Passenger jet crashes in Pakistan, 152 on board

Passenger jet crashes in Pakistan, 152 on board

Passenger jet crashes in Pakistan, 152 on board

Posted: 28 Jul 2010 01:11 AM PDT

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A commercial Pakistani passenger plane with 152 people on board crashed in bad weather in hills near the capital, Islamabad, on Wednesday, killing at least 10 people, officials said.


High Court grants leave for judicial review to quash conversion of kindergarten teacher's children

Posted: 28 Jul 2010 12:53 AM PDT

The High Court here today granted leave for a full trial in a application for a judicial review by a kindergarten teacher to quash the conversion to Islam of her three children.

read more

Dr Mahathir: Code of ethics will make bloggers more respected

Posted: 28 Jul 2010 12:51 AM PDT

Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad today called on bloggers to adhere to a certain code of ethics and ensure their blog articles are backed by truth in order for blogs to become a respected medium for the betterment of the society.

read more

Thailand to defend rights over land dispute with Cambodia

Posted: 28 Jul 2010 12:43 AM PDT

OUTRAGE: Members of the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) hold Thai national flags and placards during a rally to oppose the Cambodian plan on administering Preah Vihear Temple, a World Heritage Site, at Unesco's local office in Bangkok on Tuesday 27 July 2010. Thailand and Cambodia have been locked in nationalist tensions and a troop standoff at their disputed border since July 2008, when Unesco approved Cambodia's request to grant the 11th century Preah Vihear temple the World Heritage status. -- AFPpix

ByWATTANA KHAMCHU and PIYANART SRIVALO

read more


This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Emergency may continue in Bangkok, says PM

Posted: 28 Jul 2010 12:20 AM PDT

The fatal bomb attack in front of Big C Supercentre on Rajdamri Road on Sunday may result in the state of emergency in Bangkok being continued, Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said on Tuesday 27 July 2010.

read more

The Internet never forgets

Posted: 28 Jul 2010 12:08 AM PDT

By THAM YUEN-C
The Straits Times
Singapore, Wednesday 28 July 2010

A friend once had a rather unflattering picture of himself posted on Facebook. It was snapped by his friend during a night of revelry and depicted him red faced, eyes glazed, partying like an animal.

The incident did not make him lose his job. But it did remind him that there is no quicker way for someone to spread information about him to his extended network of a few hundred friends, co-workers and acquaintances.

read more

Indonesian clerics ban TV gossip shows

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 04:52 PM PDT

JAKARTA: Indonesia's highest Islamic body has issued a fatwa banning Muslims from watching gossip shows or having sex-change operations, an official said today.

The increasingly assertive Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) said gossip shows about the intimate details of people's private lives -- a popular genre on Indonesian television -- were immoral and threatened society.

"We considered it important to pass the fatwa as infotainment programmes may contain immoral material and violate the journalistic code of ethics," MUI official Asrorun Niam Soleh said.

"We're not against all infotainment programmes... What's haram (forbidden) is material that's gossipy and exposes shameful details about people.

"When people start spreading rumours, the joints holding a nation together will be crushed."

Profiting from infotainment shows is also forbidden under the edict, posing a theological conundrum for the media industry in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country.

Gossip shows are allowed only if they "uphold the law, warn the public and help people", Soleh said.

The ruling will be presented to the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission as a guideline for future infotainment programmes, he added.

Embarrassing apology

Another fatwa passed at an MUI meeting late yesterday forbade receiving or conducting a sex-change operation unless there is a good medical reason.

The council is the top Islamic authority in Indonesia and while its edicts are usually ignored, they can be cited by religious hardliners to justify vigilante-style crackdowns on "un-Islamic" activities.

It has recently issued a steady stream of fatwas including bans on inter-faith marriages, smoking and yoga.

It was forced into an embarrassing apology earlier this month when it corrected a fatwa ordering Muslims to pray to the west, when in fact the Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia are northwest of Indonesia.

Rajawali Citra Televisi Indonesia programming head Banardi Rachmad said the edict on celebrity gossip shows was confusing and the station would continue to produce and broadcast such content.

"We'll continue broadcasting infotainment programmes but we'll evaluate the content and see how to improve it," he said.

"What's fact to us could be deemed as lies by others, how do we know for sure what constitutes a rumour?"

- AFP

Six dead, over 300 hurt in China pipeline blast

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 04:45 PM PDT

BEIJING: At least six people died and more than 300 others were injured in an explosion when a chemical pipeline ignited in eastern China today, state media reported.

The blast occurred in the city of Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province, at about 10am, China National Radio said on its website.

It said a pipeline carrying ethylene blew up on the grounds of an abandoned plastics factory.

The official Xinhua news agency said its reporters had seen six people recorded as dead at hospitals treating the injured.

More than 300 people, including 52 with serious injuries, had been rushed to local hospitals for treatment, the China News Service said.

Authorities were still trying to determine the total number of casualties from the blast, which blew out windows in buildings up to 300 metres away, reports said.

"There are dozens of injured in our hospital. Their conditions are not serious, most of them suffered burns," said a doctor at the city's Zhongda hospital, who refused to identify herself.

"Nobody has died in our hospital. There are injured people in every big hospital in Nanjing."

Many hospitals had almost exhausted their blood stocks and local residents were rushing to mobile collection vehicles to donate blood, Xinhua said.

It said a fire that broke out at the scene following the blast had been put out.

- AFP

Passenger jet crashes in Pakistan, 152 on board

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 03:17 PM PDT

By Augustine Anthony

UPDATED ISLAMABAD: A commercial Pakistani passenger plane with 152 people on board crashed in bad weather in hills near the capital, Islamabad, today, killing at least 10 people, officials said.

The Airbus 321, belonging to private airliner Airblue, lost contact with the control room of the Islamabad International Airport at 0443 GMT while flying from the southern port city of Karachi.

The plane was carrying 146 passengers and six crewmen.

"Dead bodies are lying all around and very few might have survived in the accident," Bin Yameen, a senior police official of Islamabad, said.

"Bodies are being lifted through helicopters."

At least 10 people were killed and five injured, Imtiaz Elahi, chairman of the state-run Capital Development Authority, told reporters.

Bin Yameen said a woman was alive at the scene and crying for help.

A thick blanket of cloud and smoke caused by fire could be seen rising from the heavily wooded crash site. A helicopter hovered overhead and flames licked at trees and what appeared to be wreckage from the plane, television pictures showed.

"It was raining. I saw the plane flying very low from the window of my office," witness Khadim Hussain said.

The crash site is low on the Margalla Hills facing Islamabad, about 300 metres up the side of the hills.

Smoke was visible from the tonier districts of the city, and crowds of onlookers lined the streets pointing and watching the smoke rise from the green hills.

Pakistan's AAJ television showed rescue workers making their way on foot to the crash site with some difficulty. A young man was weeping and being embraced by another man -- with woods in the background.

The military said it had sent three helicopters to the site and troops had also been moved there.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani ordered authorities to control the fire immediately and rescue passengers.

Heavy rains

Reports said there had been heavy monsoon rains in the area for at least a couple of days.

Airblue began operations in 2004 with a fleet of Airbus A320 and A321 aircraft, the company said on its website (www.airblue.com).

Airbus confirmed one of its planes was involved in the Airblue crash.

"We regret to confirm there has been an accident with an Airbus aircraft and we will provide more information when we have more confirmed data available," said Airbus spokesman Stefan Schaffrath.

At the Islamabad's international airport, passengers in the departure lounge scanned the television screens for news.

"I'm not surprised something like this has happened," said Ahmed Fairuz, a passenger awaiting departure. "The weather is just too bad for flying."

Forty-five people were killed when a passenger plane belonging to Pakistan International Airlines crashed near the central city of Multan in 2006.

- Reuters

Leaking well capped, but where is all the oil?

Posted: 26 Jul 2010 11:22 PM PDT

NEW ORLEANS: With BP's leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico finally capped, the focus shifts to the surface clean-up and the question on everyone's lips is: where is all the oil?

For three long months a massive slick threatened the shorelines of Louisiana and other southern US Gulf Coast states as BP tried everything from top hats to junk shots and giant domes to stanch the toxic sludge.

A cap stopped the flow on July 15 after between 2.8 and 4.5 million barrels (117.6 million and 189 million gallons) had gushed out. Only one quarter of that was collected by BP's various collection and containment systems.

But thanks to frantic efforts to skim and burn the crude on the surface -- some 34.7 million gallons of oil-water mix have been recovered and 411 burns have been conducted -- the real difficulty now is finding any oil to clean up.

Dozens of reconnaissance planes fly constant sorties from Florida to Texas noting any oil sightings, while flat-bottomed boats trawl the marshes for lumps of tar too large to biodegrade.

"What we have is an aggregation of hundreds of thousands of patches of oil and the challenge is to find out where they are at right now because they are widely dispersed," said US spill response chief Thad Allen.

Pressed further on the patches, Allen relented: "Maybe patches is a misnomer on my part. What we're seeing are mats, patties, small concentrations, very hard to detect, but they're out there.

"What we're trying to figure out is where is all the oil at and what can we do about it."

Disgruntled fishermen

The figures speak for themselves. Before the cap went on, some 25,000 barrels of oil a day were being skimmed from the thickest part of the slick near the well site.

By the time Tropical Storm Bonnie arrived last week, the take was down to a pitiful 56 barrels, begging the question of what to do with the fleet of 800 skimmers, many of them run by disgruntled fishermen.

Allen said he was already looking at trying to redeploy the so-called vessels of opportunity in surveillance and testing programs and was meeting local leaders this week to discuss options.

As to where all the oil that hasn't been skimmed or burned off has gone, opinions vary: some experts say it has been broken down naturally by the elements and by microbes in the ocean, while others fear it could be lingering undetected in underwater plumes.

Only weeks ago, the slick was an unstoppable force that couldn't be prevented from swamping shorelines and slowly choking helpless pelicans; now the oil is an elusive enemy, one that has to be tracked down.

