MUAN, South Korea: South Korean authorities began releasing the bodies of plane crash victims to families Tuesday, as investigators raced to determine why the Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 crash landed and burst into flames.
US investigators, including from Boeing, arrived at the crash site in southwestern Muan, officials said, as South Korean authorities began assessing two black boxes retrieved from the burned-out wreckage of the aircraft.
The plane was carrying 181 people from Thailand to South Korea when it made a mayday call and belly-landed before crashing into a barrier and bursting into flames.
Everyone aboard Jeju Air Flight 2216 was killed, save two flight attendants pulled from the wreckage.
South Korea is observing seven days of mourning, with flags flying at half-mast.
Acting President Choi Sang-mok, who has only been in office since Friday, said the accident was a “turning point” for the country, calling for a full overhaul of air safety systems.
He urged officials to “thoroughly reexamine the overall aircraft operation system... and immediately address any necessary improvements.”
“Today marks the final day of 2024,” he said Tuesday, urging citizens to “reflect on the past year and prepare for the new one.”
“I am well aware that whenever challenges arose, both domestically and internationally, all citizens and public officials united with one heart and mind to overcome these crises.”
At Muan airport, investigators combed over the wrecked fuselage and soldiers picked carefully through the fields around the airport Tuesday, as people left ritual offerings for victims – including food and letters – near the airport’s perimeter.
“Captain, first officer, and crew members, thank you so much for doing your best to save the passengers. I pray for your eternal rest,” one letter left on the fence said.
Inside the airport, where victims’ relatives have been camped out since Sunday, waiting for information, anger was growing over delays in identifying passengers on the doomed plane.
But officials said they had begun releasing the first bodies to relatives, even as work to identify all victims continued.
“Of the 179 victims, the bodies of four have completed the handover procedures to their bereaved families for funerals,” transport minister Park Sang-woo said at Muan airport Tuesday.
“For 28 victims, whose identities have been confirmed and autopsies completed, we will allow funeral procedures to begin from 2 p.m. (0500 GMT) today with the consent of their families,” he added.
One family lost nine members – including the oldest passenger on the plane, who was taking his first-ever overseas trip to celebrate his birthday, local broadcaster KBC reported.
The passenger, surnamed Bae, was traveling with his wife, his two daughters, one son in law, and four grandchildren, including a five-year-old.
The entire family was killed, with only one of the daughter’s husbands – who was not able to join the trip – left behind to face the loss of his wife and three children.
“Yesterday, the village chief went to Muan Airport and said the son-in-law was in utter despair, saying, ‘I should have gone with them and died with them,’” KBC said.
Memorial altars for the victims have been set up nationwide, including in Seoul.
At Muan airport, families were overseeing the set-up of a new altar Tuesday, with black-and-white funeral flowers filling the area.
A fuller account of what went wrong in the flight’s final moments is expected once authorities have analyzed the black boxes.
“Regarding the black box, surface contamination cleaning has been completed at the testing and analysis center, and its condition is currently being assessed,” deputy civil aviation minister Joo Jong-wan said.
“However, the flight data recorder’s data storage unit is still under evaluation,” he said, as it was found with a missing connector.
Technical reviews are underway to determine how to extract the data.
South Korea starts releasing Jeju Air crash victims to families
https://arab.news/23qya
South Korea starts releasing Jeju Air crash victims to families
- Investigators race to determine why the Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 crash landed and burst into flames
- Everyone aboard Jeju Air Flight 2216 was killed, save two flight attendants pulled from the wreckage
US ends separate Palestinian affairs office in Jerusalem
- The closing of the separate office comes as Israel resumed a military offensive in the Gaza Strip
- Trump in his first term moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump’s administration said Tuesday that the United States would end a separate office for Palestinian affairs in Jerusalem, a largely symbolic step that supports the Israeli position.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio “has decided to merge the responsibilities of the Office of the Palestinian Affairs office fully into other sections of the United States embassy,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters.
Trump in his first term moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a major win for Israel which considers the contested holy city its eternal capital.
In doing so, Trump closed a historic consulate in Jerusalem that had served US diplomatic outreach to the Palestinians.
Rubio’s predecessor Antony Blinken sought to reopen the consulate, while maintaining the embassy in Jerusalem, but Israel resisted the move.
The United States instead set up the separate Office for Palestinian Affairs which was still inside the embassy but reported separately to Washington.
