Madrid Airport Plane Crash Kills 153
August 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
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MADRID, Spain - A jetliner heading to the popular Canary Islands vacation resort crashed during takeoff Wednesday, turning a wooded area off the end of a runway into a hellish scene of charred bodies and smoldering wreckage. Some 153 were believed dead — Spain’s worst air disaster in nearly 25 years.
Only 19 people survived the midafternoon crash of the Spanair MD-82 at Madrid’s Barajas International Airport, and some were in critical condition, said Development Minister Magdalena Alvarez, whose department oversees civil aviation in Spain.
The airline didn’t release a death toll, but said the plane carried 172 crew members and passengers, including two babies and 20 youngsters. There was no word on how many children died.
As smoke billowed from the wreckage, dozens of fire trucks and ambulances rushed to help, lining a nearby road and filling a field next to a swath of charred vegetation. Helicopters flew over dumping water on fires.
“The scene is devastating,” said Pablo Albella, an emergency rescue worker. “The fuselage is destroyed. The plane burned. I have seen a kilometer of charred land and few whole pieces of the fuselage. It is all destruction.”
Rescuers rushed the few survivors to hospitals, while emergency workers shrouded the dead in white sheets. One body lay on burned grass, an arm and a leg poking out.
Later, a long convoy of black hearses rolled onto the airport grounds to carry bodies to a makeshift morgue set up at Madrid’s main convention center — the facility used for relatives to identify bodies after the 2004 Islamic terror bombings that killed 191 people on Madrid commuter trains.
A stready stream of hearses arrived at the morgue under police escort Wednesday night. Mourners went to a special waiting area, avoiding photographers and reporters.
It was not immediately clear what went wrong. Alvarez said the jetliner had barely gotten airborne when it veered right, crashed and broke into pieces.
Spanair, a Spanish company wholly owned by Scandinavian Airlines, said it did not know what caused the accident. Alvarez said investigators ruled out foul play and considered the crash an accident. She said the plane’s flight data recorders had been recovered.
While preparing for a first takeoff attempt, the plane’s pilot reported a breakdown in a gauge that measures temperature outside the plane. The gauge was fixed, delaying the departure, said Spanair spokeswoman Susana Vergara.
It was on the second takeoff attempt that the plane crashed.
Spanair Flight JK5022 originated in Barcelona and was headed for the city of Las Palmas. It was a code-share with Flight LH255 of the German carrier Lufthansa.
In Germany, Lufthansa said it issued tickets to seven people who checked in for the flight and four of those were from Germany. It was unclear whether they were German citizens.
Sweden’s Foreign Ministry said two Swedes were on the plane. It said one was at a hospital but the other was unaccounted for.
The accident was Spain’s worst air disaster since 1983, when a Boeing 747 operated by the Colombian airline Avianca crashed near Madrid on landing approach, killing 181 people. In 1985, an Iberia Boeing 727 crashed near Bilbao in the Basque region, killing 148 people.
The deadliest disaster in aviation history occurred in Spain in 1977. Two fully loaded Boeing 747s collided on a runway in the Canary Islands and a total of 583 people died.
After being informed of Wednesday’s crash, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero broke off his vacation in southern Spain and rushed back to Madrid, heading straight for the airport. He expressed condolences to people who lost loved ones “in this tragedy that struck us today.” Later he went to the morgue to comfort mourners.
In an expression of mourning, a soccer match in Copenhagen between the national teams of Denmark and Spain started with a minute of silence and players on both teams wore black armbands.
Sergio Allard, a Spanair spokesman, said the crashed plane passed an inspection in January and no problems had been reported since then. The plane was 15 years old and has been owned by Spanair the past nine, he said.
The DC-9/MD-80 family of twin-engine, medium-range jets enjoyed wide popularity among the world’s airlines in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
But it has had a number of fatal accidents, the deadliest of which was a crash of Slovenia’s Adria Airways flight in Corsica in 1981, when all 180 people on board perished.
In Copenhagen, Mats Jansson, the chief executive of Spanair’s owner, Scandinavian Airlines, said he had no information about the accident itself.
Jansson and his deputy, John Dueholm, were on their way home from the Beijing Olympics when they learned about the accident and immediately decided to fly to Madrid with a team of crisis counselors.
“We want to be on location … there are many questions,” Jansson said before heading to Spain.
