The Egyptian investigation committee said the flight data recorder of the EgyptAir plane that crashed last month killing all 66 people on board was recovered early Friday from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, one day after the plane's cockpit voice recorder was also retrieved.
The announcement came two days after officials said they had found the wreckage of the Airbus A320 and had started mapping its debris on the seabed. The latest findings raise hopes that investigators will be finally able to determine the cause of the crash and whether the plane broke apart in the air, or stayed intact until it struck the water.
The EgyptAir Airbus A320 was flying to Cairo from Paris when it crashed on May 19 between the Greek island of Crete and the Egyptian coast.
The wreckage was believed to be at a depth of about 3,000 metres. Previously, search crews found only small floating pieces of debris and some human remains.
On Friday, the committee said in a statement that the vessel John Lethbridge, contracted by the Egyptian government to search for the plane wreckage, pulled the data recorder out of the sea in stages. It added that it managed to "successfully retrieve" the memory unit of the recorder which is the "most important" component. While the statement didn't elaborate on the condition of the recorder, but it implied that the memory unit had been safely recovered.
The two units, the so-called black boxes, are tucked into the plane's tail.
The committee said that the data will be downloaded and analyzed once it arrives from the port city of Alexandria, where they will be transferred from the site of the crash.
Earlier in the day an official in the committee said that the investigators had already started analyzing the cockpit voice recorder after it arrived in Cairo overnight.
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/18/2016 00:00 ||
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[ENGLISH.ALMANAR.LB] Brazil's interim president Michel Temer lost the third cabinet member of his month-old administration to a swirling scandal when his tourism minister resigned Thursday after being accused of taking bribes.
Presidency sources told AFP that tourism minister Henrique Eduardo Alves had submitted his resignation after a key witness accused him of accepting 1.5 million reals (around $445,000) diverted from state oil company Petrobras.Brazil tourism minister Henrique Eduardo Alves
Alves, a member of Temer's center-right PMDB party, joins former transparency minister Fabiano Silveira and former planning minister Romero Juca, who were both forced to resign over leaked phone recordings linked to the scandal.
Temer and Alves were among some 20 politicians named in the latest batch of allegations to emerge in the explosive scandal.
Sergio Machado, the former chief executive of Petrobras subsidiary Transpetro, said in a plea deal with prosecutors that both men asked him for money from an illegal kickbacks scheme that diverted some $2 billion from the national oil giant.
Machado said Temer asked him for about $430,000 to fund an ally's campaign for mayor of Sao Paulo, according to documents published Wednesday.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/18/2016 00:00 ||
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At last check, OWG Co-Superpower Should-be BRAZIL is about to self-declare itself a national econ or financial disaster heading into the Olympics.
NO DOUBT RIVAL ARGENTINA IS GLEEFUL, iff only covertly???
Argentina's Peso, even though only worth a few cents to the dollar, has been increasing in value too fast and the Argentina Central Bank had to put the brakes on the Peso Friday. Too much strength for the Argentina Peso in a South American economy coming out of shambles was too much of a good thing too soon.
A glimpse into the posh art world of New York City as it relates to odious dictators...
The Museum of Modern Art has acknowledged it wrongly canceled the New York debut of “Under the Sun,” a documentary about North Korea that has been criticized by that country and Russia.
A slyly subversive look at the reclusive state by the Russian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky, the film had been scheduled to be shown at the museum’s 2016 Doc Fortnight festival on Feb. 19-29. But an email exchange provided by the film’s German producer to The New York Times shows that a festival organizer, Sally Berger, an assistant curator at MoMA, expressed concern in late January about screening the film after reading an article suggesting that any organization that did so risked retribution from North Korea.
Turns out that Ms. Berger had worked at MoMA for 30 years or so, and some of her colleagues are quite unhappy that she got the axe for "one little mistake". Then again, they're likely as liberal progressive as she is and don't understand the big deal about North Korea...
In the emails, Ms. Berger referred to a major hacking attack on Sony Pictures that the United States has described as retaliation by North Korea for a 2014 film satire of the country, “The Interview.”
