A female passenger was killed after a US flight made an emergency landing in Philadelphia city due to engine failure, authorities said.

The Boeing 737-700, operated by Southwest Airlines, was flying from New York City to Dallas on Tuesday when one of its engines failed, reports Xinhua news agency.

Passengers said the plane was able to land “safely”, and initial reports said one person, who was hurt by crashed window, was taken to hospital.

US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chairman Robert Sumwalt later confirmed one passenger had died from the accident.

Southwest Airlines said in a statement that 143 travellers and five crew members were on the flight.

Photos shared on social media by passengers showed the engine was badly damaged. Local news reports said the damage was caused by an explosion.

According to multiple accounts, passengers on board the plane went through terrifying moments as the plane dived, and some were said to be crying or vomiting.

The Philadelphia fire department said at a press conference the plane came down “in a fairly rapid manner”, and preliminary examination of the flight record showed the aircraft dropped 5.2 km in five minutes.

A passenger made a brief Facebook live on his account at the final moments of the flight, saying “Engine exploded in the air and blew open window three seats away” from him.

The NTSB has announced an investigation into the incident.

All air traffic at Philadelphia was put on hold.

(IANS)

US President Donald Trump’s administration carried out a retaliatory strike on Syria last week even though intelligence agencies did not have absolute certainty that the Assad regime had used the nerve agent sarin against civilians, a media report said.

The decision to proceed with the strikes on the night of April 13 met a standard of evidence needed that officials felt they could accept, intelligence and defence sources told CNN on Tuesday.

Administration officials were adamant that whatever was used by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces to attack civilians in Douma on April 7 was a chemical agent and that alone justified taking action.

The lack of complete information played a role in deciding not to strike a larger set of targets including airfields, aircraft and helicopters, a defence official told CNN.

Other factors, like Russian positioning, also played a role in the decisions.

On Tuesday afternoon, Secretary of Defence James Mattis and Joint Chiefs Chair Joseph Dunford held a classified briefing for senators on the Syria strike that was launched in coordination with France and the UK.

Before the briefing, officials would not comment on whether the intelligence had become more certain post-strike.

Witnesses reported seeing at least one helicopter overhead at the time of the Syrian attack that had taken off from an airfield.

But at the time, intelligence officials did not have a full picture of the event, which would have included intercepts of conversations and verified paths that helicopters flew, the sources told CNN.

Prior to the US strike, full confirmation could not be made of whether Syria had used sarin in its attack.

“It’s a hard, long process, especially in an attack like this without physical access to victims, site. Therefore we had to work with closest allies quickly to ensure we had confidence in the intelligence picture, enabling policymakers to choose best course of action,” an intelligence official told CNN.

The Trump administration determined a “standard of evidence had been met”, the official added.

(IANS)

China on Tuesday said accusations by American President Donald Trump that Beijing allegedly devalued its currency contradicts a semi-annual report by the US Treasury Department.

“We have seen these reports and we have also noted the twice yearly report by the Treasury Department of the US and it seems that the US is sending out confusing signals,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said during a press conference here.

Hua added that China will continue with its reforms to come up with mechanisms to counter the flip-flops in foreign currency exchange rates.

A US Treasury Department report from last week had said that China did not manipulate its currency in the second half of 2016.

“Russia and China are playing the Currency Devaluation game as the US keeps raising interest rates. Not acceptable!” Trump had tweeted on Monday.

Army says it is preparing for more offensives to clear remaining territories outside government control near the capital Damascus.

Days after the suspected chemical attack which killed more than 40 people in Douma, Syrian government forces say they have now retaken the rebel pocket in Eastern Ghouta.

Now the Syrian government appears to be turning its attention to Homs, another strategic region in Syria.

Much of the central province has been recaptured in recent years but the opposition has long held an enclave in the northern countryside.

That area is strategic for Damascus if it wants to secure the roads linking government controlled cities in the west of the country.

Cyber security representatives from the US and Britain have warned of Russian state-sponsored cyber-attacks that are targeting network infrastructure devices such as routers and firewalls, to compromise government and private sectors globally.

According to a US Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT), the Technical Alert (TA) provided information on the worldwide cyber exploitation of network infrastructure devices (routers, switches, firewalls, Network-based Intrusion Detection Systems) by Russian state-sponsored cyber actors.

The joint TA is the result of analytic efforts between the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, according to information on the official website of the DHS.

“Victims were identified through a coordinated series of actions between US and international partners. The report builds on previous DHS reporting and advisories from the UK, Australia and the European Union,” the website said.

“The FBI has high confidence that Russian state-sponsored cyber actors are using compromised routers to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks to support espionage, extract intellectual property, maintain persistent access to victim networks, and potentially lay a foundation for future offensive operations,” the website added.

Since 2015, the US government has been receiving information from multiple sources — including private and public sector cyber security research organisations and allies — that cyber actors were exploiting large numbers of enterprise-class and residential routers and switches worldwide.

The US government assessed that cyber actors supported by the Russian government carried out this worldwide campaign.

