Lord Jim:At least 25 people are known dead and nine missing after a catastrophic fire aboard a scuba diving tour boat off Santa Cruz Island, east of Oxnard, California. It appears that almost all of the crew escaped but none of the clients got out of the burning boat after it burst into flames about 3 am yesterday.

  The boat Conception burned nearly to the water line then sank. Some of the bodies were found on the ocean floor.

 Reports say the 75-foot boat was anchored just off shore. Five crew members who were awake when fire broke out jumped off, retrieved a dingy, and paddled to another boat anchored nearby. One crew member is unaccounted for.

  In a frantic mayday call to the Coast Guard, a man says there are 39 people on board and “I can’t breathe.” 

Stormy Weather: Hurricane Dorian, one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record, lingered over the Bahamas yesterday, flooding neighborhoods, submerging cars, vehicles and ripping apart houses with high winds. At least five people are reported to have died.

  The Hurricane sat for most of the day on top of the island of Grand Bahama, lashing it with winds up to 180 miles per hour.“We are in the midst of a historic tragedy in parts of the northern Bahamas,” Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said at a news conference. “Our mission and focus now is search, rescue and recovery. I ask for your prayers for those in affected areas and for our first responders.”

  Now reduced to a Category Three storm, Dorian is tracking toward the East Coast,  with the potential to wreak havoc from Florida to southeastern Virginia and north. 

The News Roundup:Ismail Ajjawi, the 17-year-old Palestinian student from Lebanon who was sent home by border agents rather than be allowed to register at Harvard, has been admitted to the country and allowed to go to school. Ajjawi grew up in a refugee camp and received a scholarship from the Hope Fund. Homeland Security had said they didn’t like the social media postings of his friends. —Defending championNaomi Osaka was knocked out of the US open tournament yesterday in the fourth round by No. 13seed Belinda Bencic. The 22-year-old Bencic hasn’t reached the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam tournament since 2014.

The Obit Page:Franco Columbu, an Italian bodybuilder who along with Arnold Schwarzenegger helped popularize extreme bodybuilding had died at a hospital in Olbia, Italy. He was 78.

  Italian news reports said that Columbu became sick while swimming in the sea at San Teodoro, a beach town in Sardinia.

  Columbu and Schwarzenegger starred in the 1977 movie “Pumping Iron” that exposed the public to what had been the insular world of bodybuilding.  Schwarzenegger, of course, went on to become an action movie star and the governor of California.

  Columbu was just 5-6, but his sculpted his body into a shape that won the titles Mr. Universe, Mr. Olympia, Mr. World — twice.

Expeliarmus!:A Nashville school banned Harry Potter books because its leaders believe they contain “actual curses and spells.”

 The Rev. Dan Reehil, a pastor at the private St. Edward Catholic High Schoolsaid he consulted several exorcists in the U.S. and Rome, and it was recommended that the seven-book series be removed from the school.

  Reehil said in an email obtained by the Tennesseannewspaper,“These books present magic as both good and evil, which is not true, but in fact a clever deception. The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text.” 

  To that we say, “Expecto Patronum!”

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