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Tag: malaysia airlines flight mh 370
Putting Names, Faces To Malaysian Airlines Victims

Putting Names, Faces To Malaysian Airlines Victims

By Michael Muskal and Christine Mai-Duc, Los Angeles Times

Around the world Friday, friends and loved ones gathered to mourn the passengers and crew who lost their lives on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, including a student from Indiana, a prominent AIDS researcher, teachers, tourists, and those just going home.

President Barack Obama on Friday identified the first, and so far only, known American citizen aboard as Quinn Lucas Schansman, who had Dutch and American citizenship.

A Facebook profile appearing to belong to Schansman indicates that he was living in Amsterdam as of April, and attending the International Business School at Hogeschool van Amsterdam. A photo posted by a woman who appears to be his girlfriend included numerous condolences from friends.

The Boeing 777 was carrying 298 people when it went down Thursday in eastern Ukraine, sending shock waves around the world from Malaysia to the Netherlands. The dead were from at least 10 countries with the majority, 189, Dutch.

Another passenger with American connections, Karlijn Keijzer, 25, of Amsterdam, was a doctoral student in chemistry at Indiana University and an avid rower who once competed on the women’s varsity rowing team, the school said. She had also earned her master’s degree at Indiana.

Keijzer was a member of Indiana’s varsity 8 crew during its 2011 season. “The Indiana rowing family is deeply saddened by the news of Karlijn’s sudden passing,” said rowing Coach Steve Peterson. “She came to us for one year as a graduate student and truly wanted to pursue rowing. That year was the first year we really started to make a mark … and she was a huge reason for it.”

At a televised news conference Friday, a Malaysia Airlines official gave the latest breakdown of those who died. In addition to the 189 Dutch, which includes Schansman, there were 29 Malaysians, 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, nine from Britain, four each from Germany and Belgium, three from the Philippines, and one each from Canada and New Zealand. The nationalities of several passengers have yet to be verified and officials warned that other passengers may turn out to have dual citizenship.

The disaster over Ukraine was the second major tragedy this year involving a Malaysia Airlines flight. In March, Flight 370 went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and its 241 passengers and crew were all lost. No sign of the plane has been found.
For one Australian family, the disasters on opposite sides of the world will be forever linked.

Kaylene Mann’s brother Rod Burrows and sister-in-law Mary Burrows were on board MH370 when it vanished in March. On Friday, Mann told the Associated Press that the family had just found out that her stepdaughter, Maree Rizk, was killed on MH17.

“It’s just brought everyone, everything back,” said Greg Burrows, Mann’s brother. “It’s just … ripped our guts again.”

As many as 100 passengers on Flight 17 were traveling to Melbourne, Australia, for the 20th International AIDS conference starting this weekend. The mood among the AIDS research community was grim Friday. Among those lost was prominent researcher Joep Lange, a former president of the International AIDS Society, and his colleague, Jacqueline van Tongeren, according to the Academic Medical Center hospital in Amsterdam, where the pair worked.

“Joep was a man who knew no barriers,” the hospital said in a statement. “He was a great inspiration for everybody who wanted to do something about the AIDS tragedy in Africa and Asia.”

Organizers said the event, a leading forum for researchers to meet, form ties and discuss their work, would go on.

“In recognition of our colleagues’ dedication to the fight against HIV/AIDS, the conference will go ahead as planned and will include opportunities to reflect and remember those we have lost,” they said in a statement.

A World Health Organization spokesman traveling to the conference was also killed.

Television showed clips from the Amsterdam area of flowers being left outside a shop whose owner and boyfriend were among the missing. Mourners gathered outside the Malaysian embassy in Moscow to leave flowers and express their condolences.

Lousewies van der Laan, a Dutch politician and former member of the Dutch parliament, praised Dutch activist Pim de Kuijer, once her intern and believed to be among the dead. On Twitter, Van der Laan called de Kuijer “a brilliant, inspiring and caring activist fighting for equality and helping AIDS victims around the world.”

