NEPAL
Plane crash leaves 18 dead
A passenger plane yesterday crashed on takeoff at about 11:15am in Kathmandu, with the pilot rescued from the flaming wreckage, but all 18 others aboard killed, police said. The Saurya Airlines flight was carrying two crew and 17 of the company’s staff members, police spokesman Dan Bahadur Karki said. “The pilot has been rescued and is being treated,” he said. “Eighteen bodies have been recovered, including one foreigner.” The flight was being conducted for either technical or maintenance purposes, Gyanendra Bhul of the Civil Aviation Authority said, without giving further details.
EUROPEAN UNION
Global heat record broken
Monday was the hottest day on record globally, inching past Sunday, which had just taken the title, preliminary data from a EU monitoring agency showed. The global average surface air temperature rose to 17.15°C — 0.06°C higher than Sunday’s marginal record according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which has been tracking such patterns since 1940. The record had last been set for four consecutive days in a row in early July last year.
UNITED STATES
Secret Service boss quits
The director of the Secret Service on Tuesday resigned in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump. “I take full responsibility for the security lapse,” Kimberly Cheatle, who had served as director since August 2022, said an e-mail to staff. Cheatle’s resignation came a day after she appeared before a congressional committee and was berated for hours by Democrats and Republicans for the security failures. She called the attempt on Trump’s life the Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades.
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant