Tag Archive for: islamnews

Haitham al-Jabouri, secretary of parliament’s financial panel, which Chalabi had chaired, told news agencies that he was found dead in his bed in his Baghdad home after suffering a heart attack. 

Chalabi held many posts in the Iraqi government, including deputy prime minister and oil minister, and was a leading force against the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein. He survived at least one assassination attempt in 2008 that killed six of his bodyguards.

Educated in mathematics at two of America’s most prestigious schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Chicago, Chalabi taught as a professor in Beirut before making an unsuccessful foray into banking.

Chalabi spent the years 1992-1996 in the Kurdistan Region trying to topple Saddam with the Iraqi National Council, a group he founded that reportedly received as much as $100 million in funding from Washington.

When the US overthrew the Saddam regime, Chalabi was named one of the 25 members of the Iraqi Governing Council. Under his presidency, the council passes a law that outlawed the Baath party and ostracized its former members in a process that became famous as “de-Baathification.”

Chalabi’s ties with the US were complicated. He attended US president George W Bush’s State of the Union address in 2004 and sat with First Lady Laura Bush. Five months later, however, US forces raided his homes and offices and accused him of passing secret information to Iran, according to the BBC. Chalabi denied the charges.

In 2007, the BBC reports that he was given a post as a mediator between US troops and Baghdad residents in disputes about compensation for damages to homes during security checks.

Chalabi is believed to be survived by his wife Leila, and four children.

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Was a midair heat flash that a U.S. satellite detected over the Sinai Peninsula when the flight went down a sign of an explosion aboard the plane? And if that was the case, why haven’t investigators found signs of an explosive impact on the crash victims’ bodies, as Russian state media reports? Could the plane’s wreckage show that a past repair went awry?

There are a wide range of theories on what made the passenger jet plunge to the ground, killing all 224 people on board, but Russian officials say it’s too soon to speculate on the cause.

Aviation experts agree, and officials have downplayed an apparent claim by Islamic militants that they brought down the Airbus A321-200, saying technical failure is the most likely reason for the crash.

Here’s a look at the evidence investigators are looking at:

Radar

Flight 9268 was on its way from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg early Saturday when it dropped off radar about 23 minutes into the flight, Egyptian officials say.

Air traffic controllers apparently didn’t receive any distress calls.

The website Flightradar24, which tracks aircraft around the world, said it had received data from the Russian plane suggesting sharp changes in altitude and a dramatic decrease in ground speed before the signal was lost.

Satellite data

A U.S. military satellite detected a midair heat flash from the Russian airliner before the plane crashed Saturday, a U.S. official said.

Intelligence analysis has ruled out that the Russian commercial airplane was struck by a missile, but the new information suggests that there was a catastrophic in-flight event — including possibly a bomb, though experts are considering other explanations, according to U.S. officials.

Analysts say heat flashes could be tied to a range of possibilities, including a bomb blast, a malfunctioning engine exploding or a structural problem causing a fire on the plane.

Black boxes

Egyptian officials have said they are finishing fieldwork first, and then will go on to investigate the data in the black boxes. Experts started retrieving data from the recorders on Monday, Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry said.

Russia’s privately owned Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed source in Cairo as saying the plane’s cockpit voice recorder had captured uncharacteristic sounds the moment before the flight disappeared.

It cited the source as saying that an “unexpected’ and “nonstandard (emergency)” occurred “instantly,” which was why the pilots failed to send an emergency or alarm signal.

A top Russian aviation official has said the plane broke apart in midair. Sounds in the black-box recording could help investigators determine what caused that to happen, said Peter Goelz, an aviation analyst and former managing director of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

“You can tell whether it is a high-order explosion, or a more low-order event, like a decompression and a tearing apart of the aircraft,” he said.

The wreckage

The Egyptian committee investigating the Metrojet plane crash is expected to finish fieldwork on Tuesday evening, Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Hossam Kamel said in a news statement Tuesday.

That’s a sign that investigators will soon be closer to figuring out what happened, said Alan Diehl, a former accident investigator for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Air Force.

“This airplane went down in the desert … and that makes it a lot easier to locate the critical pieces. But that is very quick, if they can do that and get the forensic wreckage evidence into the labs, that will be good news,” he said.

State broadcaster Russia 24 reported that the aircraft’s tail was found about 5 kilometers (3 miles) away from the rest of the plane wreckage. It did not show any signs of burning from a fire, the state broadcaster said.

Russian state media has reported that so far, investigators haven’t found any traces of explosive devices in the debris.

Explosives expert Chris Owen, from Alford Technologies, said that if swabs had been taken from plane debris quickly — while the wreckage was dry — it could be possible to identify any explosive residue in a lab.

“However, there would probably be quicker and more obvious evidence from the type of damage sustained by bits and pieces around the bomb,” he said. “Surfaces in the vicinity of any explosion would be expected to be bent, perforated, petaled, spalled, sheared, frayed, charred (especially fibers), melded by impact, and otherwise characteristically damaged.”

Owen said it would be hard to rule out a bomb blast just because evidence of one had not been discovered. “If a bomb is ruled out, it will likely be because another cause has been found,” he said.

The plane’s maintenance history

According to the Aviation Safety Network, which tracks aircraft incidents, the same plane’s tail struck a runway while landing in Cairo in 2001 and required repair. At the time, the aircraft was registered to the Lebanese carrier Middle East Airlines, registration records show.

Kogalymavia’s Andrei Averyanov said the plane had been damaged in 2001, but had most recently been thoroughly checked for cracks in 2013. Not enough time had passed for major cracks to develop to a critical size since then, he said.

Mary Schiavo, former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation, said she once worked on a crash where a tail strike that had not been repaired well brought down a plane almost two decades later.

Reports that the Metrojet Flight 9268’s tail was found miles away from the other plane wreckage, she said, indicate something could have gone wrong with the repair work after the tail strike.

“To me, it says (the tail) exited the plane before the explosive event and before the fire engulfed the plane. … A bad repair is like a ticking time bomb, because once it’s on the plane, it stays with the plane forever,” she said.

The A321-200 was built in 1997, and the airline company Kogalymavia, which flies under the name Metrojet, had been operating it since 2012, Airbus said. The aircraft had clocked around 56,000 flight hours over the course of nearly 21,000 flights, the plane maker said.

So far, officials have said all its inspections were in order.

Metrojet official Alexander Smirnov said the airline had ruled out technical problems and human error. Protection systems on the plane would have prevented it from crashing, he said, even if there were major errors in the pilot’s control equipment. But authorities have said it’s too soon to rule out any possible cause for the crash.

The victims

Most of the bodies retrieved at the crash site are intact, a medical source in Sinai said on Monday, and showed no major burns.

On the bodies of victims recovered so far, investigators haven’t found any sign of explosive impact, Russian state media reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.

Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported that Russian and Egyptian experts had not found any blast-related trauma during their preliminary examination of the bodies, citing a Russian source within the investigation.

That doesn’t eliminate the possibility that an explosion occurred, said safety analyst David Soucie, a former accident investigator for the Federal Aviation Administration.

“A blast would not have to be very large … to rupture the hull of that aircraft,” he said.

The security situation

Sinai has been a battleground between ISIS-affiliated militants and Egyptian security forces in recent years. Hundreds have died in the fighting.

The militants appeared to claim responsibility for bringing down the Russian passenger jet in a statement posted online Saturday, but officials in Egypt and Russia have disputed that claim, saying there’s no evidence to support it.

Egypt’s Interior Ministry said it wasn’t stepping up security in Sharm El-Sheikh or at the resort city’s airport “because there is no indication (the plane crash) was a terrorist operation.”

But the U.S. Embassy in Cairo has sent a security message to its employees, instructing them not to travel anywhere in the Sinai Peninsula pending the outcome of the crash investigation.

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Backed by a grand regional coalition and the tacit agreement of the international community, Saudi Arabia has ravaged Yemen, raining missiles on its people.

As weeks turned into months, Yemenis found themselves caught in the eye of a furious storm, the prisoners of a war they did not seek nor did initiate.

Over 26 million people now stand in the line of fire.

The poorest nation of Arabia,over 50 percent of all Yemenis had to contend with an estimated $2 per day to survive – today over 50 percent of all Yemenis have to make due with less than a $1 per day, notwithstanding monetary devaluation.

In 2012, UNICEF reported that over a million children had been categorized as severely malnourished – today thousands have died of malnutrition, poor sanitation and a lack of medicine.

After six months of intense fighting and a de-facto blockade on commercial goods into the country, more than 21 million of Yemen’s 25 million people now require some form of aid to survive, and more than 1.5 million have fled their homes.

The humanitarian crisis in Yemen has reached “disturbing proportions,” with more than 535,000 children facing malnutrition, imminent famine and death, UNICEF senior official Afshan Khan told media this October.

“We are facing the potential of a huge humanitarian catastrophe … The levels of malnutrition that are being reported for children are extremely critical,” said Khan, the director of the U.N. Children’s Fund’s emergency programs around the world.

The World Food Program recently sounded off alarms over the critical situation in Yemen, as 13 million people have not had access to adequate food, while 6 million more face a “particularly difficult situation.”

UNICEF said fewer than 20 percent of food centers are operating in the embattled country. The U.N. body warned the situation is likely to worsen soon.

The death toll in Yemen since the start of Saudi-led airstrikes has climbed to 5,400 people, including more than 2,400 civilians and at least 502 children, according to UNICEF.

Independent sources have warned that those statistics are more than just a little “conservative”. Sources in Yemen have put the death toll at over 15,000 people, the majority of which civilians.

Suffocated by an embargo which has defied all humanitarian laws, Yemen has been cut off the world.

With no food, no fuel, no access to clean water, no medicine, no shelter and no means to protect themselves from the harsh climate, millions await, completely destitute.

Because humanitarian aid has so far been entrusted to Saudi Arabia, and because Saudi Arabia has systematically imposed conditions on such aids; thus violating international law, the Mona Relief Organization decided to step in this humanitarian wasteland and offer some comfort to a people otherwise forgotten.

The Mona Relief Organization relies solely on independent donations. The NGO does not represent any political party, and it does not speak for any political or religious agenda.

This local NGO aims to provide humanitarian assistance where it is needed, while offering long lasting solutions for the communities it serves.

Whenever possible the Mona Relief Organization sources products locally to boost commerce and provide local economic relief.

Because Yemen is under blockade, relying on local stocks is the only way!

While the NGO has been so far successful, winter and a recent humanitarian degradation prompted the organization to launch an urgent appeal:

#SaveALifeInYemen

War is a tragedy, let’s not make it the end of Yemen’s story.

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According to the Iranian calendar, Wednesday, Aban 13, marks the day when Iranian students took over the US embassy in Tehran, dubbed the “den of espionage,” back in 1979. It has been named the National Day of Fighting Global Arrogance.

In his Tuesday remarks, Ayatollah Khamenei referred to the 1953 coup d’état against former Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, and noted the then-premier made a mistake by putting his trust in the US after the Iranian oil industry was nationalized.

The Leader said the US has in recent years been involved in having certain individuals conceal its hostile intentions against Iran; the objective is to hide the real intention of the enemy from Iran so foes can harm the country, Ayatollah Khamenei said.

Some people do that with evil motives, some others out of folly, the Leader said.

Ayatollah Khamenei urged Iranian students to learn lessons from the US embassy takeover, noting that those students who seized the embassy found out that it was a “den of espionage.”

“This shows that the Americans, at the height of the [revolutionary] movement and the victory of the Revolution, were conspiring against the Islamic Republic; that is what America is,” the Leader said.

The Leader pointed to the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries and said it was the strength of the Iranian nation that forced the countries that claim a world power status to join each other and rise up to the Iranian nation and employ the hostile measures that they did in the hope that the Iranian nation would no more be able to stand on its feet. “That is the power of the Iranian nation,” Ayatollah Khamenei said.

Taking insignificant internal issues as pretexts, some people forget who the enemy is, the Leader said, adding that, “Of course, the society is free, and criticism leads to progress; however, one shouldn’t mistake the main enemy with secondary enemies and with friends with whom one has disagreements.”

“The main enemy is he who seeks to destroy the achievement of the Iranian nation,” the Leader of the Islamic Revolution said.

“In the negotiations, claiming that they opposed war, Americans even shed tears in front of cameras. This is the very person who doesn’t bother when Zionists cut to pieces hundreds of children in Gaza. Is crying in front of the camera a sincere act?” the Leader said.

‘Death to US policies’

“The slogan ‘death to America’ is backed by reason and wisdom; and it goes without saying that the slogan does not mean death to the American nation; this slogan means death to the US’s policies, death to arrogance,” the Leader noted.

“Our universities were one day a bridge to the West; today, they are ladders to reach high goals; certain people want to destroy this ladder and replace it with that bridge to the West,” Ayatollah Khamenei said, urging alertness by the youth in the face of such attempts.

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