Henan Province has ordered its namesake airline to change its name after it suffered China’s worst civil aviation disaster in nearly six years, saying that the accident has tarnished the province’s reputation.
A Henan Airlines passenger jet crashed on Tuesday while trying to land at night at a small airport in the country’s northeast, killing 42 people. Officials have yet to announce the cause of the crash, but initial probes and survivors’ accounts indicate the plane missed the runway and crashed on the ground.
PHOTO: AFP
TARNISHED NAME
The Henan Administration for Industry and Commerce, in an announcement posted late on Friday on its Web site, said the decision to revoke permission to use the provincial name for the airline was taken because the name tarnished the province’s image.
Henan had given special permission to the carrier to use the name when it moved its headquarters there last year.
But in the wake of the accident, the airline’s name had “cast an extremely adverse impact” on the province, the announcement said.
The crash by the Brazilian-made Embraer 190 plane also injured 54, including 17 who are in critical condition, the official Xinhua news agency reported yesterday.
NATIONWIDE CHECKS
China has announced it will inspect airline safety measures nationwide in the wake of the crash.
China’s aviation industry has expanded rapidly in recent years and regulators have struggled to keep up.
Airports have proliferated, as have small regional airlines, reaching into remote cities such as Yichun, which is 150km from the Russian border, and that are eager to develop tourism and other industries in an effort to catch up with the country’s economic boom.
PATIENCE
Xinhua quoted an official with China aviation body as saying an investigation into the crash could take a long time.
“The probe involves every aspect of the jet — its manufacturer, operator, pilot, crew, maintenance record as well as the air traffic management and airport authorities,” Li Jian (李健), vice director of the General Administration of Civil Aviation, was quoted as saying.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan