Boeing found a new headquarters. But customers fear it has ‘lost its way’

05/17/2022

Boeing’s decision to transplant its corporate headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia, should have signalled a new chapter in the industrial giant’s history. Instead, the move has drawn criticism for taking management further from the company’s spiritual home, the commercial aircraft factories of Seattle, and closer to its defence operations.

Unions and industry experts have expressed disquiet, with some warning that the aerospace group is heading in the wrong direction just as it seeks to emerge from the tragic 737 Max crash crisis and setbacks on civil and military programmes that have dented investor confidence.

“It’s being perceived as an abandonment of the commercial aviation part of the company,” said Ray Goforth, executive director of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, which represents more than 14,000 Boeing employees.

Workers heard “‘nobody’s going to come fix the problems — they’re focused on where they can get more money’”, he added. “The company seems to move from magic solution to magic solution.”

The location of Boeing’s headquarters is a sensitive subject. The group shifted its head office from Seattle to Chicago in 2001, four years after merging with McDonnell Douglas. Critics say executives became more focused on wooing Wall Street than engineering excellence. Boeing spent more than $40bn on share buybacks between 2013 and 2019.

Boeing said the move, to a site a mile from the Pentagon, would bring it closer to customers and stakeholders as well as engineering talent, as it seeks to attract new hires. The company’s defence business brings in more revenue than its commercial arm.

Four of the US’s five biggest aerospace and defence companies will now be based in the Washington DC suburbs as Boeing joins Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), a US regulator that has increased its scrutiny of the company, is also located in the capital.

You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.

The debate about the wisdom of the shift in headquarters has been overshadowed by poor first-quarter results, which highlighted the challenges facing the company. Boeing last month revealed $1.2bn in charges in the first three months of the year, including $660mn related to the production of two Air Force One jets, the US presidential aircraft.

On the civil side, the company announced a further delay to its wide-body 777X aircraft to 2025, projected to cost another $1.5bn. Boeing is also making slower-than-expected progress on clearing an order backlog of hundreds of 737 Max jets that built up during the aircraft’s global grounding after two crashes in 2018 and 2019. Meanwhile, customer deliveries of the wide-body 787 Dreamliner remain on hold following quality control issues.

The bad news has weighed on its shares. Down 40 per cent since January, Boeing is the sole Big Five defence company stock to have fallen this year amid renewed investor enthusiasm for the sector in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The repeated delays have frustrated some of Boeing’s largest customers, many of which are seeking to expand jet fleets as passengers return to the skies following the loosening of coronavirus pandemic curbs.

Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary said on Monday that sweeping changes were needed to Boeing’s senior management, while in February American Airlines said it had been forced to rearrange its summer schedule “due to Boeing’s continued inability to deliver our 787-8 aircraft”.

To make matters worse, Boeing’s arch-rival Airbus has built up a commanding sales lead in the narrow-body segment of the market. The European plane maker recently announced plans to aggressively step up production of its popular A320 family of jets, including with a second assembly line in the US at its operations in Mobile, Alabama.

Boeing’s offices in Arlington, VA, which will be its new base. The move means four of the five biggest US aerospace and defence groups will be located in the Washington DC suburbs © Win McNamee/Getty Images

“Clearly Boeing, especially on the commercial side, is experiencing great challenges,” said John Plueger, chief executive of Air Lease, one of the company’s biggest customers, which is still waiting on about a dozen 787 jets. “In our view, given the history that we’ve had with Boeing in the past year to two, we are hopeful that we can get at least one 787 by the end of this year. I hope I am wrong, I hope we get many more.”

The move to Virginia would “strengthen ties with defence and hopefully with regulators like the FAA, and that is fine”, Plueger added. “But in our view, there is nothing like eyeballs directly on the production line.”

Some of Boeing’s other customers have gone further, with Dómhnal Slattery, boss of the world’s second-largest lessor, Avolon, telling an industry conference this month that the company had “lost its way”. It needed to “fundamentally reimagine its strategic relevance in the marketplace”, he said, adding that this would require “fresh vision, maybe fresh leadership”. 

The public rebuke is rare in an industry where disagreements are usually kept behind closed doors. Two other executives contacted by the Financial Times privately echoed the view that Boeing would benefit from fresh leadership and questioned its execution on key programmes. Dave Calhoun, Boeing’s chief executive and a long-term board member, promised greater transparency and a return to the company’s engineering roots when he took over from Dennis Muilenburg in 2019.

Boeing’s relentless production issues were “just the absence of leadership at the top”, said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace consultant at AeroDynamic Advisory. He added that he was “baffled by the lack of a plan” for the company.

A person familiar with Boeing’s thinking insisted that management change was not needed to restore confidence. Boeing declined to comment on the matter.

Despite some customers’ frustration, the company has supporters and continues to win orders, including recently from Germany’s Lufthansa. Southwest Airlines chief Bob Jordan this year called Boeing a “terrific partner”. 

