March 16, 2019 5.00pm EDT
When lives are tragically cut short, it is generally easier to explain the “how” than the “why”. This dark reality is all the more felt when tragedy comes at the hands of murderous intent. Explaining how 50 people came to be killed, and almost as many badly injured, in Christchurch’s double massacre of Muslims at prayer is heartbreaking but relatively straightforward.
As with so many mass murders in recent years, the use of an assault rifle, the ubiquitous AR15, oxymoronically referred to as “the civilian M-16”, explains how one cowardly killer could be so lethal.
It is a credit to the peaceful nature of New Zealand society that, despite the open availability of weapons like the AR15, the last time there was a mass shooting was in 1997. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern rightly identified reform of gun laws as one of the immediate outcomes required in response to this tragedy.
But lax gun laws are arguably the only area in which blame can be laid in New Zealand. Ardern, together with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, was also right to refer to this barbaric act of cold-blooded murder of people in prayer as right wing extremist terrorism driven by Islamophobic hatred.
State and federal police in Australia have long warned that, next to the immediate threat posed by Salafi jihadi terrorism, they are most concerned about the steady rise of right-wing extremism. There has been some comfort in the recognition that the most active right wing extremist groups, and there are many, are disorganised, poorly led, and attract but small crowds.
On the face of it, then, right wing extremism in Australia is nowhere near as serious as the neo-Nazi movements of Europe or the various permutations of white supremacy and toxic nationalism that bedevil American politics. In America, it is conservatively estimated that there were 50 deaths due to terrorist attacks in 2018, almost all linked to right-wing extremism.
In 2017, it is calculated that there were 950 attacks on Muslims and mosques in Germany alone. Many of last year’s attacks in America involved a common right wing extremist hatred of Islam, and a targeting of Muslims, joining a long-standing enmity towards Jews.
Almost all recent terrorist attacks have been lone-actor attacks. They are notoriously difficult to predict. Whether inspired by Salafi jihadi Islamist extremism or right wing extremism, lone-actor attacks commonly feature individuals fixated on the deluded dream of going from “zero to hero”.
One of the main reasons authorities struggle with identifying right wing extremist “nobodies” who post online, before they turn to violence, is that it’s difficult to pick up a clear signal in the noise of a national discourse increasingly dominated by exactly the same narrative elements of mistrust, anxiety, and a blaming of the other.
In Australia, as in Europe and America, mainstream politicians and mainstream media commentators have increasingly toyed with extremist ideas in the pursuit of popularity. Many have openly brandished outrageous ideas that in previous years would have been unsayable in mainstream political discourse or commentary.
Donald Trump can be deservedly singled out for making the unspeakable the new normal in mainstream right wing politics, but he is hardly alone in this. And sadly, for all of the relative civility and stability of Australian politics, we too have now come to normalise the toxic politics of fear.
No-one put it better than The Project host Waleed Aly in saying that Friday’s terrorist attacks, although profoundly disturbing, did not come as a shocking surprise. Anyone who has been paying attention and who really cares about the well-being and security of Australian society has observed the steady growth of right wing extremist and right supremacist ideas in general, and Islamophobia particular.
“You’ll have to forgive me, these won’t be my best words...”
They have seen the numerous attacks on Muslims and Jews at prayer and worried about the day when the murderous violence that has plagued the northern hemisphere will visit the southern hemisphere. But more than that, they have worried about the singling-out of migrants, and in particular asylum seekers, African youth and Muslims as pawns to be played with in the cynical politics of fear.
Scott Morrison is right to say these problems have been with us for many years. But he would do better to point out that our downward trajectory sharply accelerated after John Howard’s “dark victory” of 2001. The unwinnable election was won on the back of the arrival of asylum seekers on the MV Tampa in August followed by the September 11 attacks, and at the price of John Howard and the Liberal party embracing the white supremacist extremist politics of Pauline Hanson.
Both major parties, it must be said, succumbed to the lure of giving focus groups and pollsters the tough language and inhumane policies the public appeared to demand and reward. We are now beginning to see the true price that we have paid with the demonising of those arriving by boat seeking asylum, or looking too dark-skinned, or appearing too religious.
The result has been such a cacophony of hateful rhetoric that it has been hard for those tasked with spotting the emergence of violent extremism to separate it from all the background noise of extremism.
There are, of course lessons to be learned. Authorities need to do better. We can begin with a national database of hate crimes, with standard definitions and robust data collection. Clearly, we need to pay attention to hateful extremism if we are to prevent violent extremism.
But ultimately, we need to address the permissive political environment that allows such hateful extremism to be promulgated so openly. The onus is on commentators and political leaders alike. They cannot change the past, but they will determine the future.
"Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence."
– Sholem Asch, The Nazarene, 1939.
As he approaches 75, Tom Engelhardt, the creator of the highly respected website, Tomdispatch.com, believes his brain is, as he puts it, "beginning to dump previously secure memories", but soon realised "that such loss also involved gain", in that it made him "something of an instant expert on one aspect of 21st-century America: the memory hole that’s swallowed up parts of our all-too-recent history.
