An Air Algerie plane carrying 116 passengers lost contact with air traffic controllers about an hour after leaving Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso late Wednesday evening.
Air Algerie Flight AH5017 was supposed to land in Algiers at about 5:00 a.m.
At the time of its disappearance the flight would have been over Mali, a nation under a threat warning from the Federal Aviation Administration due to insurgent fighting. The FAA has warned that flying below 20,000 feet leaves jets vulnerable to rocket fire. However, one source told the Associated Press that Mali rebels lacked the sophisticated weaponry to shoot down an airliner. (The same was said about Ukrainian separatists after the downing of MH17.)
The Independent reports that the black boxes recovered from the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash site have arrived in Britain and handed to investigators, it has been confirmed.
The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said the flight recorders have been delivered to their headquarters in Farnborough, Hampshire on Wednesday, where experts will attempt to retrieve crucial data from them.
The AAIB has been tasked with downloading the data by authorities in the Netherlands, who are leading the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the crash in eastern Ukraine.
All 298 passengers on board the 17 July flight were killed, of whom 193 were Dutch and 10 were British. The bodies of the first 50 victims began their journey back to the Netherlands from Kharkiv Airport this morning to begin the process of identification.
I took my talents to South Beach over the weekend for a relative’s surprise birthday party, and on the plane to and fro I had the opportunity to…think. Love airplane mode. Phones and tablets should have other modes, such as marriage mode, play-with-children mode, just-watch-one-screen mode, or perhaps physical media mode, where you would be forced to consume news and entertainment using a newspaper or magazine. I know, I know. I’m old and out-of-touch.
I am worn out about the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian war and the war over which press outlets are too pro-Israel (FOX) and too pro-Palestinian (The New York Times). Terrorist groups and organizations have for too long molded the narrative and have sabotaged every attempt at peace in the region. And the governmental authorities in the warring camps have let it happen. Clearly, Benjamin Netanyahu is not the man who will lead Israel to recognize a two-state solution and there is no current Palestinian leader with the credibility to make peace with Israel. As long as countries in the region refuse to recognize Israel’s sovereign right to exist, there is no basis for meaningful talks. As long as Israel continues to blow up Palestinian homes, the world will continue to paint it as an immoral country.
And speaking of leaders with no credibility and few morals, Vladimir Putin has almost succeeded in building his neo-Soviet state out of the ashes of the USSR. Covering up the shooting of the Malaysian airliner, then having his thugs block access to the crash site is right out of the Chernobyl 101 textbook. The problem is that textbooks are so passe and the technology we have now has laid bare his claim that it was Ukrainians, not pro-Russian separatists, who perpetrated this horrific deed. I don’t believe that this will lead to Putin’s downfall in the short term because he’s still very popular in Russia and he controls the media. Some Russians even believe that Putin himself was the target as he was flying in the general vicinity at the time the Malaysian plane was destroyed. Next up to blame will probably be the Israelis. Putin loves the Israelis.
As for the latest domestic squabbles, the Third Circuit Court in DC struck down the ACA subsidies and the Fourth Circuit in Richmond upheld them. Gotta love our judicial system. Both sides can claim victories, but my sense is that the ultimate decision by the Supreme Court, either next year or the year after, will uphold the subsidies that people get when buying insurance on the national exchange even though the law says that subsidies should only be given to people who buy on the state exchanges. Of course, the last time we tried to parse the ACA arguments in the court, the general consensus was that the law was toast. Ouch. And even if the Republicans win the Senate in November, which they won’t, the law will still survive.
BBC News is reporting that three Dutch investigators have examined bodies from the MH 17 plane crash. The bodies are stored in a refrigerated train by the crash site.
There was a disagreement on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, between host Joe Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski.
The discussion had to do with the downed MH17 flight in Ukraine and the way two American presidents handled the situation when planes were shot down during their administration. The presidents? Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan.
Mika Brzezinski tried to educate the Republican with the fact that Ronald Reagan handled a similar situation by staying on vacation for 4 extra days before finally making a statement. Joe lamented how wrong she was about his faithful leader, Reagan.
The convo went like this:
BRZEZINSKI: At the same time there’s these parallels being made to Ronald Reagan and how he responded to the Korean airliner. It took him four days to go back and make the strong statements that he made, just for some perspective.
SCARBOROUGH: He immediately canceled his vacation.
BRZEZINSKI: No, he didn’t, actually.
SCARBOROUGH: Yes, he actually did.
BRZEZINSKI: No, he didn’t immediately cancel it.
SCARBOROUGH: Yes, he did. He immediately canceled it. He immediately went back to the White House. He immediately canceled fund-raising events and campaign events. Yes, he did. You can go back and look. Ronald Reagan didn’t keep campaigning. He stopped when the Korean airliner went down.
Brzezinski, it turned out, was right. Reagan’s address came four days after the attack, in between which he had an aide make a statement about the incident before making a shorter one himself. At the time, Reagan had been on a twenty-five day vacation in California, and resisted returning to Washington, having an aide tell reporters that he had “every facility, every capacity, every capability” to deal with the crisis at his California ranch. The trip was eventually cut short.
Scarborough conceded the point on Twitter about fifteen minutes later:
And thanks to all the kind souls on Twitter who pointed out my boneheaded error as well. You are great ombudsmen! I was wrong. @morningmika
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