North Korean users of foreign messenger applications such as Kakao Talk, Line, and WeChat will be arrested on the spot on suspicion of espionage, according to a new order handed down from the authorities. Sources inside the country interpret the move as Kim Jong Un's aggressive reaction to the capability of Chinese cellphones to facilitate the import and export of information into the isolated country.
As recently reported by Daily NK, the North Korean authorities have ramped up efforts to label Chinese cellphone users as traitors and pursuing strict punishments against them. To this end, North Korean authorities doubled down on the use of signal detectors to trace illicit international calls and zero in on the location of foreign phone users.
However, the messenger apps allow users to circumvent detection by this equipment, prompting the regime to respond with new threats specifically targeting users of these communication applications.
“A measure has been enacted that orders the immediate arrest of ‘traitorous’ residents who use foreign messenger applications. The regime further threatened that those caught will not be offered clemency under any condition,” a source in Ryanggang Province told Daily NK on June 2.
“Offenders who are apprehended will be processed according to the discretion of the arresting agency-- i.e. the State Security Department or the Ministry of People’s Security. Those taken in will be charged with espionage associating with the enemy and dispatched to a political prison camp.”
According to the source, the regime first began showing interest in foreign messenger apps in May 2014. At the time, residents who continuously used Chinese cellphones were arrested, and through the course of the investigation process, the authorities discovered that information was being sent back and forth through apps such as the South Korean texting service Kakao Talk.
“At that time, the authorities decided to define such activity as espionage and handed down an order to strictly punish offenders,” he said.
The crackdown on messenger services therefore strengthened from that moment on. The South Korean service Line and the Chinese service WeChat also became targets of surveillance at that point.
“These days, Line and Kakao Talk are explicitly mentioned in lectures [routinely delivered to residents by the authorities]. That’s how serious the crackdown has become,” a separate source in Ryanggang Province said.
This, he went on to say, is unprecedented--hitherto, there had been no mention of foreign cell phone applications at official lectures. Such a proactive measure reveals Fat Boy's Kim Jong Un’s acute awareness of the adverse effects foreign information and defections pose to the stability of the regime, further highlighted by his blustery accusation that South Korea kidnapped 13 North Korean restaurant workers who recently escaped their posts in China and fled to seek asylum in the South.
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/18/2016 00:00 ||
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The Baltic Exchange’s main sea freight index, tracking rates for ships carrying dry bulk commodities, fell on Friday due to lower rates for capesize vessels.
The overall index, which factors in rates for capesize, panamax, supramax and handysize shipping vessels, was down 11 points, or 1.84 percent, at 587 points.
The capesize index lost 49 points, or 5.02 percent, at 927 points.
Average daily earnings for capesizes, which typically transport 150,000-tonne cargoes such as iron ore and coal, were down $405 to $6,533.
The panamax index was up one point, or 0.18 percent, at 546 points.
Average daily earnings for panamaxes, which usually carry coal or grain cargoes of about 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes, increased $9 to $4,361.
Among smaller vessels, the supramax index rose one point to 555 points, while the handysize index fell three points to 311 points.
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Harshith Aranya in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva)
[CNN] A German court convicted a former SS guard at tje Auschwitz death camp of acting as an accessory to the murder of 170,000 people, said Anneli Neumann. spokesperson for Detmold district court, Friday.
Reinhold Hanning was convicted of having assisted in the deaths at the concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland between 1943-4.
"You spent nearly two and half years in Auschwitz and therefore you helped in the mass murder," said Judge Anke Grudda during sentencing, according to CNN Affiliate ARD.
The court then sentenced the 94-year-old man to five years in prison, or about one minute for every 15 lives.
It's a death sentence...
Hanning denied being directly involved in the killings.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/18/2016 00:00 ||
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...I wish we would hunt down the modern genocidal killers the same way we do these men.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
06/18/2016 6:00 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The Egyptian investigation committee said the flight data recorder of the EgyptAir plane that crashed last month killing all 66 people on board was recovered early Friday from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, one day after the plane's cockpit voice recorder was also retrieved.
