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Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash
Apr 10th
On Saturday 10 April 2010, a Tupolev Tu-154M of the Polish 36th Special Aviation Regiment crashed next to Smolensk-North Airport, just outside Smolensk near Pechyorsk, Smolensk Oblast, Russia, killing all 96 aboard, as well as President Lech Kaczyński.
Information about the cause of the crash is still unverified. News agencies statement says that the pilot attempted four times to land in heavy fog, ignoring the guidance of the ground control to divert to a safer airport, either in Minsk or Moscow.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced that the bodies of all of the victims would be flown to Moscow for identification.
Polish and Russian authorities confirmed that all 96 people on the aircraft died in the mishap. It was among the most awful disasters in Polish record by death-toll, and at the time it was the most deadly aircraft crash in 2010.
The cause of the crash is currently under investigation.
Dhruv (Chopper) crashes in Ecuador
Oct 28th
An Indian made chopper Dhruv which was recently bought by Eucuador Air Force crashed during a parade.
The 18 months old chopper came down crashing during the Ecuador parade. Thankfully, both the pilots bailed out to safety in time and are safe.
Following the incident, Ecuador has grounded all 6 Dhruv choppers until the investigations are complete.
Pakistan’s Hindu Kush mountains is the new home for Osama Bin Laden
Mar 15th
The latest US Intelligence reports is said to have tracked down the world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama, in the Hindu Kush mountains in Pakistan’s scenic Chitral region.
Though America has not declared it officially, Six US and foreign officials have said that the Hindu Kush mountains in the Chitral region have been eyed as bin Laden’s hideout since 2006 by Osama.
At Dutch crash site flight recorders found
Feb 26th
AMSTERDAM- Investigators are trying to establish what caused the break down of an airplane with a good quality safety record, flown by a well-respected airline, at one of the world’s most up to date airports.
At least 9 people were killed and 55 wounded when the Turkish Airlines Boeing 737-800 crashed Wednesday in a field near Amsterdam’s main airport, splitting into three parts, officials said.
It is too early to decide the cause of the crash but the flight data and voice recorders have been recovered, said Michel Bezuijen, acting mayor of Haarlemmermeer municipality, which is home to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.
He said investigators still need to find out what, if something, the pilots said in the moments before the crash.
The injured integrated both crew and passengers, he said. The names of the dead and injured will not be released before Thursday, Bezuijen said.
“It will take more time. Probably tomorrow afternoon we can tell you about the identity of the victims, including the fatalities,” he said.
One more official said earlier that both pilots and an novice pilot are among the dead.
“There are still three crew members in the cabin,” said Bob Steensma of the Dutch Justice Department. “I’m sorry to say they are dead. We leave them there because we have to investigate the cockpit before we take the cockpit apart.”
Turkish Airlines said earlier the plane was carrying 134 people — 127 passengers and 7 crew members.
Six people were seriously wounded, Ineke Van Der Zande of Amsterdam Emergency Services told reporters at a briefing.
Twenty-five passengers were harshly injured, she said, and 24 were lightly injured. Some 60 ambulances transported 84 people to 11 hospitals throughout the region, she said. There was no word on injuries to the others who were transported.
Witnesses said they saw the nose of the plane pitch up rapidly before the break down, according to RTL journalist Greg Crouch.
The plane broken down into three pieces. One break was in front of the wing, splitting the “Turkish” logo in two, and a larger break was farther back along the fuselage.
Most of the injured were seated toward the back of the plane, which continued the most damage, a passenger on the plane told Turkish station NTV.
Several of the passengers simply walked off the plane through the cracks in the fuselage, witnesses said.
A passenger on the plane who spoke to Turkish network DHA said he saw injured people trapped and squeezed between the seats when he walked out.
Flight 1951 was arriving at Schiphol from Istanbul, Turkey, when it went down around 10:40 a.m. (4:40 a.m. ET). It came to rest in a farmer’s field about 500 yards short of the runway, near the major A9 highway.
Crouch said the weather at the time was partly sunny with no wind or rain. No fire broke out after the crash, Bezuijen said.
A bank manager who was a passenger on the plane told NTV that there were no emergency announcements. The crew’s last word to the cabin was an announcement to fasten their seat belts and get ready for landing, the bank manager said.