But the group’s decision to move its headquarters has amplified concerns over production and engineering.

“If you look at the history over the last quarters — they have pretty much taken charges on every one of their major programmes, both in defence and commercial. What they do isn’t easy, building these machines, but they seem to be having more difficulties than their peers,” said Ron Epstein, analyst at Bank of America, adding that a lot of the issues had to do with “engineering”.

A Boeing 707 version of the Air Force One jet used by President Ronald Reagan. Boeing this year revealed $660mn in charges relating to production of two of the US presidential planes. © George Rose/Getty Images

The company insists things have changed since the Max accidents. Calhoun last month defended the company’s culture on an investor call, saying: “I don’t attribute our certification issues and time lines to engineering shortfalls in any way.”

Boeing told the FT that it was taking “comprehensive actions to strengthen engineering excellence, enhance quality and drive stability and predictability through the business”. “We are a long-cycle business, and the transformative journey we’re on will be measured in years; not quarters or months,” it added.

Brian West, Boeing’s chief financial officer, said at a conference last week that the company was “on the verge of turning the corner”. 

Its key milestones, he added, were to deliver 787s, to deliver more 737 Maxes and to generate sustainable cash flow. “Those three things are the most important elements that we think about day in and day out. And I believe that as we move through the course of the year, we’re going to start knocking down these milestones,” said West.

Generating cash flow is critical if Boeing — which still has $45bn of net debt — is to have the resources to fund investments, in particular in new aircraft, as the industry faces pressure over its carbon emissions. Some analysts believe the company will need to raise equity sooner rather than later.

Other long-term watchers have suggested the company might have to demerge its commercial arm from its defence business to survive — an idea rejected by a person familiar with Boeing’s thinking, who said “absolutely not”. Boeing declined to comment on the suggestion.

The coming months will be crucial for the group to convince investors — and customers — it is meeting its milestones. “[We] have always been a huge supporter and buyer of aircraft from the Boeing company . . . It has to be a reliable partner. It has to be able to deliver the aircraft that we have on order,” said Air Lease’s Plueger.

Source: https://www.ft.com/cms/s/9df9d699-f49b-4151-8c4f-36cc488b17ac,s01=1.html?ftcamp=traffic/partner/feed_headline/us_yahoo/auddev&yptr=yahoo

20 years later, 'Frankenfish' are strong and spreading, but the anglers are getting craftier



SNAKEHEAD

Jason Nark
Tue, May 17, 2022, 

WOOLFORD, Md. - A dozen or so dead northern snakeheads lay stacked in slime and ice behind a general store in Woolford on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Fisherman Caz Kenny reached into the cooler to highlight some of the controversial fish's finer points, such as the sharp, gnarled teeth behind its ghastly mug.

Kenny, a lifelong outdoorsman, has been sounding the alarm for years about the invasive species, a powerful predator native to Asia and Russia that was first discovered breeding on the East Coast in a small suburban Maryland pond on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay 20 years ago. They've since spread south to Virginia, north to New Jersey and likely beyond.

Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.

Kenny, 47, didn't filet the fish in the cooler behind the Woolford Store in Dorchester County, one of his hangouts, but he's seen his fair share of snakeheads splayed open and knows they're usually full of eggs and other animals. He rattled off a list, his voice a machine-gun staccato: minnows, bass, perch, crayfish, frogs, even baby ducks. "There's not one place here where they haven't had an impact," Kenny tells me as he hoists a thick eight-pounder from the cooler. "There's not a biologist around here that says we're okay."

Northern snakeheads were first seen in the spring of 2002 when an angler hooked one in a swampy pond behind a shopping center in Crofton, Md., about 30 miles from Washington, D.C.

When another was caught there and reported to Maryland's Department of Natural Resources, all aquatic hell broke loose, and the legend of the "Frankenfish" was born. Think of the "killer bee" scares of the 1970s and the media attention those received.

A Washington Post headline from July 2002 found that the "Freakish Fish Story Flourishes." This fish was able to gulp air and "walk." Horror movies were made - including one called "Snakehead Terror," starring the supermodel Carol Alt - and locals sold T-shirts.

How did the dreaded fish get here? Two snakeheads were released into the pond, The Washington Post learned, by a man who'd bought them from an Asian market in New York City, intending to turn them into soup.

For every outdoorsman like Kenny, who believes snakeheads will ultimately destroy local populations, there are others who have come to prize, even obsess over, the fish for its fighting prowess on the end of a fishing line. Many of those fishermen say they don't see that devastation in the places they fish. The two factions often mix it up in the half-dozen Facebook groups dedicated to snakeheads. (Full disclosure: I have caught a few dozen snakeheads over the years in New Jersey, and I've yet to kill one.)

