179 people killed in plane crash at South Korean airport
A passenger plane skidded off a runway at a South Korean airport on Sunday, slammed into a concrete fence and burst into flames after its front landing gear apparently failed to deploy. All but two of the 181 people on board died in one of the country’s worst aviation disasters.
The country’s National Fire Agency (NFA) said rescuers raced to pull people from the Jeju Air passenger plane at the airport in the town of Muan, about 290 kilometres south of the capital, Seoul.
Emergency officials later confirmed there were only two survivors. Workers pulled two crew members to safety. Health officials said they are conscious and not in life-threatening condition.
Family members cried as officials announced the names of some victims at a lounge in the Muan airport.
Footage of the crash aired by YTN television showed the plane skidding across the airstrip, apparently with its landing gear still closed, and colliding head-on with a concrete wall on the outskirts of the facility.
Local TV stations aired footage showing the aircraft engulfed in flames, with thick pillows of black smoke billowing from it. The NFA deployed 32 fire trucks and several helicopters to contain the blaze. About 1,560 firefighters, police officers, soldiers and other officials were also sent to the site, the agency said.
Emergency officials in Muan said they were examining the cause of the fire, initially saying the plane’s landing gear appeared to have malfunctioned.
Possible bird strike
John Cox, president of aviation consulting firm Safety Operating Systems LLC, based in Washington, D.C., said the footage indicates the plane may have taken a bird strike to one or both engines, but investigators will know more once they study the aircraft’s black boxes and scour the engines for bird debris.
U.K. aviation expert Philip Butterworth-Hayes told Agence France-Presse that a strike to both engines would cause the aircraft to lose power, and pilots would have to activate the APU, or auxillary power unit, to get power back and gain more control over things like the landing gear.
“It may have been they did not have time to get the landing gear down by the auxiliary means because of having limited or no power from the engines,” Cox told CBC News.
He said the aircraft initially appeared to be under control on the runway and was slowing down, “and would have come to a stop had that wall not been there.”
Cox said under international standards, airports should have a clear area at the end of the runway so that “if an airplane does go off, it doesn’t strike something.”
“Aircraft engines are built to withstand a lot, including a bird strike,” Butterworth-Hayes told AFP. “But if the birds are particularly large, they’re in flocks and there’s several of them, even a modern jet engine has problems going through it.”
Lee Jeong-hyeon, chief of the Muan fire station, told a televised briefing that the plane was completely destroyed, with only the tail assembly remaining recognizable among the wreckage. Lee said that workers were looking into various possibilities about what caused the crash, including whether the aircraft was struck by birds.
Senior Transport Ministry official Joo Jong-wan said workers have retrieved the flight data and cockpit voice recorders in the plane’s black box, which will be examined by government experts investigating the cause of the crash and fire. Joo said the runway at the Muan airport will be closed until Jan. 1.
The ministry said the plane was a 15-year-old Boeing 737-800 jet that was returning from Bangkok when the crash occurred at 9:03 a.m. local time, and its passengers included two Thai nationals.
Thailand’s prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, expressed deep condolences to the families of those affected by the accident through a post on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. Paetongtarn said she had ordered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to provide immediate assistance.
Low-cost airline
In a televised news conference, Kim E-bae, Jeju Air’s president, deeply bowed with other senior company officials as he apologized to bereaved families and said he feels “full responsibility” for the incident.
It was the first fatal flight for Jeju Air, a low-cost airline founded in 2005 that ranks behind only Korean Air Lines and Asiana Airlines in terms of the number of passengers in South Korea.
Kim said the company hadn’t identified any mechanical problems with the aircraft following regular checkups and that he would wait for the results of government investigations into the cause of the crash.
Boeing said in a statement on X it was in contact with Jeju Air and is ready to support the company in dealing with the crash. “We extend our deepest condolences to the families who lost loved ones, and our thoughts remain with the passengers and crew,” Boeing said.
It’s one of the deadliest disasters in South Korea’s aviation history. The last time South Korea suffered a large-scale air disaster was in 1997, when a Korean Airline plane crashed in Guam, killing 228 people on board.
In an emergency meeting on Sunday evening, South Korea’s acting president, Choi Sang-mok, declared a national mourning period until Jan. 4.
The crash came as South Korea is embroiled in a huge political crisis triggered by then-president Yoon Suk Yeol’s stunning imposition of martial law and ensuing impeachment.
On Friday, South Korean lawmakers also impeached acting president Han Duck-soo and suspended his duties, forcing president Choi to take over. He ordered officials to employ all available resources to rescue the passengers and crew, according to Yonhap news agency.
Published at Sun, 29 Dec 2024 18:26:16 +0000
Jimmy Carter, 39th U.S. president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, dead at 100
Jimmy Carter, the Georgia peanut farmer who was elected as the 39th U.S. president and later earned a Nobel Peace Prize as a global champion of human rights, has died. He was 100.
“Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia,” The Carter Center said in a statement announcing his death on the social media platform X. It added that he died peacefully, surrounded by his family.