The closing of the separate office comes as Israel wages an offensive in Gaza in response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government fiercely opposing moves toward a Palestinian state.
Bruce played down a wider significance to Tuesday’s announcement on the Palestinian office, saying it reverted to policy under Trump’s first term.
The decision is “not a reflection on any outreach, or commitment to outreach, to the people of the West Bank or to Gaza,” Bruce said.
She said it was part of a streamlining of the State Department in Washington, ensuring that offices on “the issues that are important are all working together.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters arrested after occupying University of Washington building
- Students demanded that the university sever all ties with Boeing, including returning any Boeing donations and barring the company’s employees from teaching
- The arrests come amid a Trump administration crackdown on international students who took part in pro-Palestinian protests at US colleges and universities
SEATTLE: Police arrested about 30 pro-Palestinian protesters who occupied a University of Washington engineering building and demanded the school break ties with Boeing.
Students from the group Super UW moved into the Interdisciplinary Engineering Building in Seattle on Monday evening and unofficially renamed it after Shaban Al-Dalou, a teenage engineering student who was killed along with his mother after an Israeli airstrike caused an inferno outside of a Gaza hospital.
The students demanded that the university sever all ties with Boeing, including returning any Boeing donations and barring the company’s employees from teaching at or otherwise influencing the school. Boeing has a factory in nearby Renton that makes commercial and military aircraft, according to its website.
“We’re hoping to remove the influence of Boeing and other manufacturing companies from our educational space, period, and we’re hoping to expose the repressive tactics of the university,” Super UW spokesperson Eric Horford told KOMO News.
Another group dressed in black blocked the front of the building with furniture and used dumpsters to block nearby Jefferson Road.
UW police worked with Seattle police to clear the building at around 10:30 p.m., UW spokesperson Victor Balta said in a statement. About 30 people were taken into custody and charged with trespassing, property destruction and disorderly conduct, he said. Their cases will be referred to the King County prosecutors.
Any students identified will be referred to the Student Conduct Office, Balta said.
The arrests come amid a Trump administration crackdown on international students who took part in pro-Palestinian protests at US colleges and universities.
More than 1,000 students at 160 colleges, universities and university systems have had their visas revoked or their legal status terminated since late March, according to an Associated Press review of university statements, correspondence with school officials and court records.
Appeals court to hear cases of 2 university students, one detained, the other recently released
- Immigration court proceedings for Ozturk and Mahdawi are being conducted separately
- The appeals court paused that order last week in order to consider the government’s motion
NEW YORK: A federal appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments Tuesday in the cases of a Turkish Tufts University student who has been detained by immigration authorities for six weeks and a Palestinian student at Columbia University who was recently released from detention.
A three-judge panel of the US 2nd Circurt Court of Appeals, based in New York, is expected to hear motions filed by the US Justice Department regarding Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi. The department is appealing decisions made by two federal judges in Vermont. It also wants to consolidate the students’ cases, saying they present similar legal questions.
Immigration court proceedings for Ozturk and Mahdawi are being conducted separately.
A district court judge in Vermont had ordered that Ozturk, a 30-year-old doctoral student, be brought to the state from a Louisiana immigration detention center by May 1 for hearings to determine whether she was illegally detained. Ozturk’s lawyers say her detention violates her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process.
The appeals court paused that order last week in order to consider the government’s motion.
Congress limited federal-court jurisdiction over immigration matters, the Justice Department said. It said an immigration court in Louisiana has jurisdiction over Ozturk’s case.
Immigration officials surrounded Ozturk as she walked along a street in a Boston suburb March 25 and drove her to New Hampshire and Vermont before putting her on a plane to the detention center in Basile, Louisiana.
Ozturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in March, without providing evidence, that investigations found that Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group.
The government is also challenging another judge’s decision to release Mahdawi from detention in Vermont on April 30. Mahdawi led protests at Columbia University against Israel’s war in Gaza. He was arrested by immigration officials during an interview about finalizing his US citizenship.
Mahdawi, 34, has been a legal permanent resident for 10 years. He was in a Vermont state prison since April 14. In his release order, US District Judge Geoffrey Crawford said Mahdawi has raised a “substantial claim that the government arrested him to stifle speech with which it disagrees.”
Mahdawi’s release allows him to travel outside his home state of Vermont and attend graduation next month in New York. He recently completed coursework at Columbia and planned to begin a master’s degree program there in the fall.