"I’ve been wondering whether aging imperial powers, like old men and women, have a tendency to discard what once had been oh-so-familiar. There’s a difference, though, when it comes to the elites of the aging empire I live in at least. They don’t just dump things relatively randomly as I seem to be doing. Instead, they conveniently obliterate all memory of their country’s – that is, their own – follies and misdeeds.
"Let me give you an example. But you need to bear with me here because I’m about to jump into the disordered mind of a man who, though two years younger than me, has what might be called – given present-day controversies – a borderline personality. I’m thinking of President Donald Trump, or rather of a particular moment in his chaotic recent mental life.
"As the New Year dawned, he chaired what now passes for a ‘cabinet meeting᾿. That mainly means an event in which those present grovel before, fawn over, and outrageously praise him in front of the cameras.
"I’m about to plunge into history and our President is neither a historian, nor particularly coherent. Fortunately, he’s surrounded by a bevy of translators (still called "reporters" or "pundits") and we have their notes. So here, as a start, is a much-quoted passage of his on this country’s never-ending Afghan War from that cabinet meeting (including all the ‘original᾿ incoherence):
"We’re going to do something that’s right. We are talking to the Taliban. We’re talking to a lot of different people. But here’s the thing – because mentioned India: India is there. Russia is there. Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia. So you take a look at other countries. Pakistan is there; they should be fighting. But Russia should be fighting.
"The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is it was a tough fight. And literally, they went bankrupt. They went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot [of] these places you’re reading about now are no longer a part of Russia because of Afghanistan."
The overlap between the fall of the Soviet Union and its foray into Afghanistan is obvious, notes Engelhardt. The USSR invaded in 1979 and left a decade later, in 1989. The superpower dissolved shortly thereafter in 1991. But correlation is not causation. . . It was perhaps among the many reasons the USSR collapsed. But it was not the reason.
"I was left alone, still dredging through my memories of that ancient conflict, which, these days, no one but the President would even think of bringing up in the context of the ongoing US war in Afghanistan. And yet here’s the curious thing when it comes to an aging empire that prefers not to remember the history of its folly: Donald Trump was right that Russia’s Afghan misadventure is a remarkably logical place to start when considering the present American debacle in that same country.
"Let me mention one thing no one’s likely to emphasize these days when it comes to the Russian decision to enter that Afghan quagmire in 1979. At the highest levels of the Carter and then the Reagan administrations, top American officials were working assiduously to embroil the Soviets in Afghanistan and would then invest staggering sums in a CIA campaign to fund Islamic extremist guerrillas to keep them there. [Not that anyone in Washington is likely to play this up in 2019, but the United States began aiding those Mujahidin guerrillas not after the Red Army moved in to support a pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, but six months before.]
"Here’s how President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, described the situation almost two decades later:
According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahidin began during 1980, that’s to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the President in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.
And asked if he had any regrets, Brzezinski responded: "Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.’
Think about that largely missing bit of history for a moment, wrote Engelhardt. Top US officials wanted to give the Soviet Union a version of their own disastrous Vietnam experience and so invested billions of dollars and much effort in that proxy war – and it worked. The Soviet leadership continued to pour money into their military misadventure in Afghanistan when their country was already going bankrupt and the society they had built was beginning to collapse around them. They were indeed suffering from what General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev came to call ‘the bleeding wound᾿. And if that isn’t the language of disaster (or bankruptcy or, perhaps more accurately, implosion), what is? Yes, Afghanistan, that "," wasn’t the only thing that took their world down, but the way their much-vaunted army finally limped home a decade later was certainly a significant factor in its collapse.
Now, let me tax your memory (and especially elite Washington’s) just a bit more, wrote Tom. Think again about the history that led up to the American war President Trump was fretting about in that cabinet meeting. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Brzezinski and his successors were just a tad too successful – or, to put it another way, that they lured not one but two empires into their trap; the second being, of course, the American one.
After all, in that 10-year Afghan proxy war (1979–89), they laid the foundations for the creation by a rich young Saudi named Osama bin Laden of a resistance outfit of Arab fighters. You know, Al Qaeda, or ‘the baseʼ.
In other words, Brzezinski & Co. laid the foundations for what would become a nearly 30-year American quagmire war (with a decade off between its two parts) in a land that, in 1979, few Americans other than a bunch of hippies had ever heard of. Here, then, is a small hint for the President: You might consider starting to refer to Afghanistan – and I assure you this would be historically accurate (even if you were roundly criticized for it by the Washington punditariat) – as America’s "bleeding wound."
"In a country in which implosive elements are already being mixed into its politics, President Trump had his finger on something when he brought up the Russian war in Afghanistan," wrote Engelhardt. "However historically and syntactically mixed up he might have been, his brain was still far more on target than those of most of the wise men and women of the present Washington establishment."*
The fight to depose Assad is over. The battle over his regime’s boundaries has no end in sight.
Fighter of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are seen at a position in the village of Baghouz, near Syria's border with Iraq, in the eastern Deir Ezzor province on March 15, 2019. (Delil Suleiman/ AFP/Getty Images)
BYJONATHAN SPYER|
The war that has ravaged Syria over the last half-decade is coming to an end. The caliphate declared by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State organization on June 29, 2014, at the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul now consists of a few ravaged square meters in Baghouz, in Syria’s Lower Euphrates River Valley, that are on the verge of falling to Kurdish forces. The mainly Sunni Arab rebellion against the Bashar al-Assad regime, meanwhile, is already over. What remains of it is now the military component of a Turkish project to turn a corner of northwest Syria into a Turkish client entity.
In place of the old wars, however, three new ones have started. They are taking place in the three de facto independent areas whose boundaries are becoming apparent as the smoke from the previous battle clears: the regime-controlled area, guaranteed by Russia; the area east of the Euphrates River controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, which are primarily composed of Kurdish fighters protected by the United States and Western air power; and finally the area controlled by the Turks and their Sunni Islamist allies in Idlib province. The regime area consists of about 60 percent of the territory of the country, the SDF has around 30 percent, and the Turkish-Sunni Islamist area is around 10 percent. Each of these areas is now hosting a civil war of its own, supported by neighboring enclaves.
The most fragile of the three entities, both in terms of internal arrangements and relationships to external powers, is the Turkish-Sunni Islamist area. The southern part of this area is today ruled in its entirety by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an outgrowth of the Syrian al Qaeda franchise. The area is protected from a ground incursion by the Assad regime by the precarious Sochi agreement, reached between Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey in September 2018. But while a ground incursion does not appear imminent, Idlib and Hama provinces are subjected to regime artillery bombardment daily.
Further north, in the former Kurdish canton of Afrin, the Turks and their allies are facing an emergent, though underreported, insurgency supported by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, known as the YPG. A recent report by Bellingcat, quoted in an article by Amberin Zaman in al-Monitor, noted 220 attacks carried out in the Afrin area against Turkish and allied forces between late March 2018 and the end of January, in the form of roadside ambushes, improvised explosive devices, and executions of so-called collaborators. Around 100 people have been killed over the last month, according to the Bellingcat report.
The attacks began in January 2018, immediately after Turkey’s arrival in the region as part of Operation Olive Branch, which destroyed the Syrian Kurds’ westernmost autonomous canton. A campaign of expulsion of Kurds followed. The Kurdish YPG does not take responsibility for the present attacks. The YPG’s sister movement in Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, has a practice, however, of using the names of front groups when engaging in some of its less photo-friendly activities; it is probable that the YPG is doing the same.
The U.S. and SDF-controlled area east of the Euphrates is also witnessing the stirrings of internal insurgency directed from outside. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, “236 fighters [of the SDF), civilians, oil workers, and officials” have been killed since August 2018 in incidents unrelated to the frontline conflict against the Islamic State. The killings have taken place across the four provinces of Raqqa, Aleppo, Hasakah, and Deir Ezzor, which are controlled in full or in part by U.S.-allied Kurds. The most recent actions, according to the observatory, were the assassination earlier this month of an SDF fighter in the Swidan Jazira area in the eastern countryside of Deir Ezzor, and the explosion of an IED in the Jammah area of the same province.
The SDF blames Turkey for these actions, and for earlier killings such as that of prominent local Kurdish official, Omar Alloush, in March 2018, and of Sheikh Bashir Faisal al-Huwaidi, a leader of the SDF-aligned Shammar tribe, in Raqqa in November 2018. There are other plausible suspects within Syria, however, including the Assad regime (or its Iranian allies) or the Islamic State, all of which are enemies of the U.S.-supported Kurds.
The area controlled by the regime is by far the most secure of Syria’s three separate regions. President Bashar al-Assad has embarked on a slow road to regaining legitimacy in the eyes of most Syrians and faces no major threat to his continued rule over most of Syria’s land. But in the regime-controlled areas, too, there are rumblings of discontent. A chaotic array of forces hold power and influence in this zone. These include Iran-aligned local and foreign militias, Russian military police, Lebanese Hezbollah, and, of course, various competing security structures of the Syrian state. These forces have cooperated on behalf of keeping Assad in power, but their interests are not otherwise entirely aligned.
This has predictably led to tensions over their relative power, and to violent backlashes. In the restive Daraa province in the southwest, this has resulted a renewed small-scale insurgency against the Assad regime. Since November 2018, a group calling itself Popular Resistance—which appears to consist of former non-jihadi rebel fighters—has carried out a series of bombings of regime facilities and attacks on checkpoints. The latest of these was the bombing of a military checkpoint on Feb. 6, a video of which was posted online.
As the Islamic State’s caliphate disappears from Syria’s map, the country is settling into a twilight reality of de facto division, in which a variety of low-burning insurgencies continue to claim lives. Open warfare in Syria is largely over. Peace, however, will remain a distant hope.
FILE PHOTO: Nigeria's defeated opposition candidate Atiku Abubakar speaks during a news conference in Abuja, Nigeria February 27, 2019. REUTERS/Gbemileke Awodoye/File Photo
MARCH 18, 2019
ABUJA (Reuters) - The defeated main opposition candidate in Nigeria’s presidential elections filed a legal challenge on Monday to last month’s vote.
Atiku Abubakar’s petition said that he, the candidate for the People’s Democratic Party, had beaten the All Progressives Congress’s Muhammadu Buhari, who was elected to a second term on Feb. 23.
“We asked that our candidate who won the election massively across the country be declared the winner,” said Emmanuel Enoidem, a legal advisor to Atiku.
The petition asks that the electoral commission overturns the result “on the grounds of irregularities,” Enoidem said.
Buhari’s campaign has rejected Atiku’s allegations, saying the vote was free and fair.
Buhari, the 76-year-old former military ruler, took 56 percent of the vote against 41 percent for Atiku, a businessman and former vice president.
Reporting by Camillus Eboh; Writing by Paul Carsten; Editing by Robin Pomeroy
Cambridge researchers grew ‘organoid’ that spontaneously connected to spinal cord
An image of the cerebral organoids grown from stem cells by Cambridge researchers. Photograph: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Hannah DevlinScience correspondent@hannahdev- Scientists have grown a miniature brain in a dish with a spinal cord and muscles attached, an advance that promises to accelerate the study of conditions such as motor neurone disease.
The lentil-sized grey blob of human brain cells were seen to spontaneously send out tendril-like connections to link up with the spinal cord and muscle tissue, which was taken from a mouse. The muscles were then seen to visibly contract under the control of the so-called brain organoid.
The research is is the latest in a series of increasingly sophisticated approximations of the human brain grown in the laboratory – this time with something approaching a central nervous system attached.
Madeline Lancaster, who led the work at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said: “We like to think of them as mini-brains on the move.”
The scientists used a new method to grow the miniature brain from human stem cells, which allowed the organoid to reach a more sophisticated stage of development than previous experiments. The latest blob shows similarities, in terms of the variety of neurons and their organisation, to the human foetal brain at 12-16 weeks of pregnancy.
However, the scientists said the structure was still too small and primitive to have anything approaching thoughts, feelings or consciousness.
“It’s still a good idea to have that discussion every time we take it a step further,” said Lancaster. “But we agree generally that we’re still very far away from that.”
While a fully developed human brain has 80-90bn neurons, the organoid has a couple of million, placing it somewhere between a cockroach and a zebrafish in terms of volume of grey matter.
Previously, the sophistication of the organoids scientists had been able to achieve had been limited by the lack of a nutrient supply to the centre of the blob. Once it reached a certain size, the neurons in the centre would become cut off from their nutrient supply and start to die off, and the structure would stop developing.
In the latest research, the scientists grew the organoid and then used a tiny vibrating blade to cut it into half millimetre-thick slices which were placed on a membrane, floating on a nutrient-rich liquid.
This meant the entire slice had access to energy and oxygen and it continued developing and forming new connections when it was kept in culture for a year.
Alongside the organoid, the scientists added in a 1mm-long spinal cord, taken from a mouse embryo, and the surrounding back muscle. The brain cells automatically began to send out neuronal connections, linked up with the spinal cord and began sending electrical impulses, which caused the muscles to twitch.
The ambition is to use systems like this to study how the human brain and nervous system develop and why things go wrong in illnesses such as motor neurone disease, epilepsy and schizophrenia.
“Obviously we’re not just trying to create something for the fun of it,” said Lancaster. “We want to use this to model diseases and to understand how these networks are set up in the first place.”
Gray Camp, a geneticist at the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology in Basel,
Switzerland, who was not involved in the latest work, described the advance as “a big step for the field”. “It’s extremely exciting to see evidence of functional nerve tracts growing out of developing human brain tissue and innervating other tissues,” he said.
Organisations in Australia are keen on employing emerging technologies in a meaningful way to improve the customer experience they provide and boost margins. Source: Reuters/Issei Kato
ORGANISATIONS in Australia are keen on employing emerging technologies in a meaningful way to improve the customer experience they provide and boost margins.
Business leaders in the country are preparing to make the investments needed in order to transform digitally and scale digital solutions across the organisation.
According to McKinsey, their best bet is to invest in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) in order to transform the country’s economy and reach scale in the decades ahead.
Their new reportAustralia’s automation opportunity: Reigniting productivity and inclusive income growth points out that automation technologies allow companies to create better customer outcomes and help regulators better support citizens and new business ventures.
“We estimate that between 25 and 46 percent of current work activities in Australia could be automated by 2030, helping to drive a renaissance in productivity, income and economic growth.”
“If seized, this opportunity could add AUD1.1 trillion (US$780 million) to AUD4 trillion (US$2.83 trillion) to the economy over the next 15 years, providing every Australian with AUD4,000 (US$2,800) to AUD15,000 (US$10,600) in additional income per year by 2030.”
Although, McKinsey’s consultants did mention that achieving these benefits depends on ensuring displaced workers can get new jobs.
Should Australia worry about displaced jobs?