These operations enable espionage and intellectual property that supports the Russian Federation’s national security and economic goals, the website said.

Russian cyber actors leverage a number of legacy or weak protocols and service ports associated with network administration activities.

Cyber actors use these weaknesses to identify vulnerable devices, extract device configurations, harvest login credentials, modify device firmware, and copy or redirect victim traffic through Russian cyber-actor-controlled infrastructure.

Organisations can use publicly available cyber security guidance and best practices from DHS, allied governments, vendors and the private-sector cyber security community on mitigation strategies for the exploitation vectors to safeguard their networks.

India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will hold bilateral talks with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi during her two-day China visit beginning on Saturday.
Sushma Swaraj will meet Wang on the sidelines of the foreign ministers’ meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Summit (SCO).

She will meet a more powerful Wang, who in March was elevated to China’s top diplomatic post of State Councillor. They are likely to discuss a host of thorny issues.

India-China ties were severely hit by the 73-day military stand-off in Doklam last year. Both sides are now trying to restore normalcy to their ties by stepping up bilateral exchanges.

China’s opposition to India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and its move to block bids at the UN to list Masood Azhar, chief of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed militant group, as a global terrorist, has irked New Delhi.

In addition, New Delhi has reservations about the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which cuts through Pakistan-held Kashmir that is claimed by India.

Sushma Swaraj, whose last visit to China was in 2015, is also likely to meet other top Chinese leaders.

India’s Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will also visit China next week and hold a dialogue with her counterpart.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in June on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Summit.

India and Pakistan were admitted to the China-led block in 2017.

British delegation calls on Russia and Syria to allow access as Russian deputy FM says delay is due to US-led strikes
Chemical weapons inspectors have not yet been allowed access to Syria’s Douma, UK officials said as the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) met to discuss the “alleged use of chemical weapons” in Syria.
“Russia and Syria have not yet allowed access to Douma,” the British delegation tweeted on Sunday, adding that “unfettered access [is] essential” and “Russia and Syria must cooperate”.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov immediately denied the allegations that inspectors were not being allowed access, according to Russian news agency RIA.

He said the arrival of the inspectors were delayed as a result of the US-led air strikes on Saturday.

The OPCW, an intergovenmental organisation that oversees the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, met with delegates in The Hague on Monday to discuss events surrounding the April 7 attack in Douma.

Syrian government forces retook Douma last week, gaining full control over the former rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta, Russian military officials announced at the time.

The announcement came just days after dozens people were killed by alleged chemical weapons attack in the town, sparking international outcry and prompting the US, UK and France to launch missile strikes on facilities believed to be used to research, develop and store chemical weapons inside Syria.

The Chemical Weapons Convention outlaws the production or stockpiling of chemical weapons.

Syria is a signatory of the treaty. Egypt, Israel, North Korea and South Sudan are the only nonsignatory nations.

‘Barbaric use of chemical weapons’
Peter Wilson, the UK’s OPCW envoy, told the watchdog body that failure to act in Syria will cause “further barbaric use of chemical weapons.

Syria has lived through a seven-year civil war that has killed at least half a million people and created an international refugee crisis.

“The Syrian Regime has an abhorrent record of using chemical weapons against its own people. Chemical weapons use has become an all too regular weapon of war in the Syrian conflict,” Wilson said, going on to cite 390 allegations of chemical weapons attacks since 2014.

Russia has impeded international bodies from investigating these attacks, Wilson added.

Russia told the UN last Friday that its experts found no trace of “toxic substance use” during their investigation in Douma.

Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s UN ambassador, said Russia has “clear evidence” that the chemical attack was staged.

For its part, France has said it has evidence Russia was responsible.

US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has said her country will announce new sanctions on the Russian government in response to its support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

Aljazeera

Morocco has deplored the deterioration of the situation in the Middle East, including last week’s military escalation in Syria, and has said that “military options” will not only make quest for political solutions difficult but will deepen civilian suffering and “heighten anti-West sentiment”.

Morocco, which has always respected international law, can only condemn the use of chemical weapons, particularly against innocent civilian populations, an official source told the official MAP news agency, adding that “past experiences have taught us that military options, including air strikes — no matter how justified or proportionate they can be — only make it more difficult to find a political solution, deepen the suffering of civilian victims and heighten their anti-West sentiment”.

The timing chosen for this escalation, on the eve of important Arab events, and the absence of the usual appropriate consultations, may raise questions, misunderstanding and indignation, the source said.

Similarly, the different standards adopted in the management of international conflicts, in some cases resorting quickly to military options and, in other cases, imposing international legality, would only fuel international tensions.

The Kingdom of Morocco considers that the solution to the Syrian crisis can only be political and hopes that reason will prevail with a view to finding a solution to the crisis that preserves the national unity of this country and the dignity of these populations and secures an effective fight against intolerance, extremism and terrorism, the source, familiar with the thinking of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said.

