Passenger plane crash in Brazil kills all 61 on board

Passenger plane crash in Brazil kills all 61 on board
Aerial view of the wreckage of an airplane that crashed with 61 people on board in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo State, Brazil, on August 9, 2024. (AFP)
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Updated 10 August 2024
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Passenger plane crash in Brazil kills all 61 on board

Passenger plane crash in Brazil kills all 61 on board
  • The aircraft, an ATR 72-500 operated by Voepass airline, was traveling from Cascavel in southern Parana state to Sao Paulo
  • Images broadcast on local media showed a large plane spinning as it plummeted almost vertically, a column of smoke rising later

VINHEDO: An airplane carrying 57 passengers and four crew crashed Friday in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state, killing everyone on board, the airline said.
The aircraft, an ATR 72-500 operated by Voepass airline, was traveling from Cascavel in southern Parana state to Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos international airport when it crashed in the city of Vinhedo.
Voepass initially said the plane was carrying 58 passengers, but a statement on the airline’s website later revised the figure to 57.
Images broadcast on local media showed a large plane spinning as it plummeted almost vertically, while other footage showed a large column of smoke rising from the crash site in what appeared to be a residential area.
“There were no survivors,” the city government in Valinhos — which was involved in the rescue and recovery operation in nearby Vinhedo — said in an to AFP.
Vinhedo, with about 76,000 residents, is located approximately 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Sao Paulo.
Recovery of the victims’ remains for “identification” has begun and “will continue throughout the night,” Sao Paulo State Governor Tarcisio de Freitas told reporters at the scene.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared three days of mourning.
Voepass said it was cooperating with authorities to “determine the causes of the accident,” while giving full assistance to families of the victims on flight 2283.
The plane, a twin-engine turboprop, took off “without any flight restrictions, with all its systems operational,” the company said.
Brazil’s CENIPA aviation accident agency has launched an investigation.
ATR, a Franco-Italian aircraft maker and Airbus subsidiary, said its experts were working to help investigators.
Truck driver Martins Barbosa, 49, was working when he learned of the plane crash, which occurred 150 meters (500 feet) from his home.
“I thought it might have fallen on my house, with my son inside,” he told AFP, adding he felt despondent before learning his family was okay.
Nathalie Cicari, who lives near the crash site, told CNN Brasil the impact was “terrifying.”
“I was having lunch, I heard a very loud noise very close by,” she said, describing the sound as drone-like but “much louder.”
“I went out on the balcony and saw the plane spinning. Within seconds, I realized that it was not a normal movement for a plane.”
Cicari was not hurt but had to evacuate her house, which was filled with black smoke from the crash.
“I arrived at the scene and saw many bodies on the ground — many of them,” another witness, Ricardo Rodrigues, told local Band News.
Firefighters, military police and state civil defense were deployed at the scene.
Military police told local media the accident had not caused any casualties on the ground, and that the fire sparked by the crash had been brought under control.
The plane’s black box “has already been found, apparently preserved,” Sao Paulo state security official Guilherme Derrite told reporters at the scene.
The doomed plane recorded its first flight in April 2010, according to the website planespotters.net.
Air safety has improved dramatically in recent decades, with deadly passenger plane crashes becoming ever-more rare worldwide, though more frequent in developing nations.
Excluding Friday’s crash, CENIPA data shows Brazil has recorded 108 aircraft accidents so far this year, resulting in 49 deaths. Over the last ten years, 746 people have died in 1,665 accidents in the country.
In January 2023, another ATR 72 operated by Yeti Airlines crashed after stalling in Nepal, killing all 72 on board.
Nepalese authorities attributed the incident to pilot error.


Record $73m bribe lands former investigator in Russian jail

Updated 25 sec ago
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Record $73m bribe lands former investigator in Russian jail

Record $73m bribe lands former investigator in Russian jail
Marat Tambiyev was found guilty of accepting the bribes, mainly in bitcoin, from members of an organized crime group

MOSCOW: A former Russian state investigator was jailed for 16 years on Tuesday for taking bribes equivalent to around $73 million, the largest in the history of modern Russia, state news agency TASS said.
Marat Tambiyev was found guilty of accepting the bribes, mainly in bitcoin, from members of an organized crime group. He had protested his innocence.
Kristina Lyakhovenko, a lower-ranked colleague of Tambiyev, was jailed for nine years. Lawyers for both of them said they would appeal.
Russia is currently pursuing a spate of high-profile bribery investigations, many involving senior figures in the military.