“Automation technologies will disrupt workforces across the economy.”
According to McKinsey’s estimates, 3.5 million to 6.5 million full-time equivalent positions could be affected by automation and AI-powered solutions.
In order to compensate for that, the company’s consultants forecast that 1.8 million to 5.0 million workers need to change their professions.
“At a mid-point pace of adoption, disruption by industry could range from 16 percent of jobs in the education sector up to 33 percent of jobs in transport.”
Fortunately, it seems as though the economy will adjust, and new jobs will flow from the higher productivity that automation generates, as well as other trends including rising consumer incomes, greater health spending on aging and infrastructure investment.
“While some jobs will be lost, and others created, all jobs will change. As automation technologies take over more routine, predictable and physical activities, the mix of skills required in all jobs will shift, and there may be more opportunities for women with children, older workers and people with a disability.”
According to the think tank, people at work will spend over 60 percent more time using technological skills and over 40 percent more time using social and emotional skills.
It also seems that demand will increase for workers in unpredictable and interactive roles such as nursing, caregivers, and salespeople, but will also fall for workers doing more automatable activities such as radiologists, mechanics, legal research assistants and those in accounts processing.
At the end of the day, the message is simple: Automation presents a huge opportunity for businesses and the Australian economy.
Although organisations and regulators might be concerned about the loss of jobs, the reality is, people will find new jobs and gain more from automation as a result of benefits that accrue to the economy in the global marketplace.
This article originally appeared on our sister site Tech Wire Asia.
Interestingly, Ethiopia refused to hand over the crashed 737’s black boxes (actually they are red) to the FAA, as is normal with US-built aircraft. Instead, Addis Ababa sent the data boxes for analysis to BEA, France’s well-regarded aviation accident investigator.
by Eric S. Margolis-18 Mar 2019
I don’t like flying. I consider it unnatural, unhealthy and fraught with peril. But I do it all the time. For me, it’s either fly or take an ox cart.
In fact, I’ve been flying since I was six years old – from New York to Paris on a lumbering Boeing Stratocruiser, a converted, double-decker WWII B-29 heavy bomber. I even had a sleeping berth. So much for progress.
Lots can go wrong in the air. Modern aircraft have thousands of obscure parts. If any one of them malfunctions, the aircraft can be crippled or crash. Add pilot error, dangerous weather, air traffic control mistakes, mountains where they are not supposed to be, air to air collisions, sabotage and hijacking.
I vividly recall flying over the snow-capped Alps in the late 1940’s aboard an old Italian three-motor airliner with its port engine burning, and the Italian crew panicking and crossing themselves.
Some years ago, I was on my way to Egypt when we were hijacked by a demented Ethiopian. A three day ordeal ensued that included a return flight to New York City from Germany, with the gunman threatening to crash the A-310 jumbo jet into Wall Street – a grim precursor of 9/11. My father, Henry Margolis, got off a British Comet airliner just before it blew up due to faulty windows.
Which brings me to the current Boeing crisis. After a brand new Boeing 737 Max crashed in Indonesia it seemed highly likely that there was a major problem in its new, invisible autopilot system, known as MCAS. All 737 Max’s flying around the world should have been grounded as a precaution. But America’s aviation authority, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), allowed the Max to keep flying. The FAA is half regulator and half aviation business promoter, a clear conflict of interest.
The crash of a new Ethiopian 737 Max outside Addis Ababa under very similar circumstances to the Lion Air accident set off alarm bells around the globe. Scores of airlines rightly grounded their new Max’s. But the US and Canada did not. The FAA continued to insist the aircraft was sound. The problem, it was hinted between the lines, was incompetent third world pilots.
It now appears that America’s would-be emperor, Pilot-in–Chief Donald Trump, may have pressed the FAA to keep the 737 Max’s in the air. Canada, always shy when it comes to disagreeing with Washington, kept the 737 Max’s flying until there was a lot of evidence linking the Indonesia and Ethiopian crashes.
Trump finally ordered the suspect aircraft grounded. But doing so was not his business. That’s the job of the FAA. But Trump, as usual, wanted to hog the limelight.
By now, the 737 Max ban is just about universal.
Interestingly, Ethiopia refused to hand over the crashed 737’s black boxes (actually they are red) to the FAA, as is normal with US-built aircraft. Instead, Addis Ababa sent the data boxes for analysis to BEA, France’s well-regarded aviation accident investigator. Clearly, Ethiopia lacks confidence in the veracity and impartiality of the FAA and the White House.
Today, Trump professes vivid interest in Boeing’s well-being. Last May, however, Trump cancelled an Iranian order to Boeing for $20 billion in airliners which had originally been signed under the Obama administration. Israel’s fingerprints were all over this cancellation. Iran desperately needs new aircraft to replace its fleet of decaying, 1960’s passenger aircraft that have become flying coffins.
Boeing (I am a shareholder) will recover from this disaster unless the 737 Max’s center of gravity is dangerously unstable. The mystery autopilot system will be reconfigured and pilots properly trained to use it. Air France had a similar problem when it introduced the new A320. But Boeing, not third world pilots, is at fault.
