Spinal surgeries needed for 22 on board turbulent Singapore Airlines flight, hospital says
Several of the more seriously injured people who were on the Singapore Airlines flight that hit severe turbulence earlier this week will need spinal surgery, a Bangkok hospital said Thursday.
Twenty people remained in intensive care and a 73-year-old British man died after the Boeing 777, which was flying from London’s Heathrow airport to Singapore on Tuesday, ran into bad turbulence over the Andaman Sea, hurling items, passengers and crew members around the cabin.
A public relations officer for Samitivej Srinakarin Hospital, where most of the 104 people hurt in the incident were treated, told The Associated Press that other local hospitals have been asked to lend their best specialists to assist in the treatments. He spoke on condition of anonymity under hospital policy.
Hospital director Adinun Kittiratanapaibool said at a news conference Thursday that none of the 20 patients in ICU were in life-threatening condition. They include six Britons, six Malaysians, three Australians, two Singaporeans and one person each from Hong Kong, New Zealand and the Philippines.
‘Sheer terror’
Passengers have described the “sheer terror” of the aircraft shuddering, loose items flying and injured people lying paralyzed on the floor of the plane.
It remains unclear what exactly caused the turbulence that sent the plane, which was carrying 211 passengers and 18 crew members, on an approximately 1,800-metre descent in about three minutes, after which the flight was diverted to Thailand.
In one of the latest accounts of the chaos on board, 43-year-old Malaysian Amelia Lim described finding herself face down on the floor.
“I was so afraid…. I could see so many individuals on the floor, they were all bleeding. There was blood on the floor as well as on the people,” she told the online Malay Mail newspaper.
Passengers who were aboard the London-to-Singapore flight that experienced severe turbulence describe what they saw on the flight, including staff working to help people even after being injured themselves.
The woman who had been seated next to her was “motionless in the aisle and unable to move, likely suffering from a hip or spinal injury,” she said.
Thai authorities said the British man who died possibly had a heart attack. Passengers have described how the flight crew tried to revive him by performing CPR for about 20 minutes.
22 people left with spinal injuries, hospital says
Among some 41 people who had remained at Samitivej Srinakarin Hospital on Thursday morning, 22 had spinal or spinal cord damage, six had skull or brain injuries and 13 had damage to bones or internal organs, said hospital director Kittiratanapaibool. The 19 men and 22 women ranged in age from 2 years to 83 years.
Seventeen surgeries have already been performed — nine spinal surgeries and eight for other injuries, he said. Thirteen others injured in the incident remain at two other branches of the hospital.
Asked about the prognosis for the most serious cases, he said it was too early to tell if any could suffer permanent paralysis, and doctors would have to observe whether muscle function recovered after surgery.
On Wednesday morning, a special Singapore Airlines flight took 143 uninjured or lightly hurt people onward to Singapore.
Most people associate turbulence with heavy storms, but the most dangerous type is so-called clear air turbulence. Wind shear can occur in wispy cirrus clouds or even in clear air near thunderstorms, as differences in temperature and pressure create powerful currents of fast-moving air.
According to a 2021 report by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, turbulence accounted for 37.6 per cent of all accidents on larger commercial airlines between 2009 and 2018. The Federal Aviation Administration, another U.S. government agency, has said there were 146 serious injuries from turbulence from 2009 to 2021.
Tourism and aviation expert Anita Mendiratta, who is based in London, said severe turbulence is “extremely unusual.”
She said passengers should listen to instructions to keep their seatbelts on, ensure that hand baggage is put away safely when not in use, and reduce items stowed in the overhead compartments.
“When there is turbulence, those doors can open, and all of the items up top — whether it’s our hand baggage, our jackets, our duty-free items — they become movable and they become a risk to us all,” she told the AP.
Published at Thu, 23 May 2024 23:41:42 +0000
U.S. suing Ticketmaster owner Live Nation
Canadians are hopeful that a U.S. lawsuit against concert promoter Live Nation will provide some relief to cash-strapped fans and musicians.
The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) and a group of 30 states and the District of Columbia on Thursday sued to break up Live Nation, arguing the big concert promoter and its Ticketmaster unit illegally inflated concert ticket prices and hurt artists.
“It is time to break up Live Nation,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Shae Harding, a Taylor Swift fan and mom of two in Langley, B.C., says she couldn’t get through the Ticketmaster website to get tickets to the Vancouver concert for herself and her two daughters when they went on sale in November, calling the situation “kind of a nightmare.”
Thousands of Swifties were left in a similar position, and tickets were quickly posted for resale at exorbitant prices, some exceeding $26,000.
Harding eventually got tickets through a friend at face value, which was $175 apiece for nosebleeds.
“Something has to be done to stop this, because it’s just going to kill concerts. I mean, I’ve seen tickets go for thousands, tens of thousands of dollars for one ticket and that’s insane to me. That’s just not right,” she told CBC Thursday.
Harding said she is thankful for her friend getting the tickets, but will forever have a sour taste in her mouth when it comes to Ticketmaster.