Steve Kambouris, 38, a snakehead devotee from Dundalk, Md., believes the species will eventually be considered a nonnative game fish, something to market to sport fishermen, not a pest to eradicate. "I would say that anyone who says they are a trash fish hasn't caught one," Kambouris told me. "In terms of a sport fish, I can't think of any freshwater fish I would rather catch."

The biologists, of course, are more measured than both sides in their assessments. Twenty years, they say, is a blip on the biological timeline. "We should be concerned with invasive species because once they've become established, it's basically impossible to eradicate them, and control measures can be very expensive," says Steven P. Minkkinen, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When it comes to snakeheads, Minkkinen says, "the genie is out of the bottle."

Minkkinen pointed to one study, a before-and-after look at fish populations in the Blackwater River watershed after snakeheads were established in 2012. The river and its vast tributaries are just a few miles from the Woolford Store and have become a hub for snakehead fishermen from all over the country. The 2018-19 study replicated a fish study conducted in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in 2006-07 and found declines in other prey fish populations. "The loss of these prey species could be in part due to presence of an additional top predator like Northern Snakehead," the study's authors wrote.

Snakeheads are tough. They can breathe oxygen out of water for days, and they don't flop on their sides like most fish. Snakeheads slither. During big rains, they often push into adjacent waterways. When the snakeheads were discovered, officials poisoned Crofton Pond to kill them, but the Little Patuxent River runs just feet away, and it's likely some fish or eggs got out or were moved by birds and turtles. They later became established in the Potomac River.

Snakeheads can be sold commercially but are difficult to catch in large numbers because they prefer shallow water with heavy vegetation, which few boats with nets can get to. One of the more successful ways to kill them has been nighttime bowfishing - using a bow and arrow - on smaller boats equipped with bright lights.

Fishermen find snakeheads tough to hook, on account of their hard, bony mouths, and they fight like pit bulls to break loose, even when they're inside your kayak. That's why most of the snakeheads in Kenny's cooler had holes in their heads from arrows, knives or screwdrivers: from when fishermen administer the coup de grace, as if dispatching a zombie.

"Man, as long as they're wet, they can live for days," Kenny said.

Kenny, like state and federal wildlife officials, wants fishermen to eat the snakeheads they catch. He promotes events, such as the Cecil County Snakehead Fishing Tournament, in which the snakeheads have to be brought to a weigh station for measurements. Since it's illegal to transport a live northern snakehead, they have to be dead. A screwdriver through the head usually does it.

Kambouris, on the other hand, hosts online tournaments where anglers submit their measurements with photos before releasing the snakehead.

Kenny's final argument for killing snakeheads was a freshly cooked plate of breaded fish sticks on a table outside the store. He took a swig of an energy drink, then encouraged everyone - a fellow fisherman, the store owner, this reporter and a photographer - to dig in.

"It's like lump crabmeat," he told us.

Some fish are so ugly that mariners and marketers changed their names to make them more palatable for the seafood industry. Snakeheads, with their bulging eyes and penchant for oozing slime, haven't had such a makeover - but once you eat one, it barely matters. Their meat is as white and flaky as any cod or flounder, perhaps even better.

The plate was empty in a few minutes, and there's at least one more fisherman who might carry a screwdriver in his tackle box now.

- - -

Jason Nark is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a freelance writer.

Military takes UFOs seriously at congressional hearing: 

'We want to know what's out there'

Christopher Wilson

·Senior Writer

Tue, May 17, 2022, 

While the first congressional hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years didn’t reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life, it did affirm that the U.S. military is taking sightings of unknown craft seriously as a national security threat.

A House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee hearing convened Tuesday morning with a 90-minute public session that was followed by closed-door testimony later in the day.

“Unidentified aerial phenomena [UAPs] are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way,” Rep. André Carson, D-Ind., said at the beginning of the hearing, referring to the preferred technical term for unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.

“For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis,” he added. “Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did. DOD officials relegated the issues to the backroom or swept it under the rug entirely, fearful of a skeptical national security community.

“Today we know better,” Carson continued. “UAPs are unexplained, it’s true, but they are real. They need to be investigated, and any threats they pose need to be mitigated.”

The first congressional hearing on “unidentified aerial phenomena” in over 50 years was held on Tuesday. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

The hearing — the first on the topic since 1966, when congressman and future president Gerald Ford held one after a sighting in Michigan — was less focused on concerns about alien invasion and more on intelligence lapses that could lead to other nations having unknown technology about which the U.S. is not aware. That push included making sure pilots feel comfortable reporting anything they see.

“The intelligence community has a serious duty to our taxpayers to prevent potential adversaries such as China and Russia from surprising us with unforeseen new technologies,” said Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark. “This committee has an obligation to understand what you are doing to determine whether any UAPs are new technologies or not — and if they are, where are they coming from?”

In November, the Pentagon announced the new Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group program to help with tracking. It followed a June 2021 report documenting 144 observations dating back to 2004.

