Society's ChildS


Airplane

Russian Airbus A321 broke up midair, still early to determine cause

Russian Airbus A321 crash
© AFP 2015/ Khaled Desouki
Viktor Sorochenko, an official with the Intergovernmental Aviation Committee, made the comments after inspecting the crash site on Egypt's Sinai peninsula. The Russian Airbus A321 which crashed in Egypt Saturday killing 224 broke into pieces midair, but it is still too early to determine the cause, Interstate Aviation Committee (MAK) said Sunday.
"It is too early to draw conclusions," MAK executive director Viktor Sorochenko said. "Disintegration of the fuselage took place in the air, and the fragments are scattered around a large area [about 20 square kilometers]", the official added.
In a separate development, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said the investigation into the crash causes could take months.
"This is a complicated matter and requires advanced technologies and broad investigations that could take months," he told army recruits in a televised speech on Sunday.
A Kogalymavia/Metrojet Airbus A321 en route to St. Petersburg from the resort city of Sharm El-Sheikh with 217 passengers and seven crew on board, crashed in the Sinai Peninsula, leaving no survivors. The Sinai air crash became the deadliest air accident in the history of Russian aviation, surpassing the 1985 disaster in Uzbekistan, where 200 people died.

Blackbox

Russian investigators begin operations at the Airbus A321 crash site

Russian airbus crash
© REUTERS/ Mohamed Abd El Ghany
According to a Russian Emergencies Ministry spokesman, experts in the Egyptian capital of Cairo have examined some 120 bodies of Russian Airbus crash victims.

A working team led by Russian Minister of Emergencies Vladimir Puchkov began operations at the Kogalymavia A321 crash site in Egypt, a ministry representative said during a briefing on Sunday.

"A working team led by head of the Russian Ministry of Emergencies Vladimir Puchkov is working at the A321 crash site. The rescue workers are going to sweep over 16 square kilometers of terrain," he said.

Comment: Also see: 'Structural failure'? Western propaganda rag creates narrative on the Russian A321 plane crash


Blackbox

International team of investigators begins analyzing downed Russian flight data recorders

Russian airplane crash
© AP Photo/ Egyptian Prime Minister's Office via AP
The airliner's flight data recorders were discovered on Saturday night and have only minor damage.

Experts from Egypt, Russia, and France have started analyzing the flight data recorders of the Russian airliner which crashed Saturday in Egypt killing 224, Egyptian media report.

The airliner's flight recorders were discovered on Saturday night. The Russian transportation minister said they had no significant damages.

Comment: Also see: Russian plane carrying more than 200 passengers 'completely destroyed' in Egypt crash


Compass

A personal reflection on the dehumanization and mass psychosis of Ukraine

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Translated from the original article in PolitNavigator for Fort Russ by J. Arnoldski

"Dehumanization as a national catastrophe"


It should already be time to get used to things, but I simply can't as I am constantly faced with the massive orgy of "non-humans" over dead people. The catastrophe of the Russian airliner somewhere over Egypt blew the seats off the toilets of Ukrainian social network contingents and other contingents sympathetic to them. It should already be time to get used to things, but every time that I'm faced with a flood of sewage sludge that flows from the TV screen and computer monitor from the vilest depths of the human gut, I shudder and loathe. Somehow it's impossible be so hardened that you deal with such things indifferently, shrug, and turn away.

Comment: Rostovtsev gives a very sad but accurate description of the effects of the West on the hearts and souls of a number of Ukrainians - many of whom would probably not have succumbed to the ponerizing poison had it not been so insidiously injected into their society. The floodgates of pathological thinking and malevolent intent have simply been opened by those powers that would seek to control Ukraine for their own ends; that is what they do. It is probably not even a very large percentage of the population that has fallen prey. But, given the strength of its virulence, and propensity towards extreme and brutal physical and psychological violence, it has clearly taken much of Ukraine hostage to its irrational and destructive position.


Crusader

Mon Dieu: French lawmaker demoted from PACE over Crimea visit, Russia support

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© RIA NovostiThierry Mariani (C), Member of the National Assembly's Foreign Affairs Commission and co-chair of the Association Dialogue Franco-Russe, and Vladimir Konstantinos (R), Chairperson of the State Council of the Republic of Crimea, during a press briefing following their meeting in Simferopol.
French lawmaker Thierry Mariani has been asked to step down from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) after he traveled to the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea as part of the French delegation in July. RT has caught up with the politician to get his reaction.

