A bomb scare on board a passenger airliner from China to Australia forced the pilot to abort the flight, shaken passengers said yesterday.
A note warning that a bomb would explode on the China Southern Airlines flight from Guangzhou to Sydney was found less than an hour into the journey, the passengers told reporters.
The pilot returned to Guangzhou, where some 200 passengers were delayed for hours as the plane was searched, they said when they finally arrived in Sydney seven hours late.
Airline spokesman Bill Bryant said a threatening note was found in a lavatory on the Airbus A330.
"They had no option but to return and make sure the aircraft was scoured from top to bottom," Bryant told reporters.
Australian passenger Jason Harper described the fear aboard the plane as it became apparent that something had gone wrong: "They dumped all the fuel. Then all the lights went out. But no one knew what was happening."
"Then we landed and there were about 20 police cars and fire engines and stuff everywhere," he said.
"You've actually been moved to the back of the plane, all the power cut out, then they started dumping fuel -- it was all pretty dramatic for everyone on board," another passenger told national radio.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.