French President Emmanuel Macron said that he “convinced” his American counterpart Donald Trump to remain in Syria before the coordinated strikes launched against targeted Syrian government sites in response to an alleged chemical attack, the media reported.

“Ten days ago, President Trump said the US’s will is to disengage from Syria. We convinced him that it was necessary to stay,” CNN quoted Macron as saying on Sunday during a two-hour televised interview with several French media outlets.

On Friday night, the US, France and the UK launched a series of strikes on a research laboratory and two storage facilities associated with Syria’s chemical weapons programme.

Satellite images of the facilities, located west of Homs and near the capital Damascus, before and after the strikes appear to show they suffered extensive damage.

France also convinced Trump that the strikes had to be limited to suspected chemical weapons sites, Macron added.

Prior to the strikes, there had been reports that Trump wanted to see tougher, more extended action in Syria but was talked down by his national security team.

The strike was fiercely condemned by Syria’s main ally Russia, who attempted to bring a motion in the UN Security Council on Saturday to denounce the “aggression against the Syrian Arab Republic by the US and its allies”.

During Sunday’s interview, Macron said Russian President Vladimir Putin was an “accomplice” to Syria’s alleged use of chemicals weapons.

“They have not used chlorine themselves, but they have methodically contributed to the international community’s powerlessness to prevent the use of chemical weapons by diplomatic means,” CNN quoted the French leader as saying.

The French President said his country had not declared war on Syria, calling the strikes a “reprisal” for violations of the treaty banning the use of chemical weapons.

“There has been repeated and proven violations of the treaty,” he said.

Friday night’s strikes were a response to the suspected chemical weapons attack on civilians in Douma, outside Damascus, on April 7 where over 70 people including children were killed.

Inspectors for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) were due to go to Douma on Sunday after arriving in Syria shortly after Saturday’s strikes, and are yet to report on any findings.

The US and its allies have been criticized for acting before inspectors had a chance to examine the site.

Politicians in France and the UK on Monday will seek answers from the countries’ leaders about their decision to launch strikes without formal approval.

Protests against the strikes were held around the world Saturday, including in major cities in the UK, Mexico, Greece and the US.

(IANS)

Air strikes by Britain, France and the United States in Syria sent a “clear message” against the use of chemical weapons, British Prime Minister Theresa May said today and declared the action as successful.

The British Prime Minister told reporters at a Downing Street press conference on Saturday that the coordinated strikes to degrade the Bashar al-Assad led Syrian regime’s chemical weapons capability involved four Royal Air Force (RAF) Tornado GR 4s.

“This collective action sends a clear message that the international community will not stand by and tolerate the use of chemical weapons,” she said.

The tornadoes launched storm shadow missiles at a military facility some 15 miles west of Homs, where the Assad regime was assessed to have kept chemical weapons in breach of Syria’s obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention.

“While the full assessment of the strike is ongoing, we are confident of its success it was a limited, targeted and effective strike with clear boundaries that expressly sought to avoid escalation and did everything possible to prevent civilian casualties,” May said.

Acknowledging that there no “graver decision” for a prime minister than to commit the country’s forces to combat, Theresa May said that following discussions with US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron the trio had agreed to hit a specific and limited set of targets.

These included a chemical weapons storage and production facility, a key chemical weapons research centre and a military bunker involved in chemical weapons attacks.

“Hitting these targets with the force that we have deployed will significantly degrade the Syrian Regime’s ability to research, develop and deploy chemical weapons,” she said.

Making a reference to Russia, which has been supporting the Syrian regime, Theresa May indicated that the strikes were also intended as a message to Moscow over its own use of a deadly nerve agent against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury last month.

“We cannot allow the use of chemical weapons to become normalised either within Syria, on the streets of the UK or elsewhere. We must reinstate the global consensus that chemical weapons cannot be used,” she said.

In a statement, Russian President Vladimir Putin described the air strikes as an “act of aggression” by the three western allies, which would worsen the humanitarian crisis in Syria.

The UK’s Opposition Labour party branded the strikes as “legally questionable”, conducted without the backing or vote in the UK Parliament. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn condemned the government’s involvement in the US-led strikes, saying it “makes real accountability for war crimes and use of chemical weapons less, not more likely”.

May said that due to “operational security reasons” it had been “right and legal” to take the action in the way that the US, France and Britain had.

The strikes, which had been expected since Trump had tweeted a series of warnings to Syria over the past week, follows reports last Saturday of up to 75 people, including young children, being killed in the Syrian city of Douma.

Theresa May stressed that after assessments, alongside the US and France, all the indications were that it had been a chemical weapons attack which led to some harrowing images of men, women and children lying dead with foam in their mouths.

The British PM had received her Cabinet’s backing for military action during an emergency meeting on Thursday. The UK asserts that the action is not about interfering in a civil war or about regime change.

Earlier on Saturday, UK defence secretary Gavin Williamson also described the air strikes as a “highly successful mission”, adding that the UK, France and America had played an important role in “degrading the ability of the Syrian regime to use chemical weapons”.