A parliamentary delegation of more than 10 members of the French National Assembly and the Senate paid a two day long visit to the Crimean peninsula on July 23. The group visited the cities of Yalta and Sevastopol, where the delegation met with the Crimean leader Sergey Aksyonov and chairman of Crimea's State Council Vladimir Konstantinov.

The French lawmakers had decided to make the trip to Crimea to get a sense of the situation in the peninsula, after it joined Russia in spring 2014. Both the French and Ukrainian governments have condemned the decision, claiming that it was a breach of international law.

Mariani made loud statements in the press following his visit to the "region, where peace reigns," saying that the Crimeans he met were happy to be part of Russia.

Comment: Apparently PACE is not on board with the majority of French people. But that won't stop other EU lawmakers from visiting Crimea.


Nuke

Explosion at nuclear power plant in Belgium

Nuclear power plant of Doel
© wikipedia.orgNuclear power plant of Doel
An explosion occurred overnight at a nuclear power plant in Doel, northern Belgium, local media reported, adding that the blast caused a fire. The exact damage from the incident remains unknown. The blast happened around 11pm local time on Saturday. The fire started in Reactor 1 of the plant, but was soon extinguished by personnel.

The explosion didn't cause any threat to nature, Els De Clercq, spokeswoman from Belgian energy corporation Electrabel that runs the plant, told Het Laatste Nieuws. There was no fuel present at the time of the incident as the reactor had been shut due to its expired operational license.

Doel Nuclear Power Station, one of the two nuclear power plants in the country, is located near the town of Doel in east Flanders. The plant employs about 800 people. According to the Nature journal and Columbia University in New York, the plant is in the most densely populated area of all nuclear power stations in the EU. About 9 million people live within a radius of 75km of the station.

Comment: Curious incidents occurred in the fall of 2014: multiple unidentified drones were sighted over nuclear plants in France and Belgium. See also: Mystery drone spotted flying over Belgium's nuclear plant


Airplane

Russian A321 plane crash in Egypt: Evidence thus far points to sudden structural failure

Russian A321 Crash_1
© EPA/STR Egypt OUTDebris from crashed Russian jet lies strewn across the sand at the site of the crash, Sinai, Egypt, 31 October 2015. According to reports the Egyptian Government has dispatched more than 45 ambulances to the crash site of the Kogalymavia Metrojet Russian passenger jet, which disappeared from radar after requesting an emergency landing early 31 October, crashing in the mountainous al-Hasanah area of central Sinai. The black box has been recovered at the site.
The jet split in two near the tail, which could mean a 'tail strike' in 2001 was never truly fixed.

The suddenness of what happened to the Russian-operated jet that crashed in the Sinai is highly unusual. According to reports the pilot had reported a technical problem and a diversion to the nearest airport. But the problem was apparently so severe that his plan was overtaken by events and the airplane literally fell out of the sky from its cruise altitude of 31,000 feet.

In theory the Sinai is dangerous air space. Much of the Sinai is a closed military zone where the Egyptian army has frequent skirmishes with Islamic terrorist groups. There have been claims by a jihadist group linked to ISIS that it brought down the flight, but the airplane's altitude put it well beyond the range of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, or MANPADS, the only relevant weapon fielded by such groups, and first pictures of the wreckage offer no evidence of a missile strike.

Instead investigators will treat as much more credible the possibility of a sudden structural failure. The Airbus A321 was 18 years old, but with a modern airplane like this and regular maintenance that is not in itself a cause for concern.

Comment: 'Sudden structural failure' sounds plausible, but it's unlikely that this plane's 'weakness' alone would have caused it to crash so spectacularly. As the author points out, "would have been rigorously inspected then and during subsequent maintenance checks."

Information is still coming in, and what has been shared publicly thus far only gives rise to more questions. That the crash involved a Russian plane and that it went down in a region teaming with military and paramilitary would suggest that this was a deliberate act by some unknown party.

However, for now Sott.net is leaving it open that this crash could have been the result of a natural, albeit unusual, catastrophic event, perhaps like the airburst that sent the Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 into the Java Sea in December last year.

Whatever happened to this Russian-owned plane, it's definitely something more than just the result of a structural weakness. Some kind of tremendous force knocked that plane out of the sky.


Airplane

Islamic State's claim to crashing Russian passenger plane dismissed

russian crash
© www.telegraph.co.ukRemnants of Russian passenger flight A321
The Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) terror group says it is responsible for downing a Russian passenger jet that crashed Saturday in the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people on board. The deceased include seventeen children, two-hundred adult passengers, and seven crew members, reports concluded.