“We know that our service members have encountered unidentified aerial phenomena, and because UAP pose potential flight safety and general security risks, we are committed to a focused effort to determine their origins,” Ronald Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, testified at the hearing. “We want to know what’s out there as much as you want to know what’s out there. We get the questions not just from you. We get it from family, and we get them night and day.”

Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, testifies on Tuesday. (Jose Luis Magana/AFP via Getty Images)

Scott Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, said the Pentagon's database of unidentified objects has grown to “approximately 400 reports.” He said that while there had not been any collisions between military craft and UAPs, there had been at least 11 near misses. Bray said the military had not picked up communication signals from the objects, nor had it tried to begin communications with them.

“Generally speaking, it appears to be something that’s unmanned, appears to be something that may or may not be in controlled flight, so we have not attempted any communication with that,” he said, noting that the military had not fired on any UAP, nor had it come across any wreckage “that isn’t consistent of being with terrestrial origin.”

While Bray said that most of the sightings that were still unexplained could be attributed to a lack of data, he conceded, “There are a small handful of cases in which we have more data that our analysis simply hasn’t been able to fully pull together a picture of what happened.”

The American fascination with and military interest in UFOs are both decades old. In his opening remarks, Carson referenced the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, a classified program set up in 1952 that counted more than 12,000 UFO sightings over its 17-year existence, with hundreds still unexplained. A 2006 report of a disk hovering over O’Hare International Airport in Chicago was dismissed by the Federal Aviation Administration as a weather anomaly. The 1947 crash of a high-altitude balloon in Roswell, N.M., inspired generations of conspiracy theories about flying saucers. The unmanned craft was part of a top-secret program to monitor Soviet weapon tests.

Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence, plays a video of an unidentified aerial phenomenon during the congressional hearing on Tuesday. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

In a March 1966 letter to two fellow congressmen, Ford wrote, “In the firm belief that the American public deserve a better explanation than that thus far given by the Air Force, I strongly recommend that there be a committee investigation of the UFO phenomena. I think we owe it to the people to establish credibility regarding UFO’s and to produce the greatest possible enlightenment on this subject.” The following month, Ford issued a statement saying that while some had “ridiculed” his call for a congressional investigation, they were a fraction of those who had given approval to look into a March event in which 40 people, including 12 police officers, claimed to have seen a cluster of UFOs.

In 2017, the New York Times published a story about how former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had pushed for funding for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which investigated unexplained aerial sightings. The program ran from 2007 to 2012.

“I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” said Reid. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”

Microsoft Will Boost Pay and Stock Compensation to Retain Employees

Dina Bass
Mon, May 16, 2022,


(Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. plans to “nearly double” its budget for employee salary increases and boost the range of stock compensation it gives some workers by at least 25%, an effort to retain staff and help people cope with inflation.

The move will mainly affect “early to mid-career employees,” the software giant said in a statement Monday.

“As we approach our annual total rewards process, we are making a significant additional investment this year to compensate our employees globally,” the Redmond, Washington-based company said. “While we have factored in the impact of inflation and rising cost of living, these changes also recognize our appreciation to our world-class talent who support our mission, culture and customers, and partners.”

In addition to contending with cost-of-living increases and a tight Seattle housing market, Microsoft is locked in a fierce battle for talent with companies like Amazon.com Inc., Google and Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc., as well as startups. Fields like cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, the metaverse and cloud computing have been especially competitive. Moreover, the pandemic has led many workers to relocate and reconsider employment options.

“Time and time again, we see that our talent is in high demand because of the amazing work that you do,” Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in a memo that was obtained by Bloomberg.

Microsoft’s salary package is composed of base salary, bonus and stock. The changes will apply to a substantial part of the company’s workforce, which stood at 181,000 as of June 30, 2021.

The stock increase will apply to employees at Level 67 in the company’s internal scale, or below, Nadella said. Level 67 is the last tier before an employee is made a company partner, putting them in a higher pay scale. The salary budget increases will vary by country and “the most meaningful increases will be focused where the market demands.”

The company didn’t discuss pay figures, so it’s hard to tell what the new compensation levels will translate to in dollar figures. But the Glassdoor website estimates that a new graduate working as a software engineer at Microsoft makes about $163,000.

Cross-town rival Amazon.com Inc. in February said it would more than doubling the maximum base salary it pays employees to $350,000 from $160,000 to cope with a competitive labor market.

Microsoft announced the changes as it nears the end of the fiscal year ending June 30. For the current fiscal year, the company had already put in place higher budgets for promotions and a special stock award meant to “recognize exceptional impact and support retention of our most competitive talent pools,” Nadella wrote.

Insider reported the company was considering the increases last week.

Chinese plane crash that killed 132 caused by intentional act: US officials

GIO BENITEZ, JOSH MARGOLIN and AMANDA MAILE

Tue, May 17, 2022

The China Eastern Airlines plane crash that killed 132 people is believed to have been caused by an intentional act, according to U.S. officials who spoke to ABC News.

