Rica’s southern Caribbean coast, according to the National Museum of Denmark.

However, for years, they were believed to be pirate ships, the museum said in a news release.

Fisherpeople who established themselves in the area in 1826 thought this because the ships’ remains were dispersed and broken. They believed the two ships might have been engaged in a fight and capsized, Maria Suarez Toro, founder of the local community initiative Ambassadors of the Sea Community Diving Center, told CNN Friday.

The ships’ identities were only called into question in 2015, when American marine archaeologists found yellow bricks in one of the wrecks.

This discovery was significant because yellow bricks were produced in the German town of Flensburg in the 18th and 19th centuries for use in Denmark and its colonies. They were not in fashion in other European countries at the time, according to the museum.

Historical sources had recorded that two Danish slave vessels were shipwrecked off the coast of Central America in 1710: The Fridericus Quartus was set on fire, while the anchor rope of the Christianus Quintus was cut and the ship was swept away.

But the location of the wrecks was not known — until now.

Marine archaeologists from the National Museum and Denmark’s Viking Ship Museum carried out an underwater excavation of the Costa Rica wrecks in 2023, taking wood from one, as well as samples of bricks, and finding several clay pipes.

Researchers at the National Museum and the University of Southern Denmark then carried out scientific analyses that confirmed the historical accounts, the museum noted.

Tree-ring dating revealed that oak wood from one of the wrecks originated from the western part of the Baltic Sea, which encompasses Denmark, northeastern Germany and southern Sweden. The wood was from a tree cut down between 1690 and 1695, according to the museum.

The yellow bricks were measured and found to be the same size as the ones made in Flensburg for the Danish.

The clay used in the bricks was found to be from southern Denmark, either from the small town of Egernsund or from Iller Strand, both of which had large brick-making industries in the 18th century.

The clay pipes were also revealed to be Danish, with their size, shape and designs indicating that they were made just before 1710, when the ships were wrecked.

“The analyses are very convincing and we no longer have any doubts that these are the wrecks of the two Danish slave ships,” said marine archaeologist David Gregory, a research professor and head of the new maritime research center, Njord, at the National Museum of Denmark, in the news release.

“The bricks are Danish and the same goes for the timbers, which are additionally charred and sooty from a fire. This fits perfectly with the historical accounts stating that one of the ships burnt,” he added.

Rebellion and mutiny

Gregory led the excavations alongside marine archaeologist Andreas Kallmeyer Bloch, who is also a curator at the National Museum.

“It’s been a long process and I’ve come close to giving up along the way, but this is undoubtedly the craziest archaeological excavation I’ve yet been part of,” Bloch said in the news release.

“Not only because it matters greatly to the local population, but also because it’s one of the most dramatic shipwrecks in the history of Denmark, and now we know exactly where it happened. This provides two pieces that have been missing from the history of Denmark,” he added.

Bloch told CNN on Friday that the discovery is significant in part because of the “dramatic events involved with (the ships’) journey from Copenhagen to West Africa, and from there to the shores of Cahuita in Costa Rica.”

A rebellion by the enslaved people, a “horrible” navigational mistake and a mutiny by crew members when they arrived at Cahuita are among the events documented in the Danish archives, Bloch said.

The rebellion took place aboard the Fridericus Quartus, which was traveling from Ghana to the Dutch colony of St. Thomas. The uproar, combined with the French and English declaring war, influenced the decision by the Dutch to send the ship with a partner vessel, Toro said.

There were 800 people across the two ships, which got lost because of smog, she said. Instead of going north of a light they saw, which might have been Barbados, they went south, ending up at Costa Rica on March 2.

Fear of pirates and the natives led to two days of arguments between the captains over whether they should go onto the shore to look for food and water. This led to a mutiny among the sailors and the enslaved people — after which around 650 people remained.

The “most dramatic part is the lives that changed due to this event. More than 600 Africans were left on the beach, in what today is Cahuita National Park,” Bloch said.

“The discovery is significant for Danish history, and the fact that we can tie our history to Costa Rica. But it is even more significant for the local population in Costa Rica as it has a direct meaning for the identity of the local people,” he added.

The effort to unravel the identity of the ships and connect it to the identity of the community has been a decade-long project stewarded by a group of youth scuba divers of African and Indigenous origins, said Toro, adding that they feel “pride because they have found their roots.”

The discovery “changes also the story about this region,” she said, adding that it proves Afro-Costa Ricans were in the province of Limon “a hundred years before it was registered in official history.”

The endeavor by the community and the scientists to identify the sunken slave ships appeared in the 2020 television documentary series “Enslaved,” hosted by Samuel L. Jackson.

Celia Ortíz, from the Costa Rican city of Cartago, said her 103-year-old mother is a descendant of Miguel Maroto, one of the enslaved men who disembarked from one of the ships, according to Ambassadors of the Sea. Ortiz said finding her ancestry even late in her mother’s life “brought new light to our lives.”

London
CNN
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Britain’s Prince Harry has revealed that his father, King Charles, no longer speaks to him and that he cannot imagine bringing his family back to the UK after losing a court case over his security arrangements on Friday.

In an explosive interview with the BBC after the court ruling, where at times he was visibly emotional, Harry described being “devastated” at the decision, which he said made it “impossible” for him to return to the UK with his wife Meghan and his two young children.

But he said that he would “love” to repair the rift with his family, which he said had broken down over the security issue. The king “won’t speak to me because of this security stuff,” he said.

The British government downgraded Harry’s security in 2020 after he and Meghan stepped down as senior royals. “When that decision happened, I couldn’t believe it. I actually couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I thought, with all the disagreements and all of the chaos that’s happening, the one thing that I could rely on is my family keeping me safe.”

Harry spoke with the BBC in California, where he has been living with Meghan and their children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, since relocating to the United States in 2020.

Interviews like this are not common for the royal family, though Harry and his wife made headlines in 2021 after speaking to Oprah Winfrey, with Meghan sharing that life as a working royal made her contemplate suicide. In the interview, the couple also alleged that there were “concerns” from the royal family during her pregnancy about how dark their unborn baby Archie’s skin would be.

The case the Duke of Sussex lost on Friday was deeply personal to him. He had previously expressed how important it is to ensure his family has security when they visit the UK.

“The only thing I’ve been asking for throughout this whole process is safety,” Harry said in his interview Friday, calling the situation a “good old-fashioned establishment stitch up.”

For the duke, there has been a sense of not wanting history to repeat itself, and he has frequently drawn comparisons between the treatment of his wife to that faced by his mother, Diana. The late Princess of Wales died in 1997 after suffering internal injuries resulting from a high-speed car crash in Paris, while being pursued by paparazzi.

Harry said it was currently “impossible” to bring his family to his home country. “I can’t see a world in which I’d be bringing my wife and children back to the UK at this point,” he said.

The Duke of Sussex also discussed the years-long rift between him and the royal family, sharing that there have been “so many disagreements” between him and some of his family members, but that the situation surrounding his police protection is the “sticking point.”

“It is the only thing that’s left,” he said. “Of course, some members of my family will never forgive me for writing a book. Of course, they will never forgive me for lots of things. But, you know … I would love reconciliation with my family. There’s no point in continuing to fight anymore.”

The publication of Harry’s book “Spare” in 2023 ripped open old wounds in the family after he shared scathing and intimate details about his experience as a royal.

Later that year, the duke appeared briefly at the coronation of his father, sitting with his uncle Prince Andrew in the third row of the service. Both are non-working royals and did not perform any duties during the ceremony.

On Friday, Harry said that, despite their fractious relationship, he would like to make amends with the king, who last year was diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer.

“I don’t know how much longer my father has,” he added. “He won’t speak to me because of this security stuff, but it would be nice to reconcile.”

A spokesperson for Buckingham Palace told CNN on Friday that all of the issues Harry raised in the interview were “examined repeatedly and meticulously by the courts, with the same conclusion reached on each occasion.”

This story has been updated with developments.

London
CNN
 — 

President Donald Trump might want a new, “America First” world, but in the race to control inflation the United States may actually come last. That’s because, while his tariff hikes are widely expected to jack up prices at home, they could lower inflation across the pond.

The reasons are multiple, ranging from a possible influx of low-priced Chinese exports into Europe to the recent rise in the value of the euro. Aside from the benefit to consumers’ pockets, lower inflation will give European policymakers room to cut interest rates if the economy needs a helping hand — whereas the US could find it hard to lower borrowing costs if the world’s biggest economy needs a boost.

