Usher speaks out about viral moment he serenaded Keke Palmer before her baby daddy Darius Jackson outfit-shamed her for revealing look

By Ashleigh Gray For Dailymail.Com

Published: 14:26 EDT, 6 August 2023 | Updated: 14:36 EDT, 6 August 2023

EXCLUSIVE: ‘World’s first ROBOT CEO’ speaks to MailOnline about what its like to head up a Polish rum company

• Developed by Hanson Robotics, Mika claims she is the world’s first AI CEO
• As a worker who ‘never asks for a raise’, she believes AI is the future of business 

By Lauren Haughey

Updated: 12:45 EDT, 30 July 2023

LeBron James speaks out on Bronny for the first time since his 18-year-old son’s cardiac arrest by thanking the ‘countless people sending my family love and prayers’: Lakers star says he ‘will have more to say when ready’

By Alex Raskin Sports News Editor For Dailymail.com and Associated Press

Updated: 13:39 EDT, 27 July 2023

Pat McAfee speaks out on ESPN layoffs ‘after getting murdered on the internet’ amid his new ‘multimillion dollar deal’, saying he aims to prevent future ‘mass exits’

• Pat McAfee was recently acquired by ESPN for a multi million dollar deal 
• ESPN laid off about 20 on-air talents on Friday in a mass exodus
• DailyMail.com provides all the latest international sports news 

By Jake Fenner For Dailymail.Com

Published: 14:35 EDT, 1 July 2023 | Updated: 16:05 EDT, 1 July 2023

The man who alerted authorities to Madeleine McCann prime suspect Christian Brueckner has claimed the girl’s suspected murderer said she ‘didn’t scream’ and that Scotland Yard ignored his tip-off, in his first ever public interview.

Key witness Helge Busching explained how he came to know about Brueckner’s shady past by discovering harrowing sexual abuse videos, and how his former acquaintance appeared to incriminate himself in Madeleine’s disappearance. 

Helge said he learned of Brueckner’s true nature well before the disappearance of McCann after stealing some videotapes and gun from Brueckner’s house along with an accomplice. 

Remembering the moment he witnessed the clips, which purportedly showed Brueckner sexually abusing an elderly American woman and a teenage girl in Portugal, Helge recounted: 

‘You could see how someone whipped the woman. She was tied up, lying on the bed, wearing painted ski goggles… must have been 70 or 80 years old. She shouted: You fucking b******!… then I saw it was Brueckner.

‘[The teenage victim] said: ”This borders on rape!” And he just said: ”Shut up.” That’s when I knew what kind of guy Brueckner was.’

Helge then left Portugal, but told German outlet Bild how he crossed paths with Brueckner, who has since been convicted for sex crimes, again in 2008 at a music festival in Spain.

‘He asked me, ”don’t you go to Portugal anymore and do business there?” 

‘I said, ”no, since the girl disappeared there, there have been too many police checks for me and I don’t need that at all.”

‘[The topic of Madeleine’s disappearance] came up and I said: ”Anyway, I don’t understand how the little one could have disappeared without a trace.”

‘Christian had drunk two or three beers, and he said: ”She didn’t scream.”

‘I thought: He knows that. He has something to do with it. But he also checked that I understood that and then left at night. 

‘At 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning he left a packed festival with his mobile home. I looked for him the next morning, but his neighbours said he had left.’

Helge went on to claimed he’d approached German authorities after finding the videotapes, but that a policeman told him to abandon them and keep quiet.

‘I spoke to a police officer I know in Germany. He said: ”Helge, keep your hands off it.” A lawyer told me the same thing. I wasn’t sure what could happen to me – I would have incriminated myself!’

He added that he tried to inform Scotland Yard about Brueckner in 2008 via the dedicated hotline for Madeleine McCann tips, but never heard back.

‘I called Scotland Yard back in 2008. At the Maddie hotline. I said I knew someone who might have something to do with it and gave them the name. But nothing happened there. Nothing! I was never called back.

‘In 2017 I had just served a prison sentence in Greece. When I heard about the 10th anniversary of the disappearance, I remembered. Apparently the call didn’t help at all. So I contacted Scotland Yard again.

‘Then they listened to me.’

Madeleine was staying with her family at a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal when she disappeared in May 2007.

The case, unsolved for the past 16 years, remains a mystery as no body has ever been found. 

Last month, investigators combed a reservoir in the Algarve for the videotapes, a camcorder and the gun tossed by Helge and his accomplice Manfred Seyferth after they stole the materials from Brueckner’s house.

An area of around 160 square feet had been flattened and cleared of grass and shrubs with several holes dug into the ground to a depth of around two feet.

There were also other holes dug into the foreshore close to the waterline and path close to the edge of the reservoir had been cleared.

It is thought the soil removed was taken away by German officials for closer analysis at a lab in Wiesbaden where the country’s investigative force, the BKA, are based.

Germans Seyferth and Busching were living on the Algarve at the same time as Brueckner and the two were involved in petty theft with him before having a falling out.

Footage on the video camera was said to show Brueckner torturing and raping an American woman, with footage of a girl around 15 years old also subjected to the same horrific ordeal.

In 2019 Brueckner was convicted by a German court of the rape of an elderly American woman in her home at Praia da Luz close to where Madeleine vanished, and was given a seven-year sentence.

He denies any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance. 

Madeleine was staying with her family at a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal when she disappeared in May 2007.

It was the penultimate day of the holiday when Madeleine went missing.

After a day of activities, Kate and Gerry McCann put their three children to bed at around 7pm.

Madeleine fell asleep in pink pyjamas and the parents relaxed with a bottle of wine.

At around 8:30pm, the McCanns joined their friends for a meal at the Tapas bar nearby.

Gerry McCann checked on Madeleine and her siblings at 9pm and found nothing amiss.

When Kate McCann went to check up on the children at 10pm, she found Madeleine had disappeared.

‘Madeleine’s gone! Someone’s taken her!’ she was reported to have said, running back to the restaurant.

Around the same time, a man was seen carrying a child matching Madeleine’s description. 

Investigators looked into claims a friend of the family, James Tanner, had seen a man carrying a sleeping child in pink pyjamas away from the apartment block at around 9:10pm on May 3, but the evidence was later discounted. Police said the man seen with the child was another holidaymaker with their own child.

Days turned into months and hundreds of police officers were called in to support the search. Possible sightings were reported. Seven months after her disappearance, a lorry driver told investigators he had seen a woman handing a man a child near Silves, a slightly quieter town due northeast of Praia da Luz.

Astonishingly, Portuguese police named Gerry and Kate McCann as suspects in the case after four months without results. They said they found incriminating DNA evidence at the holiday apartment and in the boot of their hire car. This line of inquiry was later dropped.

In July 2008, 14 months since Madeleine’s disappearance, Portugal’s attorney general ended the investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance after they had failed to uncover any evidence.

The case was handed over to private investigators working for the family until the Met issued new sketches of potential suspects in 2013. Investigators were the first to scour the reservoir now being searched in 2008 – 12 years before authorities said they were looking into a new German suspect.

Again, the investigation struggled to produce definitive results until authorities said they were investigating a 43-year-old in connection to the disappearance, later named as Christian Brueckner.

In 2020, authorities revealed a phonecall had located Christian Brueckner in Praia da Luz, where he lived from 1997 until 2007, around the time of Madeleine’s disappearance.

They traced the call and found it connected to the mast owned by the resort complex where the family had stayed. 

Brueckner had lived in a warehouse outside the village for several years but moved into a VW campervan just before Madeleine vanished. 

A Mail on Sunday investigation later found that Brueckner stayed in an old house in nearby Foral between 2007 and 2008 – after Madeleine’s disappearance.

That year, it was revealed that a witness claimed to have spotted Madeleine getting into a German-owned VW van with a man just weeks after her disappearance.

A police file detailed how a witness believed that had seen Madeleine emerging from a restaurant in the Spanish seaside town of Alcossebre in eastern Spain, before climbing into the van with an unidentified man.

A friend of the British billionaire missing on a trip to dive to the Titanic has said she fears his submersible is trapped on the sea bed.

Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian explorer, said she knew Hamish Harding, 58, would be ‘calm’ amid the crisis.

He is one of five people on board a submersible, which at 4am on Sunday began its descent to the resting place of the Titanic, nearly 13,000 feet below the surface.

The round trip – for which participants pay $250,000 – usually takes eight hours. But contact with the mothership was lost one hour and 45 minutes into the trip, before reaching the wreck, and rescuers are now engaged in a race against time to try and recover the submersible and its crew.

‘My biggest fear is knowing that they are trapped, without being able to get help,’ said Mikkelsen.

‘There is no one who can reach him on the bottom.’

Mikkelsen, a cinematographer specializing in extreme environments, said she was deeply concerned by the fact the crew missed their ascent window – their expected time to surface.

On Monday afternoon, US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said the submersible has 96 hours of emergency oxygen on board, based on information received from the vessel operator.  