Spanair has a fleet of more than 60 aircraft and runs around 600 flights daily.
Crashes during takeoff or landing are some of the most common aviation accidents.
In July 2007, 199 people were killed in Brazil’s worst air disaster when an Airbus A320 belonging to TAM airlines skidded off the runway at Sao Paolo’s Congonhas airport and smashed across a road into a gas station and an air cargo building.
Five people died and 65 were injured May 30 when an A320 belonging to Grupo Taca skidded off the end of the runway at Toncontin International Airport near the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.
Baby came back to life minutes before burial - dies in mother’s arms
August 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Doctors pronounced the death of a baby girl on Tuesday morning who survived six hours in a hospital morgue refrigerator after being declared stillborn on Monday.
Early Monday morning, a 26-year-old woman in her 23rd week of pregnancy arrived at the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya suffering from severe pains and hemorrhage.
A preliminary examination found that the fetus had no pulse, and the woman was rushed to the operating room to have the fetus removed. At the end of the procedure, a baby girl weighing 610 grams was retrieved.
Showing no signs of life, she was pronounced dead by a senior doctor and taken to the morgue freezer. Hours later, when she was taken out to be prepared for burial, he mother noticed she was moving. She was rushed to the hospital’s intensive care department and stayed there until her death.
The baby’s father, Ali Majdub, had harsh criticism for the conduct of the hospital, telling Haaretz “we have many misgivings about the way the hospital handled the case.”
“In my opinion, they were negligent in the speed with which they pronounced my daughter’s death. It is curious how a 600-gram child, who is the size of the palm of my hand, comes back to life by herself,” he said.
The father described how his wife realized the child was alive after asking to see her dead daughter one last time.
“When I came to the morgue to collect her, her body was wrapped up,” he continued. “Then my wife, out of an inexplicable impulse, asked to see her again. At first, I didn’t want to break her heart, but then I went up. When I got there, she realized she was moving.”
Hospital director Dr. Massad Barhoum said the baby was breathing on her own. But he said her chances of survival are very, very slim because she was prematurely born in the 23rd week.
“There was one miracle, and we’re hoping for another one,” he said.
Asked whether negligence was involved, hospital deputy director Dr. Moshe Daniel said that the doctors were not too hasty in pronouncing the baby dead.
“It was a senior doctor. We passed all the findings to the Health Ministry, and they can launch an investigation if they deem appropriate,” he said.
“From the start, the chances of survival were slim,” he said after the baby was pronounced dead on Tuesday. It was later decided on Monday that an external investigative committee would be formed to look into the matter.
Bigfoot fails DNA test
August 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Bigfoot remains as elusive as ever. Results from tests on genetic material from alleged remains of one of the mythical half-ape and half-human creatures, made public at a news conference on Friday held after the claimed discovery swept the Internet, failed to prove its existence.
Its spread was fueled by a photograph of a hairy heap, bearing a close resemblance to a shaggy full-body gorilla costume, stuffed into a container resembling a refrigerator.
One of the two samples of DNA said to prove the existence of the Bigfoot came from a human and the other was 96 percent from an opossum, according to Curt Nelson, a scientist at the University of Minnesota who performed the DNA analysis.
Bigfoot creatures are said to live in the forests of the U.S. Pacific Northwest. An opossum is a marsupial about the size of a house cat.
Results of the DNA tests were revealed in an e-mail from Nelson and distributed at the Palo Alto, California, news conference held by Tom Biscardi, host of a weekly online radio show about the Bigfoot.
Also present were Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, the two who say they discovered the Bigfoot corpse while hiking in the woods of northern Georgia. They also are co-owners of a company that offers Bigfoot merchandise.
Despite the dubious photo and the commercial interests of the alleged discoverers, the Bigfoot claim drew interest from Australia to Europe and even The New York Times.
Biscardi said the DNA samples may not have been taken correctly and may have been contaminated, and that he would proceed with an autopsy of the alleged Bigfoot remains, currently in a freezer at an undisclosed location.
Unseen Bigfoot corpse likely a big fat lie
August 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A hairy corpse crammed in a Georgia freezer is Bigfoot, two men who have been tracking the legendary creature have claimed.
Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer said they stumbled across the corpse in the woods of north Georgia, United States, across the country from the remote regions of the northwest where people usually claim to see the man-ape.