He said he felt the pilot giving more power to the engines before feeling “turbulence,” then a unexpected drop. He described the crash as comparable to a unexpected impact that was over in a matter of seconds.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending a team of investigators to Amsterdam to help in the crash investigation.
The Boeing 737-800 is a reliable aircraft that has been doing well and safe in service, said aviation expert Kieran Daly of Air Transport Intelligence.
“They really are pretty much state-of-the-art airlines with every imaginable technical benefit the industry has come up with over the years,” Daly told CNN. “You would be optimistic that they would be quite survivable in an accident.”
Daly said Turkish Airlines, a national carrier, has a “very good record.”
Turkish Airlines said it has 52 Boeing 737-800s in its fleet. They can carry as many as 165 passengers each, it said.
Before Wednesday, the airline’s last mishap was of a small commuter jet in 2003, Daly said. It was a deadly crash that happened at a remote airfield in southeastern Turkey, he said.
“Their mainline operation is safe,” Daly said. “Their pilots are well thought of.”
Worldwide, there have been two fatal commercial airline crashes this year.
The last previous serious incident at the Amsterdam airport happened in April 1994 when a KLM aircraft gone down as it tried to return to Schiphol shortly after takeoff. Three of the 24 passengers and crew members on board were killed.
$8bn fraud, US tycoon charged
Feb 18th
The Securities and Exchange Commission said the financier had orchestrated “a fake, multi-billion dollar investment scheme”.
The SEC said the fraud was “based on false promises and fabricated historical return data”.
English cricket bosses have backed out of funding talks with Sir Allen.
The charges against Sir Allen, three of his companies and two executives of those companies followed a raid by US marshalls on the Houston, Texas, offices of Stanford Financial Group.
A US judge has sealed the assets of Sir Allen and the other defendants as well as those of the Stanford Group, its Antigua-based subsidiary Stanford International Bank (SIB) and another subsidiary, investment advisor Stanford Capital Management.
A receiver has been selected to “preserve assets for investors”, the SEC said.
Sir Allen last year promoted the Stanford cricket series which saw a West Indian all-star team - the Stanford Superstars - beat an England team for a $20m prize.
The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) perched funding talks with him following the fraud charges.
The ECB has a five-year deal to play games against the Stanford Superstars.
The SEC said that the Stanford International Bank - the biggest in the Caribbean - sold approximately $8bn worth of certificates of deposit to investors, promising “improbable and unsubstantiated high interest rates”.
The bank was “operated by a close circle of Stanford’s family and friends”, the SEC said in a statement.
“We are alleging a fraud of shocking magnitude that has spread its tentacles throughout the world,” said Rose Romero of the SEC.
The SEC began investigating Stanford Group last year and intensified their probe subsequent the arrest of US financier Bernard Madoff in December over an suspected $50bn (£35bn) investment fraud.
In the wake of that scandal, SIB falsely told its investors it had no contact to the funds implicated in the alleged Madoff fraud.
The Stanford Group lists its value as more than $40bn. Antigua and Barbuda granted Sir Allen citizenship about 10 years ago and knighted him in 2006.
Forbes magazine lists him as the world’s 605th richest man, with assets of $2.2bn.
Colombia: Volcano eruption sparks alert
Feb 15th
On Saturday a volcano near southwest Colombia’s border with Ecouadr erupted, leading the government to issue a “red alert” for the region.
There were not supposed to be any losses or injury in the blast, which happened at about 7:10 p.m. ET (12:10 a.m. Sunday GMT), said Carlos Lineras of the Colombia Institute for Geology and Mines.
The institute issued an mass departure order for about 7,000 people living near the Galeras volcano.
The volcano is not in a greatly settled region.
Galeras has erupted several times since it became active again in 1989. The only fatalities were in 1993, when nine people — all scientists or tourists in or near the volcano’s crater — were killed.
Global warming: Underestimated
Feb 15th
The cruelty of global warming over the next century will be much inferior than formerly supposed, a foremost climate scientist has warned.
Professor Chris Field, an author of a 2007 landmark report on climate change, said future temperatures “will be beyond anything” predicted.
Prof Field said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had underestimated the rate of change.