A Dutch senator, Willem Witteveen of the Labor Party, also died, the Dutch Senate announced.

Students at the Kincoppal-Rose Bay School of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic school in Sydney, Australia, gathered Friday for a special prayer meeting after it was confirmed that Sister Philomene Tiernan, a 77-year-old teacher, was killed.

“We’re absolutely devastated. For me, she’s been a great mentor and she’s also a personal friend,” school Principal Hilary Johnston-Croke told reporters, her voice breaking with emotion.

Another Australian school, Toorak College in Melbourne, was also bereaved, according to local media reports. Teacher Frankie Davison and her husband Liam were on the stricken flight, the school announced.

“Our hearts and sympathy goes out to their children Milly and Sam, and family,” the school said in a message online. “We are devastated by the news of this tragedy.”

Relatives were also mourning loved ones in Malaysia. Akmar Mohd Noor said her sister was flying home from Geneva to join her family for Hari Raya, the celebrations to mark the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“She was coming back from Geneva to celebrate with us for the first time in 30 years,” Akmar told reporters.

AFP Photo/Dominique Faget

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…And This Is The Overkill News Network

…And This Is The Overkill News Network

Enough, already.

Please, for the love of Cronkite: Give us a break from the missing plane. Yes, we all wonder what happened to it. Yes, our hearts go out to the families seeking resolution. But really, CNN … enough. Put your hands up and step away from the story.

I’m in the doctor’s office the other day, right? I’m waiting for my missus and the TV is on and I’m half watching, half reading and you’re covering the plane. And time passes. And you’re covering the plane. And commercials intervene and you come back and you’re covering the plane. And my wife comes out and it’s time to go and it’s been a solid hour and you’re still covering the plane. Nothing but the plane.

I’m on your website maybe six times a day, CNN, grazing for news. Have you had another lead story in the last month? Has nothing else of importance happened to any of the 7.1 billion people on this planet? I look at you and I want to start screaming like Tattoo on Fantasy Island: “De plane! De plane! De plane!”

And CNN, is it really true your “coverage” includes asking whether aliens abducted Malaysia Airlines Flight 370? Or whether it was swallowed by the Bermuda Triangle? Did you actually wonder aloud if it had flown into a black hole?

Sigh.

You know what, CNN? I don’t even watch cable news anymore. Haven’t for years. Not interested in imbibing MSNBC’s perennially aggrieved liberalism nor Fox’s angry-all-the-time conservatism. Not interested in watching you play with your holograms, either. But there are days when you’ve got no choice. There’s been a school shooting, a terrorist attack, a national election. On those days, CNN, I always turn to you on the theory — or maybe just the faint hope — that there still flickers within you some faint, vestigial notion of what news is — some last bit of fealty to the ideal of getting the facts and telling the story, giving people information they need to understand their world and make decisions about their lives.

Yes, you’re right. That’s so 1978 of me.

Look, CNN, I know that before this happened your numbers were in the tank and you were down to your last dozen viewers or so. I’m not without sympathy. Still, there’s something sadly … whorish in the way you chase the ratings bump this story has given you. One struggles to imagine the aforementioned Cronkite, much less the sainted Edward R. Murrow — peace be upon him — selling their newsmen’s souls so nakedly just so their network might charge a little more for toilet paper commercials.

But then, Ed and Uncle Walter have left the building, haven’t they? And yes, maybe they had the luxury of regarding the news as a public service, a sacred trust, consonant with Thomas Jefferson’s belief that an informed electorate was vital to a self-governing nation. But you have no such luxury. What you have is a 24/7 news cycle and the need to fill it — if not with news, then speculation, if not speculation, then controversy, if not controversy then opinion, if not opinion, then froth.