A devout Christian who taught Sunday school at his local Baptist church for decades and whose faith-based politics were often championed as an antidote to the cynicism of the Watergate years, Carter unexpectedly ascended from the Georgia governor’s office to the presidency.
His 1977-81 presidential term, however, was marked by hard economic times for many Americans and the Iranian Revolution, which saw U.S. diplomats held hostage for 444 days and released only just after his successor, Ronald Reagan, was inaugurated.
Over time, several Carter administration accomplishments would be recognized. They include the signing of the Camp David Accords signalling peace between Egypt and Israel, the Panama Canal Treaty and the SALT II Treaty with the Soviet Union to limit strategic missile development. Carter also established formal diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China.
“Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood,” the Democratic president said during a 1978 White House event.
Domestically, Carter oversaw the creation of the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He urged Democrats to pay attention to runaway government spending while simultaneously bolstering the Pentagon’s budget — a stance considered anathema by some in his party but which gained more acceptance under later Democrat presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
After leaving office, Carter continued to be heavily involved in international diplomacy efforts, often through the Carter Center, helping to broker ceasefires in global hot spots and serving as an election monitor in fledgling democracies.
In 2002, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Carter the Nobel Peace Prize for “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
Accepting the prize, Carter urged leaders to confront “the growing chasm between the richest and the poorest people on Earth.”
‘The Man from Plains’
Carter had first-hand experience with poverty, toiling during the Great Depression on his father’s peanut farm alongside Black sharecroppers. The family dwelling lacked indoor plumbing and running water for the first several years of his life.
James Earl Carter, Jr. became known as “The Man from Plains” — it was both his birthplace on Oct. 1, 1924, and the site of the family farm, some 200 kilometres south of Atlanta. Much of his youth was spent in Archery, a speck on the map down the road consisting of about 30 families.
The former U.S. president continues to teach Sunday school in Plains, Georgia, a place where he is both idolized and considered a regular member of the community.
While attending college in Georgia, Carter was accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a bachelor of science degree in 1946 — the same year he married Rosalynn Smith, whom he met through his sister, Ruth.
Decades later, Carter described marrying Rosa, as he affectionately called her, as “the pinnacle of my life.” She died of natural causes in November 2023 at age 96.
In the navy, Carter served as a submariner in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, rising to the rank of lieutenant. He eventually moved to Schenectady, N.Y., to take part in the nuclear submarine program at Union College.
Jimmy Carter has passed away at the age of 100. He will be buried at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he lived most of his life. The National’s Adrienne Arsenault travelled there to speak to the people who knew the former U.S. president best and learn more about his life, legacy and love story.
Carter’s trajectory changed in 1953. After his father died, he resigned from the navy and returned to Georgia to take over the family peanut farm and supply company.
Over the next decade, Carter became a business leader in the community, and his involvement in local politics grew. He was elected as a Democrat to the Georgia Senate in 1962 and became state governor in 1971.
Amid his political forays came a seminal event. As he later told a biographer, on a mission to a Pennsylvania coal-mining town with his church in 1968, Carter experienced “in a personal and intense way the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life.” It would guide him through the subsequent years.
Influential presidential campaign
Carter announced his intention to run for the presidency in 1974, just a few years into his term as Georgia governor. In a post-Nixon era, at a time when the American public was becoming disillusioned with Washington politics, Carter’s outsider status and preacher-like sermons about bringing back integrity to government resonated with voters.
Taking advantage of recent campaign rule changes, Carter ran in a then-record 30 primaries. The candidate and his team were the first to understand the importance of early campaign momentum in the new system, illustrating the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire results in future presidential primaries.
“Carter’s impact on the shape and structure of the modern nomination system cannot be overstated,” wrote longtime Democratic consultant Elaine Kamarck in the book Primary Politics.
Archives25:28Jimmy Carter takes the oath
Jimmy Carter is sworn in as the 39th president of the United States.
The pious Carter raised eyebrows late in the campaign, telling a Playboy interviewer, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”
But he would ultimately defeat incumbent Republican Gerald Ford in the closest election in 60 years in terms of electoral college margin.
Tumultuous term
Carter enjoyed a honeymoon period with high approval ratings before the roof fell in on his presidency, a result of the effects of soaring inflation and high unemployment, along with several self-inflicted wounds.
He brought to D.C. several of his Georgia advisers, who struggled with the process of selling their legislative program to experienced Congress members.
Carter also earned a reputation as a micromanager within the White House. Former staffer James Fallows, later a journalist with the Atlantic, characterized the administration in 1979 as having “the spirit of a bureaucracy, drained of zeal, obsessed with form.”
Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, in a 1982 interview, says the failed rescue attempt in the Iran hostage crisis was the ‘worst day of my life.’
Carter laboured for days over his most famous, and misinterpreted, presidential speech, given on July 15, 1979. In a speech about the country’s “crisis of confidence” — it was later branded by some as the “malaise” speech, even though that word was never mentioned — Carter called on Americans to join together to conserve energy where they could, arguing it would help in the pocketbook and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy.