There’s another key factor. I’ve been writing for decades that passenger aircraft should return to the three-man crew they had 40-50 years ago. The position of flight engineer was supposedly eliminated by cockpit automation. Today, aircraft are so electronically complex they need a specialist on board who can deal with problems. Pilots should not be expected to be masters of computer technology. A third crew member is essential when things go wrong. But employing one costs money. It seems rock-bottom fares remain more important than safety.
Among industry watchers, Boeing 737 assembly line is considered a "marvel of lean manufacturing."Within that impressive production line, the 737 Max 8 model was born as Boeing’s technological response to its competitors, Airbus and Bombardier, in the market for mid-size planes. After two devastating crashes in five months, first in Indonesia last October and then last Sunday in Ethiopia, the whole fleet of nearly 400 Max 8 model planes have been grounded worldwide. The two crashes killing everyone on board, 189 in Indonesia and 157 in Ethiopia, are a sad anomaly in an era of improving aviation safety.
Not since the grounding of McDonnell Douglas DC-10 in 1979 by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after the crash of a DC-10 plane on a runway at the Chicago O’Hare International Airport moments after take-off, has a fleet of planes been grounded based on concerns over design and operational problems. And never before has the grounding of an aircraft brand been undertaken on a worldwide scale.
DC-10 had serious design flaws and safety problems. The Chicago crash involving a domestic (Chicago to Los Angeles) American Airlines flight in which 258 passengers and 13 crew members perished, is the deadliest aviation accident in America. Within a month the FAA withdrew the model’s flight certificate. The company ended the production of DC-10 and shifted to production of other models with good safety records and business success. The future of 737 Max 8 depends on the results of the investigations of the two crashes. And there is far too much at stake for Boeing to think of stopping the production of what has been, until the crashes, its highflying model.
Crash implications
There also global implications for the airline industry, passengers, governments and national economies. Until the crashes, 737 Max 8 was the bestselling aircraft in the world and the fastest selling aircraft in Boeing’s history. It had notched up 5,000 orders from 78 customers at a total value of $600 billion. Less than 10% has been delivered to-date. Of the 379 Max 8 planes that have been sold, 108 are in the US and 76 are in China. There are 15 of them in Indonesia out of a 250 order. China is reported to have ordered two-thirds (reportedly amounting to 40% of Boeing’s profits on Max 8 sales) of the total 5,000 orders and was also the first to order the grounding of the current Max 8 fleet used by domestic carriers. Boeing is also caught up in the trade spat between Trump and Beijing. The final end to the trade standoff is anticipated to include China’s commitment to buy more than US$1-trillion of US goods including Boeing planes. China has not accepted a single plane after Trump precipitated the trade dispute and the new Boeing crisis will add another difficulty for resolution.
Boeing has also announced that it will not be making any new deliveries until the safety of the plane is established by independent authorities. For the 78 airline customers with huge outstanding orders for the new 737 Max 8 planes, the suspension poses different problems. In the short-term airlines are scrambling to reschedule hundreds of flights that were already scheduled with Max 8 planes. Finding replacement planes is not easy for a majority of the airlines. Finding space for the parked planes is another problem. More crucially, the suspension also upsets the planned retirement of old aircraft by different airlines. This may result in extended use of older planes by airlines with limited resources at the risk of compromising safety. The two decades of this century have been remarkable for aviation safety and the air crashes that occur now are primarily the result of aging planes and poor maintenance by carriers in developing countries. Except the last two crashes, which even though they occurred in Asia and in Africa, they both involved the newest version of Boeing 737 jet that has been one of the more reliable passenger travel aircrafts for half a century.
Lion Air is Indonesia’s largest private airline serving 120 destinations, 20 of which are international. It has a fleet of 125 planes, and another 250 on order for expansion. 186 of the latter are Boeing 737 Max 8 planes. In 2011, it failed to obtain IATA (International Air Transportation Association) membership) due to safety concerns. The airline has had 16 incidents and accidents since its inception in 1999, including the October Max 8 crash and two more after that. Lion Air has recently been working with Boeing to improve its navigational performance. The October crash of Flight 610 will be another setback to the airline.
The implications of last Sunday’s crash for Ethiopian Airlines and Ethiopia itself are tragic and unfortunate. Once known for its famine, mass killings, recurrent coups and political oppression, Ethiopia, a country of nearly 90 million people, is emerging as a successful federal constitutional democracy in the African continent. Between 2004 and 2009, the IMF rated it as one of the fastest growing economies in the world and in 2007 and 2008 as the fastest growing African economy without petroleum resources. And the World Bank has noted that between 2004 and 2014, the Ethiopian economy grew by 11% on average annually.
The Ethiopian Airlines, the national carrier, is the symbol of the country’s pride and growing prosperity, serving 102 international and 20 domestic passenger destinations and 44 cargo destinations. The Airlines has been professionally managed without political interference regardless of the regime in power, so much so it was called "a capitalist success in Marxist Ethiopia," by the Christian Science Monitor in 1988. It is the most successful and reliable airline in Africa and Ethiopia’s national airport is the hub connecting international capitals to destinations in the African continent. The hub-function of Ethiopia was evident in the international breakdown of the victims of last Sunday’s tragedy.