The Boeing 737-800 passenger jet was flying from Kunming to Guangzhou on March 21 when it plunged into a mountainous area in Guangxi, China. All 123 passengers and nine crew members were killed.

MORE: 2nd black box found as investigators search for answers in China plane crash

The Wall Street Journal was first to report the news.

The officials who spoke to ABC News point to the plane's flaps not being engaged and landing gear not put down. The near-vertical descent of the plane, they believe, would've required intentional force.

PHOTO: In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, workers search through debris at the China Eastern flight crash site in Tengxian County in southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, March 24, 2022. (Lu Boan/AP, FILE)

The plane slammed into the ground with such force that it created a 66-foot deep hole in the ground, according to Chinese officials.

Investigators also looked into one of the pilots' personal lives and background and believe he may have been struggling through certain issues right before the crash, ABC News has learned.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said all information on the investigation will come from their counterparts in the Civil Aviation Administration of China, but regulators and Boeing have not flagged any mechanical issues. Sources said Chinese investigators also haven't flagged any mechanical issues.

MORE: Black box analyzed for pilots' actions in China Eastern Airlines crash

"The NTSB will not be issuing any further updates on the CAAC's investigation of the China Eastern 5735 crash," the NTSB said in a statement. "When and whether CAAC issues updates is entirely up to them. And I haven't heard anything about any plans for them to do so."

The first black box, the cockpit voice recorder, was found on March 23, while the flight data recorder was found on March 27.

Early data showed the airliner plunged from 29,000 feet to 8,000 feet, leveled off and then went into a freefall. One video showed the plane nose-diving into the ground.

ABC News' Mark Osborne contributed to this report.

Chinese plane crash that killed 132 caused by intentional act: US officials originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

UPDATE 5-China Eastern crash probe eyes intentional action - sources

Tue, May 17, 2022,
(Adds social media action in China, no immediate China Eastern comment)

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON, May 17 (Reuters) - Investigators probing the crash of a China Eastern Airlines jet are examining whether it was due to intentional action taken on the flight deck, with no evidence so far of a technical malfunction, two people briefed on the matter said.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Tuesday that flight data from one the Boeing 737-800's black boxes indicated that someone in the cockpit intentionally crashed the plane, citing people familiar with U.S. officials' preliminary assessment.

Boeing Co, the maker of the jet, and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) declined to comment and referred questions to Chinese regulators.

The Boeing 737-800, en route from Kunming to Guangzhou, crashed on March 21 in the mountains of Guangxi, after a sudden plunge from cruising altitude, killing all 123 passengers and nine crew members aboard.

It was mainland China's deadliest aviation disaster in 28 years.

The pilots did not respond to repeated calls from air traffic controllers and nearby planes during the rapid descent, authorities have said. One source told Reuters investigators were looking at whether the crash was a "voluntary" act.

Screenshots of the Wall Street Journal story appeared to be censored both on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo and messaging app Wechat on Wednesday morning. The hashtag topics "China Eastern" and "China Eastern black boxes" are banned on Weibo, which cited a breach of relevant laws, and users are unable to share the story in group chats on Wechat.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China said on April 11 in response to rumours on the internet of a deliberate crash that the speculation had "gravely misled the public" and "interfered with the accident investigation work."

China Eastern did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal said the airline had said in a statement that no evidence had emerged that could determine whether or not there were any problems with the accident aircraft. The Chinese Embassy declined to comment.

The 737-800 is a widely flown predecessor to Boeing's 737 MAX but does not have the systems that have been linked to fatal 737-MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 that led to a lengthy grounding of the MAX.

China Eastern grounded its entire fleet of 737-800 planes after the crash, but resumed flights in mid-April in a move widely seen at the time as ruling out any immediate new safety concern over Boeing's previous and still most widely used model.

In a summary of an unpublished preliminary crash report last month, Chinese regulators did not point to any technical recommendations on the 737-800, which has been in service since 1997 with a strong safety record, according to experts.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in a May 10 Reuters interview that board investigators and Boeing had traveled to China to assist the Chinese investigation. She noted that the investigation to date had not found any safety issues that would require any urgent actions.

Homendy said if the board has any safety concerns it will "issue urgent safety recommendations."

The NTSB assisted Chinese investigators with the review of black boxes at its U.S. lab in Washington.

Shares of Boeing closed up 6.5%.

A final report into the causes could take two years or more to compile, Chinese officials have said. Analysts say most crashes are caused by a cocktail of human and technical factors.

Deliberate crashes are exceptionally rare. Experts noted the latest hypothesis left open whether the action stemmed from one pilot acting alone or the result of a struggle or intrusion but sources stressed nothing has been confirmed.

In March 2015, a Germanwings co-pilot deliberately flew an Airbus A320 into a French mountainside, killing all 150 on board.