Europe court condemns Cyprus over return of Syrian refugees to Lebanon

Europe court condemns Cyprus over return of Syrian refugees to Lebanon
Updated 4 min ago
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Europe court condemns Cyprus over return of Syrian refugees to Lebanon

Europe court condemns Cyprus over return of Syrian refugees to Lebanon
STRASBOURG: The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday condemned Cyprus for returning to Lebanon two Syrian refugees who had arrived on a small boat, without examining their asylum claim.
In a damning verdict, the ECHR said that Cyprus had committed four violations of the European Convention on Human Rights, which the Strasbourg-based court enforces, by returning the two refugees to Lebanon.
The pair fled the Syrian city of Idlib and the civil war in their home country in 2016, staying in refugee camps in Lebanon. In 2020 they paid a smuggler to take them across the Mediterranean to Cyprus along with over two dozen other migrants, the ECHR said.
The boat was intercepted by the Cypriot maritime authorities who said they had entered Cypriot territorial waters without permission and swiftly returned then to Lebanon where they still remain.
Cypriot authorities had essentially returned the pair to Lebanon “without processing their asylum claims and without all the steps required under the refugee law,” said the verdict.
Cyprus failed to conduct “any assessment of the risk of lack of access to an effective asylum process in Lebanon or the living conditions of asylum-seekers there,” it added.
Nicosia had also not assessed the risk of “refoulement” — the forcible return of refugees to a country such as Syria where they might be subjected to persecution, it added.
The Court said the two plaintiffs, named as M.A. and Z.R. said they had been “tricked” into thinking that they would be led ashore on arrival in Cyprus and were instead forced to board another boat that took them back to Lebanon.
The Court ordered Cyprus to pay 22,000 euros in damages to each applicant and 4,700 euros jointly for costs and expenses.
The ECHR is part of the 46-member Council of Europe, the continent’s top rights body and an entirely separate entity from the European Union.

Water gushes through palm trees and sand dunes after rare rain in the Sahara Desert

Water gushes through palm trees and sand dunes after rare rain in the Sahara Desert
Updated 08 October 2024
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Water gushes through palm trees and sand dunes after rare rain in the Sahara Desert

Water gushes through palm trees and sand dunes after rare rain in the Sahara Desert
  • Southeastern Morocco’s desert is among the most arid places in the world and rarely experiences rain in late summer
RABAT: A rare deluge of rainfall left blue lagoons of water amid the palm trees and sand dunes of the Sahara desert, nourishing some of its most drought-stricken regions with more water than many had seen in decades.
Southeastern Morocco’s desert is among the most arid places in the world and rarely experiences rain in late summer.
The Moroccan government said two days of rainfall in September had exceeded yearly averages in several areas that get an average of less than 250 millimeters (10 inches) annually, including Tata, one of the areas hit hardest. In Tagounite, a village about 450 km (280 miles) south of the capital Rabat, more than 100 mm (3.9 inches) was recorded in a 24-hour period.
The storms provided more rainfall than had been seen in decades, leaving striking images of bountiful water gushing through the Saharan sands amid castles and desert flora.
In desert communities frequented by the many tourists who visit the Sahara, 4x4s motored through the puddles and residents surveyed the scene in awe.
“It’s been 30 to 50 years since we’ve had this much rain in such a short space of time,” said Houssine Youabeb of Morocco’s General Directorate of Meteorology.
Such rains, which meteorologists are calling an extratropical storm, may indeed change the course of the region’s weather in months and years to come as the air retains more moisture, causing more evaporation and drawing more storms, Youabeb said.
Six consecutive years of drought have posed challenges for much of Morocco, forcing farmers to leave fields fallow and cities and villages to ration water consumption.
The bounty of rainfall will likely help refill the large groundwater aquifers that lie beneath the desert and are relied upon to supply water in desert communities. The region’s dammed reservoirs reported refilling at record rates throughout September. However, it’s unclear how far September’s rains will go toward alleviating drought.
Yet water gushing through the sands and oases left more than 20 dead in Morocco and Algeria and damaged the farmers’ harvests, forcing the government to allocate emergency relief funds, including in some areas affected by last year’s earthquake.
NASA satellites showed water rushing in to fill Lake Iriqui, a famous lakebed between Zagora and Tata that had been dry for 50 years.