Canada ‘never for sale’, Carney tells Trump
- Mark Carney, speaking in front of reporters alongside Trump at the White House, said Canada was ‘not for sale, won’t be ever’
- Trump: ‘We had another little blow-up with somebody else, that was much different — this is a very friendly conversation’
WASHINGTON: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told US President Donald Trump that his country was “never for sale” Tuesday as they met at the White House amid tensions on tariffs and sovereignty.
In their first Oval Office meeting, Trump insisted to the recently elected Carney that it would be a “wonderful marriage” if Canada agreed to his repeated calls to become the 51st US state.
But despite Trump’s claims of friendly relations, the body language became increasingly tense between the 78-year-old Republican and the 60-year-old Canadian leader.
“As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale,” Carney told property tycoon Trump, comparing Canada to the Oval Office itself and to Britain’s Buckingham Palace.
“Having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign in the last several months, it’s not for sale. It won’t be for sale, ever.”
Trump then replied: “Never say never.”
Carney won the Canadian election of April 28 on a pledge to stand up to Trump, warning that ties between the North American neighbors could never be the same.
Trump has sparked a major trade war with Canada with his tariffs while repeatedly making extraordinary calls for the key NATO ally and major trading partner to become part of the United States.
Despite that, the two leaders began their meeting with warm words toward each other.
Twice-elected Trump hailed Carney, whose Liberal Party surged from behind to win the election, for “one of the greatest comebacks in the history of politics, maybe even greater than mine.”
But while they expressed a willingness to work toward a trade deal to end the tariffs, it became clear that common ground would be hard to find.
Carney at points gripped his hands tightly together and his knee jiggled up and down while Trump spoke.
“No. It’s just the way it is,” Trump said when asked if there was anything Carney could say in the meeting that would persuade him to drop car tariffs in particular.
And when the US president pressed his claim that Canadians might one day want to join the United States, Carney raised his hand and pushed back.
“Respectfully, Canadians’ view on this is not going to change on the 51st state,” said Carney.
A visibly tense Trump then referenced his blazing Oval Office row with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February — if only to insist that there would be no repeat.
“We had another little blow-up with somebody else, that was much different — this is a very friendly conversation,” Trump said.
Carney gave a thumbs up to reporters as he left the White House after just over two hours. He is due to give a press conference at 3pm (1900 GMT).
The meeting was highly anticipated after a Canadian election during which Carney vowed that the United States would never “own us.”
Carney has since vowed to remake NATO member Canada’s ties with the United States in perhaps its biggest political and economic shift since World War II.
Trump has slapped general tariffs of 25 percent on Canada and Mexico and sector-specific levies on autos, some of which have been suspended pending negotiations. He has imposed similar duties on steel and aluminum.
The US president inserted himself into Canada’s election early on by calling on Canada to avoid tariffs by becoming the “cherished 51st state.”
Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party had been on track to win the vote but Trump’s attacks, combined with the departure of unpopular premier Justin Trudeau, transformed the race.
Carney, who replaced Trudeau as prime minister in March, convinced voters that his experience managing economic crises made him the ideal candidate to defy Trump.
The political newcomer previously served as governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and in the latter post he played a key role reassuring markets after the 2016 Brexit vote.
Carney is known for weighing his words carefully but still faced a challenge dealing with the confrontational Trump on the US president’s home turf.
“This is a very important moment for him, since he insisted during the campaign that he could take on Mr.Trump,” Genevieve Tellier, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa, told AFP.
One point in Carney’s favor is that he is not Trudeau, the slick former prime minister whom Trump famously loathed and belittled as “governor” of Canada, she added.
Ukraine’s Zelensky says Russian artillery fire has not subsided
KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday that, according to his top commander, Russian artillery fire had not subsided despite the Kremlin’s proclamation of an Easter ceasefire.
“As of now, according to the Commander-in-Chief reports, Russian assault operations continue on several frontline sectors, and Russian artillery fire has not subsided,” Zelensky wrote on the social media platform X.
“Therefore, there is no trust in words coming from Moscow.”
He recalled that Russia had last month rejected a US-proposed full 30-day ceasefire and said that if Moscow agreed to “truly engage in a format of full and unconditional silence, Ukraine will act accordingly — mirroring Russia’s actions.”
“If a complete ceasefire truly takes hold, Ukraine proposes extending it beyond the Easter day of April 20,” Zelensky wrote.