French investigators found the 27-year-old was suffering from a suspected "psychotic depressive episode," concealed from his employer. They later called for better mental health guidelines and stronger peer support groups for pilots. (Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington, Tim Hepher in Paris and Abhijith Ganapavaram in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Stella Qiu in Beijing; Editing by Leslie Adler, Marguerita Choy and Richard Pullin)

Abortion: the story of suffering and death behind Ireland's ban and subsequent legalization


Gretchen E. Ely,

 Professor of Social Work and Ph.D. Program Director, 

University of Tennessee

THE CONVERSATION
Mon, May 16, 2022

The death of Savita Halappanavar in an Irish hospital in 2012 after she was denied an abortion during a miscarriage caused outrage across Ireland. 

AP Photo/Shawn Pogatchnik

If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion in the U.S., the nation may find itself on a path similar to that trod by the Irish people from 1983 to 2018. A draft decision signed by the majority of conservative justices was leaked in May 2022, and indicates the court may do just that.

Abortion was first prohibited in Ireland through what was called the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861. That law became part of Irish law when Ireland gained independence from the U.K. in 1922. In the early 1980s, some anti-abortion Catholic activists noticed the liberalization of abortion laws in other Western democracies and worried the same might happen in Ireland.

Various Catholic organizations, including the Irish Catholic Doctors’ Guild, St. Joseph’s Young Priests Society and the St. Thomas More Society, combined to form the Pro Life Amendment Campaign. They began promoting the idea of making Ireland a model anti-abortion nation by enshrining an abortion ban not only in law but in the nation’s constitution.

As a result of that effort, a constitutional referendum passed in 1983, ending a bitter campaign where only 54% of eligible voters cast a ballot. Ireland’s eighth constitutional amendment “acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and [gave] due regard to the equal right to life of the mother.”

This religiously motivated anti-abortion measure is similar to religiously oriented anti-abortion laws already on the books in some U.S. states, including Texas, which has a ban after six weeks of pregnancy, and Kentucky, which limits private health insurance coverage of abortion.

What happened over the 35 years after the referendum passed in Ireland was a battle to legalize abortion. It included several court cases, proposed constitutional amendments and intense advocacy, ending in 2018 with another referendum, re-amending the Irish constitution to legalize abortion up to 12 weeks gestation.
Real-life consequences

Even before 1983, people who lived in Ireland who wanted a legal abortion were already traveling to England on what was known as the “abortion trail”, as abortion was also criminalized in Northern Ireland. In the wake of the Eighth Amendment, a 1986 Irish court ruling declared that even abortion counseling was prohibited.

A key test of the abortion law came in 1992. A 14-year-old rape victim, who became pregnant, told a court she was contemplating suicide because of being forced to carry her rapist’s baby. The judge ruled that the threat to her life was not so great as to justify granting permission for an abortion. That ruling barred her from leaving Ireland for nine months, effectively forcing her to carry the pregnancy to term.

On appeal, a higher court ruled that the young woman’s suicidal thoughts were in fact enough of a life threat to justify a legal termination. But before she could have an abortion, she miscarried.

The case prompted attempts to pass three more amendments to Ireland’s constitution. One, declaring that suicidal intentions were not grounds for an abortion, failed. The other two passed, allowing Irish people to travel to get an abortion, and allowing information to be distributed about legal abortion in other countries.

Emergency treatment

Even with these adjustments, the Eighth Amendment sometimes restricted the ability of medical professionals to offer patients life-saving care during a pregnancy-related emergency.

In 2012, Savita Halappanavar, age 31 and 17 weeks pregnant, went to a hospital in Galway, Ireland. Doctors there determined that she was having a miscarriage. However, because the fetus still had a detectable heartbeat, it was protected by the Eighth Amendment. Doctors could not intervene – in legal terms, ending its life – even to save the mother. So she was admitted to the hospital for pain management while awaiting the miscarriage to progress naturally.

Over the course of three days, as her pain increased and signs of infection grew, she and her husband pleaded with hospital officials to terminate the pregnancy because of the health risk. The request was denied because the fetus still had a heartbeat.

By the time the fetal heartbeat could no longer be detected, Halappanavar had developed a massive infection in her uterus, which spread to her blood. After suffering organ failure and four days in intensive care, she died.

This was likely not the only time someone had suffered, or even died, as a result of being denied abortion in Ireland. But the publicity surrounding the case prompted a new wave of activism aimed at repealing the Eighth Amendment. In 2013, the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act was signed into law, which did not fully repeal the Eighth Amendment but legalized abortions that would protect the mother’s life.

It is estimated that about 170,000 people traveled from Ireland to seek a legal abortion between 1980 and 2018.

In 2018, a referendum repealing the Eighth Amendment passed overwhelmingly by a margin of 66% to 34%. As a result of the repeal, legal abortions are now allowed during the first trimester, with costs covered by the public health service.

A similar situation in the US

As a social work professor who researches reproductive health care, I see many parallels between what happened in Ireland between 1983 and 2018 and the present U.S. situation.

People in the U.S. are already traveling long distances, often to other states, in a manner similar to the Irish abortion trail.

In both the U.S. and Ireland, the people who need help paying for abortions are mostly single people in their 20s who already have an average of two children, according to research I conducted with some abortion funds, which are charitable organizations that help people cover often-unaffordable abortion expenses.

In contrast to the United States, Ireland is moving away from political control over private life. If Roe is reversed and abortion is criminalized in much of the U.S., pregnant people could face decades of forced pregnancy, suffering and even death – as was the case in Ireland prior to 2018.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Gretchen E. Ely, University of Tennessee.

Read more:

US Senate to vote on abortion rights bill – but what would it mean to codify Roe into law?

Religious beliefs give strength to the anti-abortion movement – but not all religions agree

Gretchen E. Ely has previously received research funding from the Society of Family Planning, the National Network of Abortion Funds, and inroads: The International Network for the Reduction of Abortion Discrimination and Stigma. Dr. Ely also serves on the community board for the Planned Parenthood affiliate in Knoxville, TN.

Dirty liberal pipe-dream: 3 myths about electric cars




Some people raised questions about how electric vehicles would fare when stuck in a traffic jam in the snow (AFP/Angela Weiss)

Roland Lloyd Parry with AFP bureaus
Mon, May 16, 2022

Sceptics say that far from helping save the planet, electric cars are a liberal pipe-dream whose environmental benefits are exaggerated.

But even if there is no such thing as an all-green car, studies show that battery-powered ones cause fewer harmful greenhouse gas overall than their petrol-driven ancestors.

AFP Fact Check examined three common claims about them.

'Coal-powered'

"Coal Powered Electric Cars.... Helping liberals pretend they are solving a make-believe crisis," reads a text shared on Facebook, with a photo of cars plugged in at a charging station.

The humorous meme implies that electric cars do not help lower climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions because coal is burned to feed the electricity grid.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has a calculator tool on its website to compare a petrol car's emissions with those of an electric one depending on where it is charged.

It calculates that an electric car charged in St Louis, Missouri -– part of the subregion that relies the most on coal –- on average will produce 247 grams of carbon dioxide per mile, lower than the average 381 grams of a gasoline vehicle.

Experts at Carbon Brief agree an electric car's emissions depend on what region or country it is charged in.

They would be higher in Poland or in an Asian country where more coal is burned than in France, where most electricity comes from nuclear power.

Overall, the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) found electric cars are lower-emitting than their petrol-driven equivalents across their life cycle, from mining components to recycling.

An electric car is also much more efficient in its use of energy than a petrol-powered one, according to the US Department of Energy and other sources.

'200 tonnes of earth'

Making the vehicles' batteries is an energy-intensive process that includes mining and trucking raw materials, assembly in factories, and shipping worldwide. Recycling them is costly.

Another viral text shared on Facebook claimed that 500,000 pounds (227 metric tonnes) of earth are dug up to extract the metals for one electric car battery.

The estimate appeared to originate from a 2020 analysis by the Manhattan Institute, a climate-sceptic research group.

Several experts consulted by AFP said the figures were misleading. Peter Newman, professor of sustainability at Australia's Curtin University, judged it a "gross exaggeration" and said the quantity mined would vary depending on geography and the type of battery.

Mining has other impacts not immediately related to the global climate. About 70 percent of cobalt -- a battery ingredient -- comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where use of child labour in mines has been documented.

Access to the ingredients also raises strategic supply concerns, with many of the raw materials held by China, according to the International Energy Agency.

Georg Bieker, a Berlin-based researcher at the ICCT, said the environmental damage from oil-drilling made gasoline production no better.

The risk of devastation driven by greenhouse gas emissions, projected in recent reports by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, would be even worse.

"It is correct to demand improvements, e.g. as considered by voluntary standards in the industry and by mandatory due diligence requirements that are foreseen in the upcoming EU battery regulation," he said.

"In any case, it's clear that the social and environmental impact of global warming is catastrophic, at a different scale than the mining of battery raw materials."

'Stuck in snow'

After a snowstorm stranded hundreds of motorists in Virginia in January, users on Facebook shared posts warning that electric vehicles would run out of power and make the traffic jam even worse.

"All those people would be stuck in freezing temperatures without a heated vehicle. And all the cars would be stuck unable to move because you can't bring a charging station to them," read the text.

"All those electric cars would become roadblocks to the gasoline powered vehicles."

Several fact-checking organisations scrutinised the claim. They found there was no evidence that electric cars would fare worse in a storm.

Studies such as one published in 2015 by the American Chemical Society have found that electric vehicles do consume energy less efficiently when driving in the cold.

However various experts said that if stuck in a storm, an electric vehicle would consume less power than a gasoline one, which would have to keep its engine running to power the heating.