Monster hurricane Milton threatens an already battered Florida

Monster hurricane Milton threatens an already battered Florida
Updated 08 October 2024
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Monster hurricane Milton threatens an already battered Florida

Monster hurricane Milton threatens an already battered Florida
  • The densely populated west coast of Florida braces for landfall on Wednesday
  • Milton became the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic Ocean

Hurricane Milton weakened slightly to a still powerful Category 4 storm on Tuesday as it threatened Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula on its way to Florida, where more than a million people were ordered to evacuate from its path.
The densely populated west coast of Florida, still reeling from the devastating Hurricane Helene less than two weeks ago, braced for landfall on Wednesday.
The US National Hurricane Center projected the storm was likely to hit near the Tampa Bay metropolitan area, home to more than 3 million people and where some evacuees rushed to dispose of mounds of debris left behind by Helene on their way out of town.
With maximum sustained winds of 270kph, Milton eased overnight from the strongest level storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale.
Wind speeds could decrease further to 233kph by the time it approaches Florida, according to the hurricane center, but still capable of causing catastrophic damage, including power outages expected to last days.
Fed by warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, Milton became the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic Ocean, the Hurricane Center said, as it surged from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours.
Its path from west to east was also unusual, as Gulf hurricanes typically form in the Caribbean Sea and make landfall after traveling west and turning north.
“It is exceedingly rare for a hurricane to form in the western Gulf, track eastward, and make landfall on the western coast of Florida,” said Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University. “This has big implications since the track of the storm plays a role in determining where the storm surge will be the largest.”
The Hurricane Center forecast storm surges of 3 to 4.5 meters along a stretch of coastline north and south of Tampa Bay.
Jamie Rhome, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, said Milton was expected to grow in size before making landfall on Wednesday, putting hundreds of miles of coastline within the storm surge danger zone.
Milton was likely to remain a hurricane for its entire journey across the Florida peninsula, Rhome told a Monday news briefing.
YUCATAN DRENCHED
As of 1 a.m. CDT on Tuesday (0600 GMT), the eye of the storm was 105km north-northeast of Progreso, a Mexican port near the Yucatan state capital of Merida, and 840km southwest of Tampa, moving east at 15kph.
While the eye of the storm appeared to have passed to the north of the Yucatan Peninsula, dangerous conditions were still expected to lash the region the early hours of Tuesday.
“We ask you to be pay attention to the information issued by civil protection officials from the government of Mexico and Yucatan’s government as well and if you live in lowlands it is better to go to the shelters that have been already installed,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said earlier.
The area is home to the picturesque colonial-era city of Merida, population 1.2 million, several Maya ruins popular with tourists and the port of Progreso.
In Florida, counties along the western coast ordered people in low-lying areas to take shelter on higher ground.
Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, said it ordered the evacuation of more than 500,000 people. Lee County said 416,000 people lived in its mandatory evacuation zones. At least six other coastal counties ordered evacuations including Hillsborough County, which includes the city of Tampa.
With one final day for people to evacuate on Tuesday, local officials raised concerns of traffic jams and long lines at gas stations.
Relief efforts remain ongoing throughout much of the US Southeast in the wake of Helene, a Category-4 hurricane that made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26, killed more than 200 people and caused billions of dollars in damage across six states.


Russian attack on Ukrainian city of Kharkiv injures 11, governor says

Russian attack on Ukrainian city of Kharkiv injures 11, governor says
Updated 08 October 2024
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Russian attack on Ukrainian city of Kharkiv injures 11, governor says

Russian attack on Ukrainian city of Kharkiv injures 11, governor says
  • Kharkiv has been a frequent target of Russian attacks since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022

KYIV: A Russian attack on the city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine injured at least 11 people on Tuesday, including a child, regional officials said.
Governor Oleh Syniehubov said via the Telegram messaging app that the attack had damaged infrastructure and the authorities were working to verify the type of weapon used.
He and Kharkiv mayor Ihor Terekhov said it was likely that a civilian production facility had been hit. Terekhov said a fire had broken out.
Located 30km from the border with Russia, Kharkiv has been a frequent target of Russian attacks since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Last week, a Russian guided bomb attack on the city struck a five-story apartment block, inuring 10 people, local officials said.