48 people die in a passenger plane crash in Russia's Far East, officials say
Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said earlier that it had found the burning fuselage of the Soviet-designed twin turbo prop plane on a hillside south of its planned destination in the town of Tynda, more than 4,350 miles east of Moscow.
The plane, which was operated by the Siberia-based Angara Airlines, had initially departed from Khabarovsk before making its way to Blagoveshchensk on the Russian-Chinese border and onwards to Tynda.
It wasn't immediately clear what caused the crash. Russia's Interfax news agency said there were adverse weather conditions at the time of the crash, citing unnamed sources in the emergency services. Several Russian news outlets also reported that the aircraft was almost 50 years old, citing data taken from the plane's tail number.
Images of the reported crash site circulated by Russian state media show debris scattered among dense forest, surrounded by plumes of smoke.
Regional Gov. Vasily Orlov said rescuers struggled to reach the site due to its remote location, 9 miles south of Tynda.
The transport prosecutor's office in the Far East said in an online statement that the plane was attempting to land for a second time when it lost contact with air traffic control and disappeared from radars.
Orlov announced three days of mourning in the Amur region to mark the disaster, which he described as a 'terrible tragedy.'
A previous statement from the govenor said that 49 people had been onboard the flight. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear.
The authorities have launched a probe on the charge of flight safety violations that resulted in multiple deaths, a standard procedure in aviation accidents.
Aviation incidents have been frequent in Russia, especially in recent years as international sanctions have squeezed the country's aviation sector.
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Boston Globe
13 hours ago
- Boston Globe
‘How can this be happening?' The coincidence that put my family trauma in a new light.
Frankly, I was happy to put Boston behind me. My childhood was miserable, filled with trauma. I never wanted to return to this place, except perhaps for holidays or funerals. Or so I thought. I had received a job offer from The Boston Globe, a paper I long idolized, and just had to take it. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up The Facebook invite was from Kellie, a person who wasn't quite a friend in high school. But we got along — I recall we danced a bit on stage when we performed in our high school musical. 'Who would you like to invite?' Kellie asked. Good question. I didn't really keep in touch with anyone. But I was Facebook friends with several people like Kellie, classmates who were friendly acquaintances but people I never spent time with outside of school. When you're a kid and struggling, you think you're the only one who's struggling. Trauma is not something people easily speak about, especially in high school where the number one goal is conformity. You sit in a classroom and stare at the other kids and wonder what it might be like to be normal. So, it was shocking to see them at the cookout now as adults, stumbling through life just as I was. Not everyone I invited could make it. A few weeks later, I received a Facebook message from someone I'll call Madeline for the purposes of this story. 'Hey Tom, sorry I missed your welcome back party! I was away. Wondering if you would like to come have dinner sometime. ... I live in Watertown with my husband and kids. I think you'd like my husband. He's nice.' 'Sure,' I replied. 'That's nice of you. What's your address?' Her response froze me. For several seconds, I stared blankly at the number and street name. No. That's not possible. Good and bad reality My parents emigrated from China to Boston in the 1950s. They started a laundry business before Dad went to work for New England Telephone Company. He would sit on a bench and assemble parts into landline telephones. Like many Chinese families, they wanted desperately to have a son, which proved difficult for them. By the time I was born in 1977, Dad was already 49 years old and father to four daughters. No one would ever mistake us for the Brady Bunch. Dad was an angry, abusive man who frequently unleashed his verbal and physical wrath on his wife and daughters. He never laid a hand on me, though he was psychologically abusive. Mom suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. She could be loving and caring in one moment and then suddenly attack me with a ruler or Wiffle ball bat for the tiniest of infractions. She heard voices and insisted that the neighbors were using a machine to monitor our thoughts. My eldest sister, whom I'll call Susan, started to lose her grip on reality in her late teens and was also diagnosed with schizophrenia. She would chase me throughout the house with a pair of scissors, threatening to castrate me. She would frequently try to climb into bed with me. I coped with the chaos the same way many trauma victims deal with such things: I buried it deep inside me. I started to compartmentalize reality. There was the 'good reality,' the one where I hung out with friends, crushed on a girl, acted in high school plays, and wrote for the town newspaper. The world in which I exercised a degree of control and provided my life with some measure of hope and meaning. And then there was the 'bad reality' of the horror and fear that I endured at home. The reality that still terrifies me. I vowed to keep these realities apart. Not just out of self-preservation but also out of fear that my bad reality would somehow pollute or 'infect' my good reality. That's why I rarely spoke about my parents or siblings or why I freaked out when someone I knew saw me in public with them. No, these two realities must never meet. 'What else was I missing?' After high school, I went to college and tried not to look back. Over the next 25 years, I lived and worked in New York, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, and San Francisco. One of my sisters died from cancer in 2003, and Dad passed away three years ago. Both times, I kept my distance, though before my dad died I did return home once to help my parents move into a more senior-friendly house located just down the road from my childhood home in Watertown. Susan's life had rapidly deteriorated. She could no longer hold a job or live on her own. So she moved back in with my parents in their new home. Unfortunately, Susan's schizophrenia started to mirror Mom's. Susan thought the neighbors were out to get her. She accused them of trying to break into the house and prank-calling us. She convinced my mom to change phone numbers and to install a home alarm system. She even called the police on the neighbors. Yet my view on Susan gradually softened. Thanks to some difficult therapy and introspection, I began to see Susan as less of a monster who terrorized me and more of a human who was also a victim of my father's abuse. Once, when our sister was dying from cancer, Susan sent her a note that read: 'I'm sorry that you're sick. I would help you but as you know I'm not feeling really well myself.' The note stunned me. I didn't know Susan was even capable of such compassion, such clarity of thought. She had gotten so bad that I had doubted she could even read and write anymore. What else was I missing? What would have happened if Susan hadn't been abused? If she had received the care and treatment she needed? What kind of big sister would she have been? Would we even be pals? My thoughts were racing. I started to process everything by writing about mental health and familial abuse on social media. 'Over the years, I came to accept she had an awful illness and was also physically and sexually abused,' I wrote on Facebook on Oct. 16, 2022. 'I'm also sorry that she suffered so much in her life and that her sickness produced so much collateral damage.' My posts found a wide and compassionate audience. 'The fact that you came to understand how sick she was shows how you've grown in your awareness and understanding,' one friend wrote. 'It does not make your pain any less. But you are managing.' Said another: 'We grow through our painful experiences, but also through the experiences of others willing to share.' The things that bind us together When people learned I was returning to the Boston area, they assumed the reason was family. 'No,' I said. 'I'm here for the job. That's all.' That wasn't quite true. I wondered how Boston would look to me as a middle-aged man rather than as an angry, emotionally volatile 17-year-old. The dinner invitation from Madeline came as a surprise. For one thing, I was shocked that she had moved back to Watertown. Madeline, her older sister, and I had performed in the same high school plays. In fact, I had a major crush on her sister. That was a major part of the 'good reality' that I so desperately tried to protect from the 'bad.' And later, Madeline had tried to pursue a career in acting. She attended theater schools and auditioned for movie and television roles. I imagined her in New York or Los Angeles maybe. But yet here she was, married and raising a family in Watertown. But until I received her dinner invite, I didn't know exactly where. As it turned out, Madeline lives right next door to Mom and Susan. Could it be that Madeline and her family were the same neighbors my sister fixated on? The people she called the cops on? During the dinner, I tried to read Madeline and her husband, whom I'll call Greg, for some clues about whether she knew that my mom and sister lived next door. But they gave no indication of that. I started to think it wasn't them. I decided to find out. 'Hey, this is pretty weird,' I said. 'But did you know you live next door to my mom and sister?' Greg's face changed color. Madeline stopped eating. Silence. OMG. They were the neighbors. No, they didn't know it was my family. And yes, my sister called the cops on them. Three times. She accused them of racism. The cops had taken Susan's complaints seriously. Each time the police arrived they brought some kind of crisis interventionist/social worker to teach Madeline and Greg how not to be racist. 'I am not racist!' Madeline insisted to me. No matter how hard Madeline and Greg tried to convince Susan, she heard something different. 'First of all, I am so sorry," I said, mortified. 'Secondly, it's better that you do not say anything to her. No matter your intentions. She is just very sick.' 'I know,' Madeline said. 'At first, we were very upset. But then I started to read the social media posts of this guy I knew, who wrote on Facebook about mental illness and his family. He taught me compassion toward people who were struggling like this.' Who was this guy? 'You,' Madeline said. The world grew exponentially smaller. Let me get this straight: Madeline, an acquaintance with whom I had not spoken in 30 years, read my social media posts about mental health, which allowed her to better understand the actions of her ill neighbor, who turned out to be my sister . So in a sense, I was paying it forward to myself when I wrote those posts. To this day, I wrestle with what happened. I don't believe in coincidences. Everything has a reason. What was I supposed to take from all of this? I concluded that I had been mistaken to draw a distinction between 'good' and 'bad' reality. There is just reality. We view our lives holistically if we want to heal. We have to confront past trauma and reconcile it with our present and future. The bad stuff in my life occurred simultaneously with the good stuff. It's true that my sister chased me with scissors. It's equally true that I happily performed plays with Madeline and her sister. And somehow the universe saw fit to remind us that life can be filled with mysterious little coincidences that seem unrelated but ultimately bind us together. The question is whether you want to see the big picture.
UPI
a day ago
- UPI
New memorial project brings Britain's bloodiest Korean War battle to life
SEOUL, July 25 (UPI) -- On the site of one of the Korean War's most ferocious battles, a pioneering hybrid online/offline tour was launched Friday to commemorate the British army's stand at the Battle of the Imjin River. "Stand in the Bootprints of Heroes," produced by the Seoul-based non-profit British Korean War Memorial Committee, features 11 QR-coded signs located at key sites around the battlefield in Paju, some 25 miles north of Seoul. The codes link to a series of 19 video episodes detailing the events of the three-day battle with narration, music, photographs, paintings and maps. The project's combination of real-world location markers with multimedia storytelling "brings history to life in a way that is immersive, respectful and accessible to all," Commodore Andy Lamb, Britain's defense attache in Seoul, said at a launch event held at the British Embassy in Seoul on Friday. "It is helping people connect with the past without altering the landscape itself," Lamb, who serves as the president of the BKWMC, said. The April 1951 battle came during the largest Chinese offensive of the Korean War and is remembered for the heroism of the British 29th Infantry Brigade, particularly the last stand of the Gloster Battalion. British and U.N. forces held off the Chinese 63rd Army in an effort to delay their advance toward Seoul. On April 25, the heavily outnumbered U.N. troops were forced to withdraw from their positions, but the Gloster Battalion was surrounded and fought valiantly until being overrun. The British held the key breakthrough point long enough to blunt the Chinese offensive and help U.N. forces maintain control of Seoul. With over 1,000 casualties, the Battle of the Imjin River remains Britain's bloodiest action since World War II. The 1950-53 Korean War left millions dead, including some 160,000 South Korean soldiers and more than 36,000 U.S. soldiers. Britain provided the second-largest contingent to the combined United Nations Command -- over 81,000 troops -- and saw 1,078 killed and 2,674 wounded. Despite the scope of the devastation, the Korean conflict has long been overshadowed in the West's historical memory, lost between World War II and the Vietnam War -- a situation the team behind the Imjin River project is hoping to help rectify. "It is widely recognized as the 'Forgotten War,' and this work tries to address that," Lamb told UPI. "We're trying to bridge together commemoration and education. As the number of veterans reduces and many of them come to the end of their lives, it's important that we find new ways to commemorate and inform." Younger Koreans also have much to learn about the history of the battles fought right in the backyard, said Lee Myung Hee, a Paju city official who attended the opening ceremony. Lee told UPI that the city is planning to promote the Imjin River project and is organizing a tour for students in October. "This project is a good opportunity for the younger generations, not only in Paju, but nationwide, to understand and remember what the veterans did during the Korean War," she said. "Standing in the Bootprints of Heroes" is the second project by the British Korean War Memorial Committee, which receives its funding from local business sponsors and private donations. The group installed a series of informative panels last year at Paju's Gloster Hill Memorial Park and is considering future expansions for the Imjin River site, including augmented-reality features and physical installations. A new project commemorating the 1951 Battle of Happy Valley in Goyang is also being discussed, organizers said. British Ambassador to South Korea Colin Crooks said in remarks at the launch event that the Imjin River tour is an innovative way to keep the stories of Korean War veterans alive. "One of the great privileges of being ambassador is helping to mark the British contribution to the Korean War," Crooks said. "As the number of living veterans declines, our duty to preserve their legacy becomes more urgent."