The U.S. Justice Department is suing Live Nation, the owner of Ticketmaster, alleging it has illegally monopolized the live music industry — harming fans, artists and venues in the process. Andrew Chang lays out the argument for dismantling the company.
Concert fans and politicians for years have been calling for a re-examination of Live Nation’s acquisition of Ticketmaster in 2010, especially after the ticket seller botched sales in 2022 to Swift’s first tour in years, sending fans into hours-long online queues, charging prices that customers said were too high and drawing charges of poor service.
The debacle prompted congressional hearings and bills in state legislatures aimed at better protecting consumers.
Thursday’s legal action underscores the aggressive approach U.S. President Joe Biden’s antitrust enforcers have adopted as they seek to create more competition in a wide range of industries, from Big Tech to health care to groceries.
“Live Nation relies on unlawful, anti-competitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters and venue operators,” Garland said. He went on to say that as a result fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to perform and smaller promoters get squeezed out.
Shares of Live Nation were down 7.8 per cent at close Thursday.
‘Vast scope’ of influence and control
The suit says Live Nation directly manages more than 400 musical artists and controls around 60 per cent of concert promotions at major venues. It owns or controls more than 265 concert venues in North America, and through Ticketmaster controls roughly 80 per cent or more of big venues’ primary ticketing for concerts.
In the lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, the DOJ argued the “vast scope” of Live Nation and Ticketmaster allowed them to “insert themselves at the centre and the edges of virtually every aspect of the live music ecosystem.”
The Justice Department accuses Live Nation of a slew of practices that allow it to maintain a stronghold over the live music scene, including using long-term contracts to keep venues from choosing rival ticketers, blocking venues from using multiple ticket sellers and threatening venues that they could lose money and fans if they don’t choose Ticketmaster.
The Justice Department says Live Nation also threatened to retaliate against one firm if it didn’t stop a subsidiary from competing for artist promotion contracts.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, speaking after the Department of Justice launched a lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, is alleging Live Nation has ‘illegally monopolized markets across the live concert industry in the United States for far too long.’
Live Nation called the suit a possible “PR win for the DOJ in the short term,” but said the entertainment company would prevail in court. The lawsuit “won’t solve the issues fans care about relating to ticket prices, service fees and access to in-demand shows.”
“There is more competition than ever in the live events market,” it added.
Andrew Cash, president and CEO of the Canadian independent music association, says it’s about time governments confront this issue.
He told CBC that small and mid-size venues are being squeezed out by Live Nation in Canada, which hurts the artists that rely on those venues.
“It would be a much more healthy and competitive atmosphere in the music ecosystem if there were more players, if there were more promoters, if there were more small and medium-sized promoters out there,” Cash said.
Canada also approved 2010 merger
In 2010, the U.S. Justice Department approved Ticketmaster’s controversial merger with Live Nation, with conditions intended to stop the combined company from harming competition, including that Live Nation agree not to retaliate against concert venues for using other ticket companies for 10 years. Canada’s Competition Bureau also approved the merger.
In 2019, the DOJ investigated and found that Live Nation had “repeatedly” violated that agreement and extended the prohibition on retaliating against concert venues to 2025. That same year, Canada’s Competition Bureau ordered Ticketmaster to pay a penalty of $4.5 million Cdn for misleading customers on online ticket sales, but also ruled the company’s practice of recruiting scalpers to secretly purchase and resell Ticketmaster tickets for inflated costs was legal.
In 2020, a court extended most of the DOJ’s oversight of the merger to 2025 because, the department said, Ticketmaster retaliated against stadiums and arenas that opted to use other ticketing companies.
Live Nation has said in the past that it was confident its business practices were legal, and that the probe had been prompted by complaints from rivals, including resellers.
When it was reported that the company was under federal investigation in 2022, the concert promoter said in a statement that Ticketmaster enjoys such a large share of the market because of “the large gap that exists between the quality of the Ticketmaster system and the next best primary ticketing system.”
But competitor ticket sellers have long complained that Live Nation makes it difficult for them to disrupt the market with practices such as withholding acts if those venues don’t agree to use Ticketmaster’s service.
University of Victoria economics professor Pascal Courty says breaking up the companies would give artists more options, and could lead to some innovation and a small decrease in ticket prices.
“Now that we have an investigation, we’re going to find out a lot. And that’s going to allow us to understand the depth of the problem,” Courty told CBC.
“I think we need to break up the stronghold between venue promotion and ticketing. Then we might want to also break up ticketing by region, or so that we encourage competition.”
He says Live Nation could still try to maintain a monopoly in Canada even if it is forced to break up in the U.S., at which point the Competition Bureau would have to decide how to proceed.
Canada’s recent federal budget document mentions high ticket prices at concerts and sporting events, and says the federal government will work with provinces and territories to adopt best practices that reduce unexpected charges and crack down on fraudulent sellers, but does not offer any plan to introduce enforceable measures.
Published at Thu, 23 May 2024 15:20:16 +0000
