Russian pilots are planning a risky attempt at flying a passenger jet that made a miraculous emergency landing in Siberia earlier this month, TV channel Rossia reported yesterday.
“A technical team will give its advice then the final decision will be taken by the constructor Tupolev, but we are counting on continuing to use this plane,” an official from airline Alrosa told the channel.
The Tu-154 airliner carrying 81 people was forced to make an emergency landing on September 7 at a deserted runway in Russia’s far northern Komi region, 1,500 kilometres from Moscow, after it suffered a mid-flight power failure.
Nobody was hurt in the landing, which the pilot achieved with no working navigation gear and at high speed.
The plane overshot the runway by several hundred metres and pictures on the TV channel showed teams cutting trees and hauling the plane out using bulldozers. (AFP)
Abusive parents jailed
A US mother was sentenced to 34 years in prison and the father got 26 years for abuses that included hog-tying their son to a table nightly for months.
Judge Kathleen Ann Sutula sentenced 37-year-old Andreia Huffman and 32-year-old Jason Dunikowski on their guilty pleas to a 196-count indictment including kidnapping and child endangering.
The mother also pleaded guilty to felonious assault. (PA)
HIV-infected airman charged
An airman in Kansas has been charged with assault and related crimes for having unprotected sex without telling his partners he was HIV positive, the Air Force said yesterday.
Tech Sgt David Gutierrez, 43, is accused of violating military law by having unprotected sex with at least 11 different people, including some he met at so-called swinger parties.
Sgt Gutierrez is stationed with the 22nd Maintenance Operations Squadron at McConnell Air Force Base in central Kansas.
Along with aggravated assault, the military also charged him with violating his squadron commander’s October 2009 order to notify his sexual partners about his HIV status before having sexual relations and to use condoms. (PA)
Baby in EU Parliament
An Italian member of the European Parliament grabbed the spotlight at yesterday’s session when she showed up, voted, and took the floor, carrying her one-month baby girl in a sling.
Licia Ronzulli, a 35-year-old conservative whose baby was born August 10, won a good round of applause as she got up to speak out on behalf of women.
“I am here symbolically with my daughter Vittoria to think of all those women who cannot reconcile serenely pregnancy and jobs, professional life and family life,” said the member of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s party. (AFP)
Pay freeze for Poles
More than 5,000 Polish civil servants took to the streets of Warsaw yesterday in a protest at pay freezes proposed by the government in the 2011 Budget, an AFP correspondent said.
Demonstrators, among them police officers, firemen, border and prison guards as well as tax collectors, marched between the finance ministry, the seat of Parliament and Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s office after a walkout call by Poland’s main trades unions OPZZ and Solidarity.
Mr Tusk’s centre-right government last week adopted guidelines for the 2011 Budget that expect a growth rate of 3.5 per cent, inflation at 2.3 per cent and unemployment to hit 9.9 per cent.
The government imposed the austerity package to cut the public deficit – the shortfall between revenues and spending by the central government and local authorities – to under three per cent of gross domestic product. (AFP)
Karzai ‘manic depressive’
US intelligence suspects Afghan President Hamid Karzai has received treatment for manic depression, contributing to the uneasy US ties with him, a new book by legendary reporter Bob Woodward says.
“He’s on his meds, he’s off his meds,” the US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, is quoted as saying in the new book Obama’s Wars, according to a pre-release account on Monday in The Washington Post.
The newspaper added that according to US intelligence reports President Karzai has been diagnosed with manic depression. (AFP)
Mob attacks art lovers
A mob enraged at public alcohol consumption attacked guests at a cocktail party outside an art gallery in Istanbul, leaving five injured, witnesses and officials said yesterday.
Up to 50 men armed with sticks, iron bars, knives and gas sprays, launched a “planned and organised” attack on the event in the downtown district of Tophane late on Tuesday, gallery owner Nazim Dikbas told a press conference.
The attackers, believed to be local residents, shouted “Why are you drinking in the street?” and “Allahu Akbar“ (God is Great), witnesses told NTV television.
“If the galleries had not rolled down the shutters immediately, it would have become a sort of lynching,” Antonio Cosentino, an artist who was attending the event, told the Haberturk newspaper. (AFP)
Italian cops arrested
Eight Italian police officers were arrested in Naples yesterday on suspicion of drug trafficking Ansa news agency reported.
The officers, who were all from the same district police station, were arrested as part of an investigation by judicial authorities into drug trafficking in the southern city, the report said.
The eight men, who are suspected of forgery, drug trafficking and misuse of public funds, were arrested after a tip off from the district police chief, the report said. (AFP)