That’s just one way Trump could “Make Europe Great Again,” as economists at Nomura, a global financial services group, put it in a recent research note.

Influential forecasters at the International Monetary Fund also see Trump’s tariffs pushing inflation higher in the US, they wrote in their latest outlook report.

The main reason higher US tariffs will likely raise prices in America is because tariffs are taxes on imports, whether of finished goods or parts.

There are already signs some companies will pass on the costs of the tariffs to American consumers, rather than absorb them. For example, the Adidas CEO said earlier this week that cost increases due to higher tariffs “will eventually cause price increases” in the US. Outside of the US, “there is no reason” to raise prices because of the levies, Bjørn Gulden later added.

The impact of US tariffs introduced in 2018, during Trump’s first term, suggests an inflation bump is on the way. A 2019 study, co-authored by Mary Amiti at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, found a “complete pass-through” of those tariffs into the domestic prices of imported goods.

Even non-tariffed companies might raise their prices. “Domestic producers raise their prices when their foreign competitors are forced to raise prices due to higher tariffs,” Amiti and her co-authors wrote.

While Trump has already implemented an additional 10% tariff on goods imports from almost all countries, as well as much higher tariffs on some sectors and a gigantic duty on imports from China, the European Union has so far only threatened limited retaliatory tariffs on US goods.

The EU may yet put in place a stronger response, which could raise the prices of imports from the US, but the impact on European inflation would still be a lot smaller than what’s in the cards for the US. That’s because, in contrast with Trump’s maximalist approach, Europe would be “only putting tariffs on a single country’s imports,” George Buckley, chief European economist at Nomura, told CNN.

As things stand, economists say, Trump’s tariffs are more likely to slow inflation in the EU this year and next, in four ways.

One is what Christine Lagarde, European Central Bank president, has described as likely efforts by China to “reroute” its exports away from the US, possibly to Europe. “That would have a dampening impact on prices,” she said in an interview on the Washington Post Live platform last week. More goods on the market mean more competition, which means lower prices for shoppers.

Jack Allen-Reynolds, a senior economist at consultancy Capital Economics, explained in a note in April: “Increased competition from cheap Chinese imports could push goods prices down… And with China currently facing much higher tariffs than we had expected, its exporters might slash prices further to offload goods that would otherwise have been sent to the US.”

China is already shipping a lot less to the US, with industry data showing a plunge in sailings last month.

Trump’s whipsaw policy changes have also driven investors away from US assets — including the dollar. In contrast, the euro has strengthened since April 2, when Trump unveiled the 10% tariffs on nearly all countries and even higher levies on products from about 60 nations and trading blocs, including the EU.

The euro has gained 3% against the currencies of the eurozone’s main trading partners, including the dollar, and stands not far off the record high hit on April 22. A stronger currency makes imports cheaper, which generally results in more goods, higher competition and thus lower prices on the market.

Against just the dollar, the euro has risen by a larger 4% since April 2.

“I think concerns about the US economy have dominated (the dollar’s slide),” said Ruben Segura-Cayuela, head of economic research for Europe at the Bank of America. “And second, I think a lot of the recent developments have created some risk premium for US financial assets.”

Meanwhile, expectations of a hit to the global economy from Trump’s tariffs have helped drive energy prices lower since April 2, as traders predict less demand for fuels.

Oil prices tanked in the wake of his “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. Brent crude, the global benchmark, has lost 17% since then.

Natural gas prices have also declined and more sharply in Europe than the US. That could get worse, based on World Bank forecasts published this week. It sees US natural gas prices surging overall in 2025, with another small rise in 2026, while European prices are predicted to increase only modestly this year and fall next year.

The expectations of weaker economic growth have another, broader effect too. Coupled with extreme uncertainty about the direction of trade policies, they are discouraging spending by businesses and denting consumer confidence in Europe. That is the fourth curb on prices, with economists predicting that consumers will also eventually spend less.

While the trade war could slow price increases in Europe, there are still some factors that could nudge inflation higher in the region. One is the recent parliamentary approval in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, of a plan to massively increase investment in infrastructure and defense. Another is an agreement by European leaders in March to ramp up defense spending.

But all that spending will take a while to happen, possibly years.

And with the current level of global uncertainty, who knows what could happen by then.