Hamilton Spectator
a day ago
- Hamilton Spectator
‘Pleased as punch': $265K Black history art installation now under construction honours early Oakville entrepreneur
The Town of Oakville has begun construction of a new permanent art installation honouring local Black history. Construction of the installation began in Burnet Park the week of July 14 and is expected to finish by the end of September. Town staff said the installation honours Oakville's Black history, community, heritage and, in particular, entrepreneur Samuel Adams, a free African American from Maryland who moved to the Oakville area around 1855. He came with his wife and young family and set up a successful blacksmith practice in Bronte. According to the Canadian Caribbean Association of Halton (CCAH), Adams would go on to invent equipment used to lift flat stones from the bottom of Lake Ontario so they could be used in construction. The practice would become known as 'stonehooking' and would become a significant industry in Oakville. Adams' invention of stonehooking equipment would make him a wealthy man and he would reportedly use this wealth to help African Americans fleeing slavery in America to make a life for themselves in Upper Canada. The CCAH said Adams also worked with Reverend William Butler to organize a group of devout Black settlers who, in 1891, built the Turner African Methodist Episcopal Church. The church building still stands at 37 Lakeshore Rd. W. Town staff said the art installation will incorporate stones from the foundation of the Adams family home, which stood at 104 Burnet St. until 2017, when it was demolished due to fire damage. There will also be iron benches at the site that call back to Adams' iron work. According to the Town of Oakville, $265,000 has been allocated to this project. Burnet Park remains open to the public during this construction period. 'We're pleased as punch that this is coming to fruition,' said Dionne Downer, CCAH executive director. 'I think this is a wonderful project and we're very pleased as a community by its progression.' Town staff said descendants of the Adams family have worked with the town and the CCAH to ensure the artwork would be designed by Black artists and reflect on and celebrate the contributions of the Black community to Oakville. Design work for the project was completed by a Black-owned architecture practice, the Studio of Contemporary Architecture (SOCA), a Toronto-based architecture and urban design studio. Avion Construction Group Inc., has been retained as the general contractor for construction. A statement on the SOCA website said their design for the installation, which they call a memorial to Adams, commemorates the life and legacy of a remarkable figure whose story embodies resilience, ingenuity, and community leadership. They said the salvaged foundation stones from the 19th century heritage home will anchor the site with authentic material memory. 'These stones are framed by newly constructed rammed earth walls that evoke permanence and craft,' the statement continues. 'Sculptural iron seating gestures to Adams' blacksmithing trade and longer histories of African iron work, while the open, contemplative design invites visitors to connect with a profound local history of migration, invention, and Black community-building. The project honours Adams' legacy not only as a skilled craftsman and entrepreneur, but as a builder of place — whose story continues to shape Oakville's cultural landscape.' Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