His approval ratings rose noticeably after the speech, contrary to some revisionist accounts, but within days he sacked a number of cabinet members — killing any possibility of momentum by giving the impression of a dysfunctional administration.
Carter’s decision to pull U.S. athletes from the 1980 Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan also came in for criticism, and his younger brother Billy’s shady business dealings with the Libyan government produced more negative headlines.
In a 1982 interview with CBC’s Barbara Frum, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter talked about what cost him support in his 1980 race against Republican Ronald Reagan.
As a result, Carter faced a now-rare primary challenge for a sitting president. While he would overcome Ted Kennedy’s bid to wrest away the Democratic nomination, Carter became the first elected president to lose a bid for a second term in 48 years.
Carter had general support as measured by approval ratings for his handling of the international crisis that arose when Iranian students took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held dozens of American diplomats and citizens hostage. But his failure to secure their release eventually weighed down his presidency, and he approved a doomed rescue mission that killed three marines and five air force members.
In the lone 1980 presidential debate, Reagan seized on Carter’s penchant for pedantry, dismissing his rival with the pithy phrase “there you go again.” Reagan would trounce Carter by a 440-vote margin in the electoral college, with exit polls indicating the economy and leadership qualities were bigger factors than the hostage issue.
‘I’m a better ex-president’
Carter returned to Georgia, became a professor at Emory University and founded the Carter Center, a non-partisan, non-profit organization focused on advancing international human rights and conflict resolution.
He and his wife were also involved in expanding the affordable housing charity Habitat for Humanity. A woodworker in his spare time, Carter became the poster child of the organization and was often photographed volunteering on build sites around the world.
“I can’t deny I’m a better ex-president than I was a president,” he said in 2005.
Seven hundred volunteers picked up hammers and saws for the official launch of the Habitat for Humanity project in Winnipeg. Former President of United States Jimmy Carter was right there alongside them.
Carter would author more than two dozen books — in addition to expected forays into international politics and U.S. history, he wrote about faith, fishing and his parents. He also wrote children’s books and a collection of poetry.
In a review of Carter’s 2017 book, A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates wrote, “Carter is a brave, thoughtful, disciplined leader who understands the world at a remarkable level and who has improved the lives of billions of people through his advocacy for human rights and global health.”
Carter was not shy in expressing his opinions about domestic politics, regardless of the party in power. While his relationship with Bill Clinton was occasionally frosty, he nonetheless argued in a joint 1998 op-ed with former rival Gerald Ford that Clinton should not be impeached after lying about his relationship with an intern but formally censured instead.
In 2004, Carter decried the U.S. war in Iraq championed by George W. Bush as “based on lies and misinterpretation from London and from Washington.” He also urged Barack Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.
Late in Donald Trump’s first year in the Oval Office, Carter told an interviewer that the media had been “harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” a comment that earned praise from the now-former president.
But less than two years later, Carter questioned the legitimacy of the Trump presidency in a panel discussion.
George Stroumboulopoulos sits down with former U.S. president Jimmy Carter.
Russian interference, “if fully investigated, would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016,” Carter argued. “He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
In a statement after the 2020 election, Carter said he looked forward to the “positive change” — and according to President Joe Biden, the two shared a private conversation on the eve of his inauguration in January 2021.
In November 2019 Carter underwent surgery to alleviate pressure on his brain after suffering two falls in the preceding weeks. He had broken his hip in another fall earlier in the year, and also survived a 2015 diagnosis of melanoma.
Carter’s survivors include sons John, Chip and Donnell, and a daughter, Amy. In addition to his wife, Carter was predeceased by his three younger siblings — brother Billy and sisters Ruth and Gloria each died of pancreatic cancer, as did their father — as well as one grandchild.
In his own words
“The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices. God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make these changes and we must.”
— Jimmy Carter, 2002, Nobel speech
“Acknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world — water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution — if we tackle them with courage and foresight.”
— Jimmy Carter, 1981, farewell address
“If we are to serve as a beacon for human rights, we must continue to perfect here at home the rights and values which we espouse around the world: A decent education for our children, adequate medical care for all Americans, an end to discrimination against minorities and women, a job for all those able to work, and freedom from injustice and religious intolerance.”
— Jimmy Carter, 1981, farewell address
“There’s no way now for you to get the Democratic or Republican nomination without being able to raise two or three hundred million dollars, or more, and I would not be inclined to do that. And I would not be capable of doing it. We’ve become now an oligarchy instead of a democracy. And I think that’s been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards of the American political system that I’ve ever seen in my life.”
— Jimmy Carter, telling Oprah Winfrey in 2015 why he could not become president in the current-day political climate
“America did not invent human rights, but in a very real sense, human rights invented America. Ours was the first nation to be founded on the idea that all are created equal and all deserve equal treatment under the law. Despite our missteps and shortcomings, these ideals still inspire hope among the oppressed and give us pride in being Americans.”
— Jimmy Carter, op-ed, December 2016
Published at Sun, 29 Dec 2024 21:32:32 +0000
