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Nepal Crash Site Reveals Flight Data, Voice Recorders

Nepal Crash Site Reveals Flight Data, Voice Recorders

(CTN NEWS) – POKHARA, Nepal –  The flight data and cockpit voice recorders of a passenger plane that crashed into a ravine on approach to a new airport in the foothills of the Himalayas were found on Monday, according to officials.

As investigators sought to determine what caused Nepal’s deadliest plane tragedy in 30 years.

Of the 72 persons aboard, at least 69 were killed, and authorities think the three missing people are also dead. Rescuers searched among the wreckage strewn down a gorge 984 feet deep and 300 meters deep for the victims.

The majority of passengers on the flight on Sunday were going back to Pokhara, though the city is also well-liked by tourists since it serves as the starting point of the Annapurna Circuit trekking circuit.

A man cries as he waits to receive the body of a victim of a plane crash, at a hospital in Pokhara, Nepal, Monday, Jan 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Yunish Gurung)

Some shouted at officials to expedite the postmortems so they could hold funerals for their loved ones as they gathered outside a nearby hospital on Monday evening. Some people did eventually receive their families’ bodies.

The crash, which occurred on a calm day with minimal wind and less than a minute’s flight from the airport, is still unknown.

Buildings, roads, and vegetation can be captured by a passenger looking out of a window as the aircraft comes in for a landing.

Following a sharp shock and a string of jerky pictures followed by screams, flames eventually engulf the screen in the video, which was shot by Sonu Jaiswal and confirmed by The Associated Press.

The aircraft last made touch with the airport, which only started operating two weeks ago, from a location close to Seti Gorge, according to Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority.

READ ALSO:   French ATR 72 Airplane Crashes in Nepal 68 Dead, 4 Missing

Family members receive the body of a victim of Sunday’s plane crash in Pokhara, Nepal, Monday, Jan 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Yunish Gurung)

The jet appeared to be making a routine landing until it abruptly veered to the left, according to a witness who captured the fall on camera.

Diwas Bohora remarked, “I observed that and was shocked. I believed everything would be over here when it crashed today, and I would also perish.”

Red flames appeared after it crashed, and the earth shook ferociously, according to Bohora. I was terrified after seeing that scenario, he continued.

A stall is a scenario in which a plane loses lift, which is particularly likely at low airspeeds, according to Amit Singh, an experienced pilot and the founder of India’s Safety Matters Foundation. Bohora’s video appears to illustrate one of these situations.

The 27-minute trip from the nation’s capital, Kathmandu, to Pokhara, 200 kilometers (125 miles) to the west, was being completed by the twin-engine ATR 72 aircraft, which is flown by Nepal’s Yeti Airlines.

A woman wails as she waits to receive the body of a relative, victim of a plane crash, at a hospital in Pokhara, Nepal, Monday, Jan 16, 2023.(AP Photo/Yunish Gurung)

According to a statement from Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority, it carried 68 passengers, including 15 foreign people and four crew members.

Five Indians, four Russians, and two South Koreans, each from Ireland, Australia, Argentina, and France, were among the outsiders.

According to authority spokesman Jagannath Niraula, the flight recorders will be given to the investigators. The cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder were both discovered, according to Pemba Sherpa, a representative for Yeti Airlines.

Eight of the fourteen highest mountains in the world, including Mount Everest, are found in Nepal.

The nature of the area, with its high peaks and constrained valleys, increases the risk of accidents and at times forces pilots to fly by sight rather than depending on instruments, according to a pilot who frequently flies an ATR 72-500 aircraft from India to Nepal.

The ATR 72-500 is an “unforgiving aircraft” if the pilot isn’t highly skilled and acquainted with the topography and wind speeds of the area, according to the pilot, who works for a private Indian airline and insisted on being anonymous owing to company policy.

A portrait is displayed on the coffin of a Sunday’s plane crash victim in Pokhara, Nepal, on Monday, Jan 16, 2023.(AP Photo/Yunish Gurung)

Hundreds of people have gathered outside the Pokhara Academy of Health and Science, Western Hospital, where the bodies are being stored.

When she learned that Tribhuban Paudel’s jet had crashed, Bimala Bhenderi said she had plans to meet her friend that day. She sobbed, “I’m so heartbroken, I still can’t believe it.”

Bikash Jaiswal claimed that the only way to identify his wife’s brother was by the ring he was wearing, and that he had not yet informed his wife—who had just given birth to their daughter.

To attend the birth, Sanjay Jaiswal, a marketing representative for a private pharmaceutical business in Kathmandu, was taking a flight to Pokhara.

His body was still at the hospital where his niece was delivered more than 24 hours after the collision.