He said warming is expected to cause more ecological harm than anticipate.
Speaking at the American Science conference in Chicago, Prof Field said fresh data showed greenhouse gas emissions between 2000 and 2007 amplified far more quickly than anticipated.
“We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we’ve considered seriously in climate policy,” he said.
Prof Field said the 2007 report, which predicted temperature rises between 1.1C and 6.4C over the next century, critically underestimated the scale of the crisis.
He said the increases in carbon dioxide have been caused, mainly, by the blazing of coal for electric power in India and China.
Prof Field said the impact on temperatures is as yet indefinite, but warming is expected to speed up at a much faster pace and cause further environmental harm than had been predicted.
He says that a warming planet will dry out forests in tropical areas building them much more likely to undergo from wildfires.
The increasing temperatures could also speed up the melting of the permafrost, greatly mounting the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, Prof Field warns.
“Without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought,” he said.
In space Russian & US satellites smashed together
Feb 13th
On Wednesday 2 satellites smashed together in space hundreds of miles (kilometers) above Earth, destroying an Iridium commercial satellite in a collapse that may result in disturbance of service, the US Company said.
The Bethesda, Maryland-based company said it “lost an operational satellite” after it was struck Tuesday by a spent Russian satellite, in what is being described as the first foremost collision of its kind in space.
US space agency NASA apparently was tracking hundreds of particles of debris from the collision, and said that the orbiting International Space Station (ISS) faced an “elevated” but small risk of being struck.
“While this is an extremely unusual, very low-probability event, the Iridium constellation is uniquely designed to withstand such an event, and the company is taking the necessary steps to replace the lost satellite with one of its in-orbit spare satellites,” the company said in a statement.
The privately-held Iridium Satellite, which says its network comprises 66 communication satellites plus in-orbit spares, stressed the mishap was not the effect of a breakdown of technology or the company’s fault.
“This satellite loss may result in very limited service disruption in the form of brief, occasional outages,” it said, adding that the company expects to apply a network solution by Friday, and move one of its in-orbit spares in place to eternally replace the shattered satellite within 30 days.
According to Space News, the US space agency NASA issued an alert Tuesday saying Russia’s 900-kilogram (1,980-pound) Cosmos 2251 satellite collided with Iridium’s 560-kilogram (1,232-pound) craft at 16:55 GMT, some 790 kilometers (490 miles) above Siberia.
It said NASA was tracking two large clouds of debris.
The Washington Post quoted a NASA memo about the occurrence, saying officials “have determined that the risk to the space station is elevated, and they estimate the risk to be very small and within acceptable limits.”
There is little risk the space station will enter the debris clouds, however, as the ISS is orbiting about 354 kilometers (220 miles) above earth, some 436 kilometers (270 miles) below the collision orbit.
Cosmic collisions of space junk are not unheard of, but NASA officials said it was the first linking a pair of intact satellites, the Post reported.
NASA spokesman John Yembrick said the collision debris would persist to spread and could end up forcing the space station into elusive maneuvers.
“The space station does have the capability of doing a debris-avoidance maneuver if necessary,” and has done so on eight occasions, he said.
Some 6,000 satellites have been sent into space since the Soviet Union launched the first man-made orbiter, Sputnik 1, in 1957. About 3,000 satellites remain in operation, according to NASA.
NASA’s space shuttle Discovery is planned to launch from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on February 22 at the earliest, on a mission to the ISS.
Nadya Suleman Octuplet’s birth spawns outrage from public
Feb 8th
As per the Springfield fertility specialist, having eight babies shouldn’t be considered glamorous or cute, and whoever helped a California mother conceive octuplets was reckless by disregarding well-established ethical guidelines.
Dr. J. Ricardo Loret de Mola said the fact that Nadya Suleman already had six young children at home — all conceived through in vitro fertilization — didn’t make it wrong for a fertility program to assist the divorced, unemployed 33-year-old in getting pregnant again from a sperm donor.
“The decision of how large a family should be is a decision that each individual couple, or person, is going to make,” he said. “This is a personal and individual decision that families have to decide on by themselves, not by physicians. I don’t think that as a society we have reached a point where we’re comfortable limiting the size of a family.”