In Brief: Nation & World: 12-27-16

Colombia probe finds human error, lack of fuel in air crash

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — A series of human errors caused an airliner to run out of fuel and crash in Colombia last month, killing 71 people including most of a Brazilian soccer team, aviation authorities said on Monday.

Colombia’s Civil Aeronautics agency concluded in its investigation that the plan for the flight operated by Bolivia-based charter company LaMia did not meet international standards. Among the errors made were the decisions to let the plane take off without enough fuel to make the flight safely and then to not stop midway to refuel. The pilot also did not report the plane’s emergency until it was too late, it said.

Neither the company nor Bolivian authorities should have allowed the plane to take off with the flight plan submitted, said Freddy Bonilla, air safety secretary for Colombia’s aviation authority. He said the agency’s preliminary conclusions were based on the plane’s black boxes and other evidence.

Experts had earlier suggested that fuel exhaustion was a likely cause of the Nov. 28 crash that wiped out all but a few members of the Chapocoense soccer team, as well as team officials and journalists accompanying them to a championship playoff match in Medellin, Colombia.

The BAE 146 Avro RJ85 has a maximum range was 2,965 kilometers (1,600 nautical miles) — just under the distance between Medellin and Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where the plane had taken off at almost full capacity.

The plane was in the air for about 4 hours and 20 minutes when air traffic controllers in Medellin put it into a holding pattern because another flight had reported a suspected fuel leak and was given priority.

Investigators found that crew members of the LaMia flight were aware of the lack of fuel but waited too long to report the emergency.

Bonilla said that during the flight the pilot and co-pilot are heard on “various occasions” talking about stopping in Leticia — a city near the borders separating Brazil, Peru and Colombia — to refuel but decided not to do so. When the plane entered Colombian airspace it was flying into a wind, which caused more fuel to be consumed.

And when the pilot asked for priority to land in Medellin, six minutes before crashing, the plane had already spent two minutes with a motor shut off, the investigation concluded. All the motors shut down minutes later.

In a recording of a radio message from the pilot, he can be heard repeatedly requesting permission to land due to a lack of fuel and a “total electric failure.” A surviving flight attendant and a pilot flying nearby also overheard the frantic pleas from the doomed airliner.

In addition, there was no explosion upon impact, pointing to a scarcity of fuel.

Publicist: British singer George Michael dead at age 53

LONDON (AP) — George Michael, the British pop superstar who reached early fame with WHAM! and went on to a solo career lined with controversies and chart-topping hits that blended soul and dance music with daring social and personal commentary, has died, his publicist said Sunday. He was 53.

Michael died at his home in Goring, England. His publicist, Cindi Berger, said he had not been ill. Michael’s manager, Michael Lippman, says the cause of death was heart failure. His family issued a statement through Thames Valley Police saying that he “passed away peacefully at home over the Christmas period.

“The family would ask that their privacy be respected at this difficult and emotional time. There will be no further comment at this stage.”

Before Lippmann’s announcement, police issued a statement calling the death “unexplained but not suspicious” and that “a post mortem will be undertaken in due course.”

The loss of Michael continues a year of grief in the music industry, with David Bowie, Prince and Glenn Frey among those dying before age 70.

Kremlin plays down terror attack possibility in jet crash

SOCHI, Russia — The Kremlin on Monday played down the possibility that a terror attack might have downed a Syria-bound Russian plane, killing all 92 people on board, as the nation observed a day of mourning for the victims, including most members of a world famous military choir.

The Tu-154 owned by the Russian Defense Ministry crashed into the Black Sea early Sunday two minutes after taking off in good weather from the city of Sochi. The plane was carrying members of the Alexandrov Ensemble, often referred to as the Red Army Choir, to a New Year’s concert at a Russian military base in Syria.

About 3,500 people, 43 ships and 182 divers have been sweeping a vast crash site for bodies of the victims and debris, and dozens of drones and several submersibles also have been involved in the search. Rescue teams so far have recovered 11 bodies and numerous body fragments, which have been flown to Moscow for identification.

Divers have located parts of the plane’s fuselage and other fragments, but the search for the jet’s flight recorders will likely prove challenging as they lack underwater locator beacons for easy spotting common in more modern planes.

Officials sought to squelch speculation that the crash might have been caused by a bomb planted on board or a portable air defense missile.

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Japanese prime minister arrives in Hawaii for memorial visit

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrived in Hawaii on Monday to recognize the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Abe landed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam for the historic visit. He will be the first Japanese prime minister to visit the memorial that honors sailors and Marines killed in the attack that spurred America to enter World War II.

Japan’s former leader Shigeru Yoshida went to Pearl Harbor six years after the country’s World War II surrender, but that was before the USS Arizona Memorial was built. Yoshida arrived at Pearl Harbor in 1951, shortly after requesting a courtesy visit to the office of Adm. Arthur W.R. Radford, commander of the U.S. Pacific fleet. The office overlooked Pearl Harbor, offering a direct view of the attack site.

The memorial will be closed to the public Tuesday when Abe visits the historic site, joined by U.S. President Barack Obama, who is vacationing in Hawaii with his family.

The importance of the visit may be mostly symbolic for two countries that, in a remarkable transformation, have grown into close allies in the decades since they faced off in brutal conflict. At the same time, it’s significant that it took more than 70 years for U.S.-Japanese relations to get to this point.