Fine. But this is not a trend without impact, CNN. We are becoming a stupider people. You see it in test scores, but you see it more viscerally in the way some of us equate higher volume with sounder logic, wear party as identity, refuse new information that challenges old beliefs, act as if everything must entertain us. Even the news.

It seems like somebody ought to take a stand against that. Just saying.

Granted, the missing jetliner is not an unimportant story. But neither is it a story deserving of the kind of round-the-clock-man-on-the-moon-war-is-over-presidential-assassination coverage you have given it.

CNN, that jet isn’t the only thing lost. Have you seen your credibility lately?

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

AFP Photo/ Ted Aljibe

Indian Ocean Search For Missing Malaysia Airliner Comes Up Empty Again

Indian Ocean Search For Missing Malaysia Airliner Comes Up Empty Again

By Don Lee, Tribune Washington Bureau

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Despite better weather conditions Friday and the use of some of the world’s most advanced surveillance aircraft, an Australian-led search operation came up empty on its second day of scouring the south Indian Ocean for possible debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Several military aircraft, a commercial jet and two merchant ships combed a large area about 1,500 miles off the coast of Perth, Australia, where two objects had been spotted on satellite imagery. Australian officials reported the images Thursday and said they could be related to the missing jetliner. The weather was fair Friday, making for much better visibility than on Thursday, said the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

Though the search efforts in the area are intensifying, with a number of aircraft, ships and helicopters from China, Japan and other countries heading toward the vicinity, the absence of early success provided a kind of reality check after hopes rose Thursday of a possible breakthrough in the mystery of the Boeing 777 that vanished after departing Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing on March 8.

“This is going to be a long haul,” said Malaysia’s acting transport minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, at a news conference. Among other things, he said, he would ask U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on Friday for additional help, including deep-sea salvage vehicles.

Thus far, the aircraft search operations in the area have included four Australian air force P3 Orions, one U.S. Navy P8 Poseidon and a New Zealand P3 Orion. On Thursday, rain and clouds largely limited the search to radar, but aircraft crews Friday were able to make visual inspections flying over the area.

Still, it is “a big area when you’re looking out the window trying to see something by eye,” said John Young, general manager of the Emergency Response Division at the Australian maritime agency. The search area is about 8,900 square miles, slightly smaller than the size of New Hampshire.

What’s more, because of the long distance to fly to that section of the ocean, the aircraft have only about two hours of actual search time before needing to return for refueling.

“Tomorrow’s plan is to do the same thing,” Young said Friday. “The plan is we want to find these objects because they are the best lead to where we might find people to be rescued.”

There was some speculation, however, that the objects spotted on satellite could have submerged since the pictures were captured Sunday. Australian officials said it wasn’t until Thursday that the images were reported to authorities because of a large volume of films and time needed for analysis.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Friday defended his decision to announce the satellite imagery. He said he had a duty to pass on the information to families of the missing passengers. At the same time, Abbott reiterated that the two objects detected on the film, one of them about 79 feet long, may have nothing to do with the missing jetliner.

“It could just be a container that has fallen off a ship; we just don’t know,” he said.

With the investigation of the missing airliner entering its third week this weekend, there were still many unanswered questions.

Malaysian officials Friday said they had no update on the log data that were deleted from the flight simulator made by Flight 370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

Asked about reports that Shah made a phone call before take-off, Malaysia Airlines’ chief executive, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, who has been a regular at the daily news conference by Malaysian officials, said Friday without elaborating that the information was being passed on to authorities.

But now more than anything else, the big question is whether the floating objects captured on satellite are from the missing plane — and if so, how long it will take to find them.

Cho Byungjae, South Korea’s ambassador to Malaysia, is one of a number of foreign diplomats staying on top of the search efforts. South Korea is sending two aircraft to the south Indian Ocean.

After coming out of a meeting with Malaysian officials Friday afternoon, Cho spoke in somewhat sobering terms. “It could take some time,” he said.

AFP Photo/Eric A. Pastor