The Airlines has a total fleet of 112 planes, majority of which are Boeing models. The fleet includes three (excluding the crashed aircraft) 737 Max 8 jets while another 25 are on order. What will happen to the outstanding order will depend on the investigations into the crash. The examination of the two black boxes is being undertaken in France as Ethiopia doesn’t have the facilities to carry out the examination. In a significant move that has been welcomed by analysts, Ethiopia chose to send the black boxes to France and not the US to demonstrate objectivity and avoid perceptions of conflict of interest .
Competitive Design
The world’s three largest airlines are all in America: American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines. Their operations are primarily domestic and serve fewer countries than European and Middle Eastern airlines. American Airlines is not even within the top ten international airlines serving fifty or more countries. Yet, with a fleet size of nearly 1,000 and highest aggregate of passenger-kilometres, American Airlines is the target for fierce competition among passenger aircraft manufacturers, the leading companies among whom are Airbus (France), Boeing (US), Bombardier (Canada), Embraer (Brazil) and Tupolev (Russia). Industry analysts trace the genesis of Boeing 737 Max 8 to the competition between Airbus and Boeing to be the supplier of choice for American Airlines.
Boeing 737 Max 8 is a narrow body plane like the prototype, but can fly further (6,750 km range) and at higher fuel efficiency. It is a two-engine, single-aisle aircraft accommodating 210 passengers over a total length of 39.5m and a wingspan of 35.9m. Along with fuel efficiency, Boeing assured airlines that no extensive pilot training at significant costs will be required to fly the new aircraft. Economizing on fuel and training was a major competitive advantage for Boeing over its rivals. Both were achieved through design modifications and technological sophistication. These changes are at the centre of what is suspected to have been the common cause behind the two crashes.
The new design involves bigger engines for fuel efficiency but are positioned differently from the original 737 models because of the engine size. The new engine position has changed the aircraft’s centre of gravity, potentially causing the nose to pitch up during flight which could result in the plane stalling. To address this problem, the design includes a software called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) that will be triggered by a sensor when it detects that the nose is too high. The maneuvering system will automatically push the nose down. Based on the Lion Air crash in Indonesia, it has been suggested that the sensor may have incorrectly triggered the MCAS to pitch the nose downward into a dive. It is also reported that the sensor on the plane was replaced before the crashing flight after pilots on four earlier flights had experienced problems in controlling the plane and receiving incorrect air speed and altitude information. The satellite data on the Ethiopian flight showed the final flight track to be similar to the Lion Air crash in Indonesia.
After the Indonesian crash, Boeing issued a safety warning on the potential for a sensor failure and giving instructions to deactivate MCAS by flipping a switch. The problem could have been averted by giving proper training to pilots on operating the new plane. As has been reported, training was avoided to save costs on the premise that pilots with the license to fly 737 jets needed no training for the Max 8 plane. Even national regulators including the FAA have gone along with this and did not insist on pilot training. A number of North American pilots have also complained about inadequate training, but no training program was initiated in response to those complaints.
Instead, US and Canadian airlines were insisting that the plane was safe for flying and their pilots were handling the aircraft well. US and Canadian officials took time to ground the Max 8 while the rest of the world was already grounding the jet. Politically it was becoming untenable to postpone grounding until they found evidence in the similarity of the satellite pictures to justify grounding. The reverse would have happened in the sequence of grounding if a plane had crashed in North America and not in Asia or Africa.
The day before grounding, President Trump took to twitter to blame it all on technology: "Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly, old and simpler is far better." And a follow-up: "I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Albert Einstein to be my pilot." The two crashes are not the fault of technology, but are the result of competitive pressures that created an aircraft design and rushed it to the production line without adequate testing, and of the failure to give adequate training to the pilots to save costs even though there was information about a malfunctioning sensor and an overcorrecting software system. Technology has immensely contributed to aviation safety. It is in the application of technology that human beings are being tested and challenged and are being shown to be not always acting in the public interest. When it comes to aviation, the primary and the principal public interest is always safety.
President describes scale of disaster as huge, as Red Cross says most of Beira damaged or destroyed Aerial footage shows Cyclone Idai devastation in Mozambique – video
Ruth Maclean in Dakar-
More than 1,000 people are feared dead in a devastating cyclone that hit Mozambique on Friday, the country’s president has said.
Filipe Nyusi told Mozambican radio he had seen “many bodies” floating in the overflowing Pungwe and Busi rivers. “It appears that we can register more than 1,000 deaths,” he said, adding that more than 100,000 people were at risk because of severe flooding.
At least 215 people have been confirmed dead and hundreds are missing across Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe from Tropical Cyclone Idai, according to government agencies and the Red Cross, which said 1.5 million people had been affected.
A more precise death toll and the true scale of the damage is not likely to be known soon, as many areas are cut off.
“I think this is the biggest natural disaster Mozambique has ever faced. Everything is destroyed,”
Celso Correia, the environment minister, said. “Our priority now is to save human lives.”
Residents of the devastated port city of Beira, where the Pungwe and Busi rivers flow into the sea, have had no communications since Idai hit. Many families have been frantically trying to get information about their relatives, but with no phones or internet access, no electricity and great chunks of the main road into Beira washed away and blocked by flooding, all they can do is wait.
Despite the difficulty of getting much-needed supplies, equipment, rescue teams and other people into the area, some humanitarian organisations managed to fly in and begin taking stock of the damage.
“The situation is terrible. The scale of devastation is enormous. It seems that 90 per cent of the area is completely destroyed,” said Jamie LeSueur of the Red Cross. “We are also hearing that the situation outside the city could be even worse. Yesterday, a large dam burst and cut off the last road to the city.”
An aerial shot of Beira made available by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies on Monday. Photograph: Caroline Haga/AP
Aerial footage of Praia Novo, an informal settlement on a Beira beach, showed homes that had been torn apart.
A British doctor who was in Beira when the cyclone hit and managed to get on a plane to Maputo on Sunday said he saw widespread damage to buildings, trees and power lines in the city. He said the poorest seemed to be the hardest hit.
“All those who were in reasonably built houses/ hotels during the storm who I heard about seemed to come through unscathed,” Mark Ellul wrote from Johannesburg. “I did hear of casualties and fatalities from those I talked to, who were all in poorly built accommodation in the centre of the city.
My thoughts were constantly with those people (the majority) who have poorly built houses and had to endure this horrific storm with very little shelter.”
In images taken by the South African broadcaster eNCA , people were seen climbing trees and wading through waist-high water as ripped-off roofs and debris lay scattered across the city.
“We were in the house – actually we’d been told to move out of Beira – but we never thought and expected that it could have been as serious as it is. It was catastrophic, destructive, and we were in panic,” one Beira resident told eNCA.
“We were lucky but most of the people were not lucky,” another said.
Idai began as a tropical depression in the Mozambique channel on 4 March, dropping heavy rain over Mozambique and Malawi before heading back eastward in the direction of Beira, by which time it had become a cyclone. It has also devastated parts of neighbouring Zimbabwe.
“It was a miracle I managed to escape. Most of my relatives are missing,” said Casious Maunga, who worked in a banana plantation in Chimanimani, where hundreds are believed to have died and most houses were submerged under water. “I’m confused, I hope they are all alive.”
The cyclone will have far-reaching consequences beyond the flooding. Farmers in the region were about to harvest their maize crop when Idai hit, and many of their fields have been ruined, meaning widespread hunger in at least the year ahead.
Mozambicans and Zimbabweans criticised their leaders for their response to the crisis. Nyusi travelled to Swaziland on a courtesy visit to its king as the cyclone hit Beira, then announced he was cutting short his trip – exploiting a tragedy for political gain, according to one activist.
In Chimanimani, where people were running out of food as rain continued to fall, no help arrived, according to local residents.
“Government officials came in their big cars and they left us, all they did was to promise us assistance but we haven’t seen any help. We are hungry and starving,” another survivor, Grace Mungwari, said.
March 16, 2019 5.00pm EDT
Fighter of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are seen at a position in the village of Baghouz, near Syria's border with Iraq, in the eastern Deir Ezzor province on March 15, 2019. (Delil Suleiman/ AFP/Getty Images)
An image of the cerebral organoids grown from stem cells by Cambridge researchers. Photograph: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Boeing has also announced that it will not be making any new deliveries until the safety of the plane is established by independent authorities. For the 78 airline customers with huge outstanding orders for the new 737 Max 8 planes, the suspension poses different problems. In the short-term airlines are scrambling to reschedule hundreds of flights that were already scheduled with Max 8 planes. Finding replacement planes is not easy for a majority of the airlines. Finding space for the parked planes is another problem. More crucially, the suspension also upsets the planned retirement of old aircraft by different airlines. This may result in extended use of older planes by airlines with limited resources at the risk of compromising safety. The two decades of this century have been remarkable for aviation safety and the air crashes that occur now are primarily the result of aging planes and poor maintenance by carriers in developing countries. Except the last two crashes, which even though they occurred in Asia and in Africa, they both involved the newest version of Boeing 737 jet that has been one of the more reliable passenger travel aircrafts for half a century.
The world’s three largest airlines are all in America: American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines. Their operations are primarily domestic and serve fewer countries than European and Middle Eastern airlines. American Airlines is not even within the top ten international airlines serving fifty or more countries. Yet, with a fleet size of nearly 1,000 and highest aggregate of passenger-kilometres, American Airlines is the target for fierce competition among passenger aircraft manufacturers, the leading companies among whom are Airbus (France), Boeing (US), Bombardier (Canada), Embraer (Brazil) and Tupolev (Russia). Industry analysts trace the genesis of Boeing 737 Max 8 to the competition between Airbus and Boeing to be the supplier of choice for American Airlines.
