Forty-one of the 53 bodies pulled from the Black Sea after an Armenian airliner crash have been identified, Russian Transport Minister Igor Levitin said yesterday, as Russia and Armenia observed a day of mourning for the 113 victims of the disaster.
A special diving vehicle was sent to the site of the crash, about 6km off the southern Russian resort of Sochi, to try to pinpoint the remains of the plane's fuselage on the sea floor.
Levitin said authorities were searching both in Russia and abroad for equipment to raise the fuselage, where some bodies are thought to be trapped.
PHOTO: AP
"I want to say, for us the most important thing now is raising the bodies, because we understand that for the victims' relatives not raising the bodies or fragments would be an even bigger tragedy," Levitin told reporters.
He had said on Thursday that searchers had located a large part of the plane's fuselage that was emitting a radio signal believed to be from a flight recorder, and he later said a signal from the plane's other "black box" had been detected.
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
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