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Assad gains Aleppo, but others likely to shape Syria’s fate

BEIRUT — Under different circumstances, Syrian President Bashar Assad’s capture of Aleppo would project an aura of invincibility. He has survived nearly six years of revolt.

Instead, it has underscored his dependence on outside powers.

Turkey, Iran, and Russia have tilted recent events in his favor, and it is those three players — and perhaps the incoming Trump administration — that are now best placed to determine Syria’s endgame.

The three nations met in Moscow last week for talks on Syria that pointedly included no Syrians, indicating they prefer to pursue a grand bargain among great powers rather than a domestic settlement between the government and the opposition.

The warming of ties between Russia and Turkey, who back opposing sides of the civil war, may prove to be a game changer, potentially helping to end a conflict that has confounded the world’s top diplomats for more than five years.

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Election system susceptible to rigging despite red flags

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Jill Stein’s bid to recount votes in Pennsylvania was in trouble even before a federal judge shot it down Dec. 12. That’s because the Green Party candidate’s effort stood almost no chance of detecting potential fraud or error in the vote — there was basically nothing to recount.

Pennsylvania is one of 11 states where the majority of voters use antiquated machines that store votes electronically, without printed ballots or other paper-based backups that could be used to double-check the balloting. There’s almost no way to know if they’ve accurately recorded individual votes — or if anyone tampered with the count.

More than 80 percent of Pennsylvanians who voted Nov. 8 cast their ballots on such machines, according to VotePA, a nonprofit seeking their replacement. A recount would, in the words of VotePA’s Marybeth Kuznik, a veteran election judge, essentially amount to this: “You go to the computer and you say, ‘OK, computer, you counted this a week-and-a-half ago. Were you right the first time?’”

These paperless digital voting machines, used by roughly 1 in 5 U.S. voters last month, present one of the most glaring dangers to the security of the rickety, underfunded U.S. election system. Like many electronic voting machines, they are vulnerable to hacking. But other machines typically leave a paper trail that could be manually checked. The paperless digital machines open the door to potential election rigging that might not ever be detected.

What’s more, their prevalence magnifies other risks in the election system, such as the possibility that hackers might compromise the computers that tally votes, by making failures or attacks harder to catch. And like other voting machines adopted since the 2000 election, the paperless systems are nearing the end of their useful life — yet there is no comprehensive plan to replace them.

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Obama vs Trump: Dispute erupts over who would have won

HONOLULU (AP) — In an alternate universe in which President Barack Obama ran for a third term against Donald Trump, who would have won?

No surprise: The president and the president-elect disagree.

A fresh dispute erupted Monday between Obama and his successor, spurred by Obama’s hypothetical musings that had he run again, he would have been victorious. Interviewed for a podcast, Obama suggested he still holds enough sway over the coalition of voters that elected him twice to get them to vote for him once again.

“I am confident in this vision because I’m confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” Obama told his former White House adviser, David Axelrod, in a podcast released Monday.

Trump, naturally, disagreed. He took to his preferred medium — Twitter — to offer his reaction.

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Blizzards, ice storms wreak havoc across northern Plains

CHICAGO (AP) — Travel conditions remained hazardous as a winter storm swept across much of the northern Plains on Monday, with blowing and drifting snow forcing the closure of an airport and creating near-zero visibility on some roads.

The combination of freezing rain, snow and high winds that forced vast stretches of highways in the Dakotas to be shut down Sunday continued into Monday, and authorities issued no-travel warnings for much of North Dakota.

Meanwhile, in parts of the South, unseasonably warm temperatures was raising the risk of tornadoes and damaging thunderstorms. About 3 million people in parts of Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee could see damaging wind gusts and isolated tornadoes Monday, the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, said, but no major outbreak is expected.

Most of North Dakota was to remain under a blizzard warning through Monday afternoon or early evening, according to the National Weather Service in Bismarck. Severe whiteout conditions led to the closure of Minot International Airport, and the facility wasn’t expected to reopen until 3 a.m. Tuesday. The airports serving Fargo and Bismarck also list flight cancellations on their websites.

Winds gusting 40 mph to 50 mph associated also led to delays and cancellations at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The storm also has caused power outages in the Dakotas and Nebraska.

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Trumps pick for ambassador to Israel sparks hot debate

NEW YORK (AP) — If President-elect Donald Trump wanted to show he planned to obliterate President Barack Obama’s approach to Israel, he might have found his man to deliver that message in David Friedman, his pick for U.S. ambassador.

The bankruptcy lawyer and son of an Orthodox rabbi is everything Obama is not: a fervent supporter of Israeli settlements, opponent of Palestinian statehood and unrelenting defender of Israel’s government. So far to the right is Friedman that many Israel supporters worry he could push Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be more extreme, scuttling prospects for peace with Palestinians in the process.

The heated debate over Friedman’s selection is playing out just as fresh tensions erupt between the U.S. and Israel.

In a stunning decision Friday, the Obama administration moved to allow the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution condemning Israeli settlements as illegal. The move to abstain, rather than veto, defied years of U.S. tradition of shielding Israel from such resolutions, and elicited condemnation from Israel, lawmakers of both parties, and especially Trump.

“Things will be different after Jan. 20th,” when he’s sworn in, Trump vowed Friday on Twitter. On Monday, he added: “The United Nations has such great potential but right now it is just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time. So sad!”