The latest "Nearshore Surface Oil Forecast" from the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) indicated only seven sizeable patches of surface oil, all light sheen.

An overflight on Sunday identified one thicker patch of emulsified crude. A flotilla of skimmers was immediately dispatched and made short work of mopping it up.

With hopes high that the well will be sealed for good next week, Allen was conscious of the need to plan for the next phase, admitting, "we are going to have to figure out how we make a transition in our resources".

Brain-crunching depths

Sophisticated underwater operations involving fleets of robotic submarines at brain-crunching depths will make way for the less glamorous but equally complex work of Shoreline Clean-up Assessment Teams, SCATs for short.

"They will sign off literally mile by mile where we've had oil impact," said Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft, a government on-scene coordinator. "And that is the very long phase of this operation where you ultimately determine how clean is clean."

About 1,027km (638 miles) of Gulf Coast is officially listed as "oiled," 362 miles in Louisiana, 109 miles in Mississippi, 70 miles in Alabama, and 97 miles in Florida.

The beaches should be relatively painless to mop up, but cleaning up the maze of marshes, where there's nothing to stand on and shallow-bottomed boats are needed to navigate the narrow channels, is a logistical nightmare.

Geologist Ed Owens, a world authority on protecting shorelines from oil spills contracted by BP to lend his expertise to the response effort, gave an upbeat assessment yesterday, saying the marshes should recover in a matter of months as only a "tiny fraction" of oil had infiltrated them.

Other leading scientists though have warned of a decades-long effect on marine life that could lead to a shift in the overall biological network in the Gulf of Mexico.

- AFP

Passenger jet crashes in Pakistan, 152 on board

Posted: 28 Jul 2010 12:39 AM PDT

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A commercial Pakistani passenger plane with 152 people on board crashed in bad weather in hills near the capital, Islamabad, on Wednesday, officials said.


S.Korea kids to carry GPS beepers against sex crime

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 11:49 PM PDT

SEOUL, Wednesday 28 July 2010 (AFP) - South Korea, shaken by several brutal sex crimes against minors, will supply children with GPS-embedded beepers to warn police of dangers and activate surveillance cameras, officials said Wednesday.

read more

Vietnam police fire tear gas at mass protest: official

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 11:43 PM PDT

HANOI, Wednesday 28 July 2010 (AFP) - Vietnamese police fired tear gas to disperse a crowd of thousands who gathered to protest the death of a young man detained by police, an official said Wednesday.

read more

Two dead, up to 200 hurt in China pipeline blast: reports

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 11:42 PM PDT

BEIJING, Wednesday 28 July 2010 (AFP) - At least two people died and up to 200 others were injured in an explosion when a chemical pipeline ignited in eastern China on Wednesday, state media reported.

read more

Philippines seeks faster growth under new leader

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 11:41 PM PDT

MANILA, Wednesday 28 July 2010 (AFP) - The new Philippine government said Wednesday it aimed to sustain economic growth of up to eight percent annually as investor confidence grows and the effects of reforms kick in.

read more

Iran sanctions hit Chinese trade

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 11:44 PM PDT

Despite a trading history that goes back centuries, China has reluctantly backed UN sanctions against Iran in light of its nuclear programme.


At least 6 dead in blast at China factory

Posted: 28 Jul 2010 12:07 AM PDT

BEIJING (Reuters) - At least six people died and dozens were seriously injured on Wednesday after an explosion at an abandoned plastics and chemicals factory in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, state media said.


Passenger jet crashes in Pakistan, 152 on board

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 10:46 PM PDT

ISLAMABAD, July 28 — A commercial Pakistani passenger plane with 152 people on board crashed in bad weather in hills near the capital, Islamabad, today, officials said. Five bodies had been recovered from the crash site in the forested Margalla hills near the city, an official said. The jet, belonging to private airliner Airblue, lost contact with ...


Plane with 150 aboard crashes in Pakistan

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 03:17 PM PDT

ISLAMABAD: A commercial Pakistani passenger plane with more than 150 people on board crashed in bad weather today in hills near the capital, Islamabad, an aviation spokesman said.

One body had been recovered, an official said.

The plane belonging to AirBlue, a private airliner, lost contact with the control room of the Islamabad International Airport at 0443 GMT while flying from the southern city of Karachi.

"There were 146 passengers and six crewmen on board. We are gathering information. We have no more details," Mubarik Shah, spokesman of the state-run Civil Aviation Authority, said.

A thick blanket of cloud could be rising from the forested Margalla Hills near Islamabad and a helicopter hovering overhead amid rain.

"It was raining. I saw the plane flying very low from the window of my office," witness Khadim Hussain said.

Pakistan's AAJ television showed footage of at least one helicopter hovering over what appeared to be the site of the crash, with columns of snoke billowing from heavily forested ground. Flames licked at trees in the area.

The cause of the crash could not be immediately ascertained.

- Reuters

Dutch girl Dekker allowed to sail

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 09:02 PM PDT

A 14-year-old girl has been given permission by a Dutch court to try to become the youngest person to sail around the world.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)