Bikash stated, “He was a hard worker, and now there’s no one left in his family to earn.”

Rescuers stand by wreckage of a passenger plane that crashed in Pokhara, Nepal, Monday, Jan 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Anish Bhattarai)

The demise of Arun Paudel and his daughter, Prasiddi, was reported on Monday by Park Dae-seong, a politician and representative of the Won Buddhist order.

Arun Paudel, 47, was a police officer in Nepal until his brother converted him to the faith. Before he was ordained as a minister in 2009, he spent years studying religion at a university in South Korea.

In 2013, he returned to Nepal and opened a school in the Lumbini region where students could learn English, Korean, and computer science.

According to Park, Paudel was going back to Nepal to work on projects for the Vishow Ekata Academy.

People observe a candlelight vigil in memory of victims of a plane crash in Kathmandu, Nepal, Monday, Jan. 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Bikram Rai)

41 individuals have been identified, according to the Civil Aviation Authority. After postmortem results are completed, according to Gyan Khadka, a police spokeswoman for the area, the bodies will be given to the relatives.

Since the late 1980s, airlines all over the world have been using the ATR 72 type of aircraft for brief regional flights.

Due to two mishaps involving ATR 72-500 and ATR 72-600 aircraft in Taiwan in 2014 and 2015, the aircraft were temporarily grounded.

According to a tweet from ATR, an ATR 72-500 plane crashed on Sunday. The aircraft was 15 years old and “fitted with an obsolete transponder with poor data,” according to plane monitoring information from flightradar24.com.

According to data on Airfleets.net, it was formerly operated by Thailand‘s Nok Air and India’s Kingfisher Airlines before Yeti took over in 2019. A request for comment from ATR has gone unanswered.

Data from the Safety Matters Foundation show that since 1946, there have been 42 fatal plane crashes in Nepal.

The incident on Sunday is the deadliest in the nation since a Pakistan International Airlines plane crashed into a mountainside while attempting to land in Kathmandu in 1992, killing all 167 persons on board.

Since 2013, the European Union has prohibited Nepali airlines from operating flights into the 27-nation bloc, alleging lax safety regulations.

Improvements in Nepal’s aviation industry were noted by the International Civil Aviation Organization in 2017.

Although the EU is still pressing for administrative changes.

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Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

Google

Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.

According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.

Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.

google

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.

Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.

Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.

To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.

Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.

On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.

In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.

Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

google

Pixa Bay

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.

TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.

When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.

And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.

Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.

A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.

google

Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.

But today, it feels more like reality.

Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.

Could we remember Google in the same way that we remember Yahoo or Ask Jeeves in decades? These next few years could be significant.

SOURCE | CNN

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The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

Supreme Court

(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.

The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.

Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.

This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.

In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.

The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.

This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.

The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.

In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.

According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.

Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.

The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.

For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.

Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.

As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.

As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.

The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.

SOURCE: AP

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Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli, To repay $6.4 Million

shkreli

Washington — The Supreme Court rejected Martin Shkreli’s appeal on Monday, after he was branded “Pharma Bro” for raising the price of a lifesaving prescription.

Martin appealed a decision to repay $64.6 million in profits he and his former company earned after monopolizing the pharmaceutical market and dramatically raising its price. His lawyers claimed the money went to his company rather than him personally.

The justices did not explain their reasoning, as is customary, and there were no notable dissents.

Prosecutors, conversely, claimed that the firm had promised to pay $40 million in a settlement and that because Martin orchestrated the plan, he should be held accountable for returning profits.

shkreli

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

Martin was also forced to forfeit the Wu-Tang Clan’s unreleased album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” which has been dubbed the world’s rarest musical album. The multiplatinum hip-hop group auctioned off a single copy of the record in 2015, stipulating that it not be used commercially.

Shkreli was convicted of lying to investors and defrauding them of millions of dollars in two unsuccessful hedge funds he managed. Shkreli was the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals (later Vyera), which hiked the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill after acquiring exclusive rights to the decades-old medicine in 2015. It cures a rare parasite condition that affects pregnant women, cancer patients, and HIV patients.

shkreli

He defended the choice as an example of capitalism in action, claiming that insurance and other programs ensured that those in need of Daraprim would eventually receive it. However, the move prompted criticism, from the medical community to Congress.

shkreli

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

Attorney Thomas Huff said the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling was upsetting, but the high court could still overturn a lower court judgment that allowed the $64 million penalty order even though Shkreli had not personally received the money.

“If and when the Supreme Court does so, Mr. Shkreli will have a strong argument for modifying the order accordingly,” he told reporters.

Shkreli was freed from prison in 2022 after serving most of his seven-year sentence.

SOURCE | AP

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