British consumer affairs magazine Which? tested an electric SUV by simulating a traffic jam, with the car's radio, air conditioning, seat-heating and headlights on, plus a tablet device plugged in playing a film.

That used up a negligible two percent of the battery, or eight miles' worth of range, in an hour and a quarter - admittedly in summer conditions.

rlp/mh/yad

Student protest as discontent rises over China's zero-COVID
 

 

KEN MORITSUGU and DAVID RISING
Tue, May 17, 2022

BEIJING (AP) — Administrators at an elite Beijing university have backed down from plans to further tighten pandemic restrictions on students as part of China’s “zero-COVID” strategy after a weekend protest at the school, according to students Tuesday.

Graduate students at Peking University staged the rare, but peaceful protest Sunday over the school’s decision to erect a sheet-metal wall to keep them further sequestered on campus, while allowing faculty to come and go freely. Discontent had already been simmering over regulations prohibiting them from ordering in food or having visitors, and daily COVID-19 testing.

A citywide lockdown of Shanghai and expanded restrictions in Beijing in recent weeks have raised questions about the economic and human costs of China’s strict virus controls, which the ruling Communist Party has trumpeted as a success compared to other major nations with much higher death tolls. While most people have grumbled privately or online, some Shanghai residents have clashed with police, volunteers and others trying to enforce lockdowns and take infected people to quarantine centers.

Many of the Peking University students protesting Sunday outside a dormitory took cellphone videos as Chen Baojian, the deputy secretary of the university’s Communist Party committee, admonished them through a megaphone to end the protest and talk with him one-on-one.

“Please put down your mobile phones, protect Peking University,” he said, to which one student yelled: “Is that protection? How about our rights and interests?”

The crowd of about 200 clapped and cheered as a half dozen protesters broke through the sheet-metal barrier behind Chen.

The phone videos were quickly shared over social media, but just as quickly removed by government censors. Some supportive comments remained, though many were also taken down, while some videos remain on Twitter, which is blocked in China.

“Peking University students are great!” wrote one person on the popular social media platform Weibo. “Fight for rights. A single spark can start a prairie fire.”

The Communist Party moves quickly to quash most activism and any sign of unrest, which it sees as a potential challenge to its hold on power. Peking University is among a handful of elite institutions that have played prominent roles in political movements including the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and the student-led 1989 pro-democracy protests centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that were crushed by the army.

Following the protest, university leaders met with student representatives and agreed to remove the sheet-metal barrier, the South China Morning Post reported Tuesday.

One graduate student who took part in the protest, who did not want her name published due to possible repercussions, said the wall had been taken down a short time later, and that other concessions were made to the students, including organizing free supermarket deliveries.

“We achieved our goals Sunday night,” said the student, who said she had been confined to the university's Wanliu residential compound for 7 days before the protest.

The compound is about 5 kilometers (3 miles) southwest of the main Peking University campus, housing young professors and graduate students. It also has a gym, a supermarket and other facilities.

Authorities have tightened restrictions on access to campuses and monitoring of classroom instruction and student life, making such protests extremely rare. In 2018, police detained students at schools including Peking University who had sought to form an alliance with protesting factory workers, displaying their refusal to tolerate even mild attempts at political activism.

As most other countries in the world have begun to ease restrictions and gradually open back up, China has stuck tenaciously to its zero-COVID policy.

The strict lockdowns with most public areas closed down have played havoc with employment, supply chains and the economy in general, and are becoming increasingly hard on people as the highly transmissible omicron variant proves more difficult to stop.

In Beijing, authorities on Tuesday restricted more residents to their homes in a now 3-week-long effort to control a small but persistent COVID-19 outbreak in the Chinese capital.

Seven adjoining areas in the city's Fengtai district were designated lockdown zones for at least one week, with people ordered to stay at home in an area covering about 4 kilometers by 5 kilometers (2.5 miles by 3 miles). The area is near a wholesale food market that was closed indefinitely on Saturday following the discovery of a cluster there.

The added restrictions come as Shanghai, China’s largest city, slowly starts to ease a citywide lockdown that has trapped most of its population for more than six weeks.

China recorded 1,100 new cases on Monday, the National Health Commission said Tuesday. Of those, about 800 were in Shanghai and 52 were in Beijing. The daily number of new cases in Shanghai has declined steadily for more than two weeks, but authorities have been moving slowly to relax restrictions, frustrating residents.

In Beijing, the number of cases has held steady but new clusters have popped up in different parts of the city. City spokesperson Xu Hejian said that Beijing's top priority is to screen people related to the cluster at the wholesale food market and isolate those who test positive. A second wholesale food market in Fengtai district was shut down Tuesday.

Most of Beijing is not locked down, but the streets are much quieter than usual with many shops closed and people working from home.

___

Rising reported from Bangkok. Associated Press researcher Chen Si in Shanghai and news assistant Caroline Chen in Guangzhou, China, contributed to this report.

Tuesday, May 17, 2022, in Beijing.

 (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)