‘My fear is that they didn’t make their last ascent window,’ Mikkelsen told Chris Cuomo on NewsNation.

‘They didn’t. We are starting to make worst case scenarios.’

G. Michael Harris, a Titanic expedition leader, said he knew several of those on board, and the outlook was grim.

He told Fox News’s Jesse Watters that there was oxygen on board and CO2 scrubbers, but ultimately there was no magic solution.

‘Just not feeling good about it,’ he said.

‘When we deploy it’s usually a two and a half hour drop down to the wreck site itself.

‘We go down 3,980 meters. We spiral down, a corkscrew action, about three degrees per second to land right basically in front of the bow of Titanic.

‘Once we get down there we begin our grid searches and our decay and everything that goes on with Titanic.’

Harris said the worst situation would be an implosion of the hull around 3,200 meters.

‘I don’t see anything that can happen at this point. When you are talking 6,000lbs per square inch, it is a dangerous environment.

‘More people have been to outer space than this depth of the ocean.’

He said you have to ‘do everything perfect by the book’, and it was ‘not looking good’. 

Mikkelsen said Harding acted as a mentor to her, and was well aware of the risks he took.

‘Hamish is an explorer at heart and this is one of the things he wanted to explore, on his checklist,’ she said.

‘Hamish knows the risks before he starts.

‘I know that Hamish will be calm, they will work together through their checklist of options.’

The mothership, MV Polar Prince, set off from Newfoundland on Saturday bound for the spot above the Titanic wreck, 370 miles away.

The submersible went into the water in the early hours of Sunday.

On board were Harding, French Navy veteran PH Nargeolet; and CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush. The other two passengers have not been named.

The submersible – it is not a submarine, because it is not independent and relies on a mothership – lost contact with the mothership one hour 45 minutes into its descent.

It takes two and a half hours to descend to the wreck. 

Analysts believe it could have lost power, or sunk and perhaps became trapped on the wreck. Some initially suggested it perhaps surfaced and was bobbing without power, but that seems an increasingly remote possibility.

There were 96 hours of air left on the submersible as of Monday afternoon, and the U.S. Coast Guard said they are engaged in a race against time. 

There are no rescue submarines in the U.S. Coast Guard that are able to reach the depths of the Titanic. 

Harding holds the Guinness World Record for the longest duration spent at the bottom of the sea.

The London-born adventurer set it in 2021, after diving to the deepest place on Earth, the Mariana Trench, and traversing it for four hours and 15 minutes.

It was one of three Guinness world records he has earned.

He set another one for the longest distance, three miles, covered at the bottom of the ocean. 

His first was set in 2019, for the fastest circumnavigation of the earth via North and South Poles in a Gulfstream 650ER business jet – with Mikkelsen filming the adventure. 

Last year he went into space.

The father of two – who is friends with astronaut Buzz Aldrin – said recently: ‘I used to read the book of Guinness World Records regularly as a child. I always wondered how I could get into it. I did not think I could do it.

‘And I didn’t want to do something stupid – like setting a record for the number of ping-pong balls bounced in a day, or something like that.’

As the frantic search for the Titanic submersible was underway Monday, family members asked for prayers for Harding as his latest adventure went awry.

The aviator, businessman and explorer is no stranger to perilous expeditions.

He told an interviewer in 2021 how his submarine, Challenger Deep, had sustained a damaged thruster during his journey to the ‘truly spectacular’ Mariana Trench, which lies seven miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. 

‘The sub has many safety features, including four days’ reserve of oxygen, water and emergency rations,’ he said. 

‘The only problem is that there is no other sub that is capable of going down there to rescue you. It will take three years to build another one. 

‘So, having four days of supply doesn’t make a difference really. 

‘If something goes wrong, you are not coming back.’

Harding, who runs an aviation company in Dubai, also has the distinction of taking the oldest man – moon landing astronaut Aldrin, at the age of 86 – and the youngest, his 12-year-old son, to the South Pole.

‘Buzz is an old friend of mine,’ he said. 

‘We had always talked about going to the South Pole together and we finally did it in 2016.’

An only child, Harding was born in Hammersmith, London, in 1964, and has degrees in natural sciences and chemical engineering from Cambridge University.

Last year, Harding was one of six astronauts to go to space on Blue Origin’s fifth human spaceflight aboard its New Shepard rocket.

And before another trip, to the North Pole two months prior to going into space, he said: ‘People, especially as they grow older, tend to give up on their dreams. When I think of something unusual, I just try to find ways to make it happen.’