The Airbus A321 plane was flying from the Red Sea resort city of Sharm El-Sheikh to St. Petersburg, when it crashed only a few hundred miles away in the central Sinai area. Everyone on the plane was Russian except for a few Ukrainian passengers, Egypt's airport authority said in a statement.

A branch of the terror organization, Wilayat Sinai (formerly known as Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis), posted a statement on social media, declaring, "The fighters of the Islamic State were able to down a Russian plane over Sinai province that was carrying over 220 Russian crusaders. They were all killed, thanks be to God."

ISIS fighters do possess MANPADS, shoulder-launched missiles that have a maximum effective range of around 15,000 feet, according to experts. However, the plane started to experience issues at 31,000 feet, well out of the range of the jihadis' portable launchers. Both Egyptian and Russian officials have dismissed ISIS's claims.

Comment: See also:Russian plane carrying more than 200 passengers 'completely destroyed' in Egypt crash


Bad Guys

Fourth atheist blogger hacked to death in Bangladesh; three others wounded in similar attack

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© Munir Uz Zaman/AFPThe body of Bangladeshi publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan, lies in a morgue at Dhaka Medical College in Dhaka Dhaka on October 31, 2015, after he was killed in an attack in his office.
A publisher of secular books was hacked to death in Bangladesh's capital Dhaka on Saturday after three of his colleagues were wounded in a separate attack.

The victims in both attacks had been involved in the publishing of works by Bangladeshi-US blogger and writer, Avijit Roy, who was himself hacked to death on the Dhaka University campus in February.

The slaughtered body of Faisal Arefin Dipan was discovered in the office of his Jagritee publishing house. "I saw him lying upside down and in a massive pool of blood. They slaughtered his neck. He is dead," Dipan's father, Abul Kashem Fazlul Haq, a well-known Bangladesh intellectual and writer, told AFP. According to Haq, that fact that his son "published the books of Avijit Roy" was the most likely reason for his murder.

Local police chief, Jamaluddin Mir, said that at least seven people were trapped inside the publishing house when the attack on 43-year-old Dipanwas carried out. "The criminals introduced themselves as customers who were buying books, and entered the publishing house," he said.

Earlier on Saturday, publisher Ahmed Rahim Tutul and two writers - Ranadeep Basu and Tareque Rahim - were shot and stabbed by three men at the Shudhdhoswar publishing house headquarters. Right after the attack Basu posted on a short status on Facebook, reading: "They hacked us, me Tutul and Tareq."

Comment: See also:


X

Prison industrial complex: Falsified or tainted evidence leads to thousands of wrongful convictions

Annie Dookhan
© Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Reuters.Annie Dookhan, convicted of falsifying evidence used in roughly 34,000 criminal cases
How many people are in jail based on faked data?
Earlier this year, I wrote about a sprawling prosecutorial scandal in Orange County, California, involving a long-standing program of secret jailhouse snitches that had tainted prosecutions in cases almost too numerous to count. This story has only continued to worsen. One of the prosecutors at the heart of the case simply packed up and left California last month, and just this week the news emerged that Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas had been told that his office might have a jailhouse informant problem all the way back to 1999, a full 16 years before the current allegations about the misuse of jailhouse snitches had surfaced.

The problem with a scandal on this order of magnitude isn't just that it reflects a fundamental flaw in the justice system. The problem is that, as a purely practical matter, there is simply no easy way to correct it. In Orange County, some convictions have been tossed, others have been stalled, and a call for a Justice Department investigation has gone unheeded. Even years after cases like this come to light, undoing or redoing wrongful convictions proves almost impossible to achieve, especially when the state believes someone else should be cleaning up the mess.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of a massive scandal that cannot seem to be reversed involves Annie Dookhan, a chemist who worked at a Massachusetts state lab drug analysis unit. Dookhan was sentenced in 2013 to at least three years in prison, after pleading guilty in 2012 to having falsified thousands of drug tests. Among her extracurricular crime lab activities, Dookhan failed to properly test drug samples before declaring them positive, mixed up samples to create positive tests, forged signatures, and lied about her own credentials. Over her nine-year career, Dookhan tested about 60,000 samples involved in roughly 34,000 criminal cases. Three years later, the state of Massachusetts still can't figure out how to repair the damage she wrought almost single-handedly.

Comment: This is an appalling travesty of injustice against thousands of people, most likely disproportionately affecting the poor and minorities, yet those who are responsible for this aren't being held accountable and those who are innocent and were falsely imprisoned aren't seeing justice. Seems like another indicator of a severely corrupt system and a product of a psychopathic for-profit prison industrial complex that cares more about profits than people or justice. Anytime accountability is lacking, corruption is surely to follow.

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