On Friday, they indignantly stood by their story at a news conference in Palo Alto, California, during which they offered an e-mail from a scientist as evidence and also acknowledged they would not mind making a few dollars from the “find”.
“Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words,” Whitton, an officer on medical leave from the Clayton County Police Department, said.
He and Dyer, a former corrections officer, announced the discovery early last month on YouTube videos and their website. Although they did not consider themselves devoted Bigfoot trackers before then, they have since started offering weekend search expeditions in Georgia for $499.
The specimen they bagged, the men said, is one of several apelike creatures they spotted cavorting in the woods.
On Friday, the pair was joined by Tom Biscardi, head of a group called Searching for Bigfoot, as they faced a skeptical audience of several hundred journalists and Bigfoot fans - including one curiosity seeker dressed in a Chewbacca suit. Other Bigfoot hunters call Biscardi a huckster looking for media attention.
Biscardi fielded most of the questions. Among them: Why should anyone accept the men’s tale when they weren’t willing to display their frozen artifact or pinpoint where they allegedly found it? How come bushwhackers aren’t constantly tripping over primate remains if there are as many as 7,000 Bigfoots roaming the United States, as Biscardi claimed?
“I understand where you are coming from, but how many real Bigfoot researchers are out there trekking 140,000 miles a year?” Biscardi said.
Biscardi, Whitton and Dyer presented what they called evidence supporting the Bigfoot theory. It was an e-mail from a University of Minnesota scientist, but all it said was that of the three DNA samples sent to him, one was human, one was likely a possum and the third could not be tested because of technical problems.
At least one other Bigfoot researcher, Idaho State University anthropologist Jeffrey Meldrum, called the trio’s claims “not compelling in the least”.
He told Scientific American magazine that photographs posted on the website “just look like a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect”.
Polar bear eaten by shark: who’s top predator?
August 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment
OSLO (Reuters) - Already threatened by a thaw of ice around the North Pole, the polar bear’s title as the top Arctic predator may under challenge from a shark.
Scientists researching how far sharks hunt seals in the Arctic were stunned in June to find part of the jaw of a young polar bear in the stomach of a Greenland shark, a species that favors polar waters.
“We’ve never heard of this before. We don’t know how it got there,” Kit Kovacs, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, told Reuters of the 10 cm (4 inch) bone found in a shark off the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.
“We can’t say whether or not the shark took a swimming young bear” or ate a carcass, she said. “We don’t know how active these sharks are as predators.”
Most shark experts contacted said it was likely the bear was dead before the shark found it. Even a young, two- or three-year-old bear would be a ferocious opponent for a Greenland shark, which can grow to up to 7 meters (23 feet) and weigh more than a tonne.
“It sounds like a scavenge,” said Steve Campana, head of the Canadian shark research laboratory at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
He said he had not heard of a shark eating a bear before and it was a “million dollar question” for researchers as to whether Greenland sharks attack live bears.
CARIBOU
Bits of animals including caribou have been found in Greenland shark stomachs in the past — scavenged or attacked swimming. Campana said there was even a myth that the sharks could leap out of the water and seize caribou standing on ice.
“There’s no possibility a Greenland shark could predate a live adult white bear unless it was injured or seriously ill,” said Jeffrey Gallant, co-director of a Canadian-based Greenland shark education and research group.
Sonja Fordham, deputy chair of the shark specialist group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said more research was needed into the Greenland shark’s habits.
“Greenland sharks do seem quite sluggish … but they have been known to move very quickly when they are eating,” she said.
The United States this year listed polar bears as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act because their sea ice habitat is shrinking, apparently due to global warming. A thaw may mean that bears spend more time in the water.
But less chill waters are unlikely to lure other big sharks, except perhaps the porbeagle, to polar regions, Campana said. Most sharks favor much warmer conditions.
Killer whales, however, have been spotted further north in recent years. “Both walruses and polar bears are powerful in the water. Both could handle most potential predators, but not killer whales,” Kovacs said.
Gallant said warming was unlikely to help the Greenland shark catch bears.
“The Greenland shark simply cannot afford the risk of injury nor the expenditure of energy required to kill such a large and dangerous animal, with or without the help of global warming,” he said. “There is far easier prey to be found.”
Kovacs also said: “For polar bears the greater risk is a loss of habitat. These other things will be ancillary.”
By Alister Doyle
