US Gangster Whitey Bulger Found Slain in Prison

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31 October 2018, 14:04

This undated file FBI photo found in Boston during an evidence search and released Dec. 30, 1998, shows James "Whitey" Bulger. Photo: Associated Press

BOSTON — James “Whitey” Bulger, the murderous Boston gangster who benefited from a corrupt relationship with the FBI before spending 16 years as one of America’s most wanted men, was slain in federal prison. He was 89.

Bulger was found unresponsive Tuesday morning at the U.S. penitentiary in West Virginia where he’d just been transferred, and a medical examiner declared him dead shortly afterward, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Authorities did not immediately release a cause of death, but Justin Tarovisky, a prison union official, told The Associated Press it was being investigated as a homicide.

Bulger, the model for Jack Nicholson’s ruthless crime boss in the 2006 Martin Scorsese movie, “The Departed,” led a largely Irish mob that ran loan-sharking, gambling and drug rackets. He also was an FBI informant who ratted on the New England mob, his gang’s main rival, in an era when bringing down the Mafia was a top national priority for the FBI.

Bulger’s rap sheet started as a juvenile, and he spent three years in Alcatraz, the infamous island prison off San Francisco.

Bulger fled Boston in late 1994 after his FBI handler, John Connolly Jr., warned him he was about to be indicted. With a USD$2 million reward on his head, Bulger became one of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” criminals, with a place just below Osama bin Laden.

There was no love lost for Bulger on the Boston streets he once ruled.

Patricia Donahue’s husband, Michael, was killed in 1982 when he offered a ride home to a man allegedly targeted for death by Bulger because he was talking to the FBI. “I’d like to open up a champagne bottle and celebrate,” she told WBZ-TV on Tuesday.

Tom Duffy, a retired state police detective who searched for Bulger and was a consultant on “The Departed,” called word of Bulger’s death “celebratory news.”

When the extent of his crimes and the FBI’s role in overlooking them became public in the late 1990s, Bulger became a source of embarrassment for the FBI. During the years he was a fugitive, the FBI battled a public perception that it had not tried very hard to find him.

After more than 16 years on the run, Bulger was captured at age 81 in Santa Monica, California, where he had been living in a rent-controlled apartment near the beach with his longtime girlfriend, Catherine Greig.

In 2013, he was convicted in the slayings, as well as extortion, and money-laundering after a sensational racketeering trial that included graphic testimony from three former Bulger cohorts: a hit man, a protege and a partner. He was sentenced nearly five years ago to two consecutive life sentences plus five years.

Bulger had just been moved to USP Hazelton, a high-security prison with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. He had been in a prison in Florida before a stopover at a transfer facility in Oklahoma City. Federal Bureau of Prisons officials and his attorney had declined to comment on why he was being moved.

A lawyer who represented Bulger blamed the gangster’s death on decisions made by the Bureau of Prisons.

“He was sentenced to life in prison, but as a result of decisions by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, that sentence has been changed to the death penalty,” attorney J.W. Carney Jr. said in a statement.

Bulger, nicknamed “Whitey” for his bright platinum hair, grew up in a gritty South Boston housing project and became known as one of the most ruthless gangsters in Boston. His younger brother, William Bulger, became one of the most powerful politicians in Massachusetts, leading the state Senate for 17 years.

In working-class “Southie,” Bulger was known for helping old ladies across the street and giving turkey dinners to his neighbors at Thanksgiving. He had a kind of Robin Hood-like image among some locals, but authorities said he would put a bullet in the brain of anyone who he even suspected of double-crossing him.

“You could go back in the annals of criminal history and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone as diabolical as Bulger,” said Duffy.

“Killing people was his first option. They don’t get any colder than him,” Duffy said after Bulger was finally captured in June 2011.

Bulger was accused of strangling Debra Davis, the 26-year-old girlfriend of his partner, Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, and Deborah Hussey, also 26, the daughter of Flemmi’s common-law wife. In both cases, Bulger insisted on pulling out the women’s teeth so they would be difficult to identify, Flemmi testified.

During a search of his Santa Monica apartment, agents found over $800,000 in cash and more than 30 guns, many hidden in holes in the walls. A property manager at the building said Bulger and Greig, who used the names Charles and Carol Gasko, had lived there for 15 years and always paid the rent-controlled rate of $1,145 a month in cash.

They were caught days after the FBI began a new publicity campaign focusing on Greig. The daytime TV announcements showed photos of Greig and noted that she was known to frequent beauty salons and have her teeth cleaned once a month.

A woman from Iceland who knew Bulger and Greig in Santa Monica saw a report on CNN about the latest publicity campaign and called in the tip that led agents to them. The Boston Globe identified the tipster as a former Miss Iceland, a former actress who starred in Noxzema shaving cream commercials in the 1970s.

Greig is still serving her sentence at a federal prison in Minnesota.

Bulger, a physical fitness buff, had been taken to a Boston hospital from his jail cell at least three times, complaining of chest pains, since being brought back to Boston to stand trial.

Story: Denise Lavoie, Alanna Durkin Richer

‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Won’t Rock You, but Malek Will

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Associated Press

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31 October 2018, 13:44

Where does a preening, pansexual rock god get his powers? The Freddie Mercury biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody” traces his sonorous majesty to an unlikely place: his back teeth.

Mercury, nee Farrokh Bulsara, was born with four extra incisors, giving him a bigger mouth. Introducing himself to his future Queen bandmates Mercury, as played by Rami Malek, explains that the added chompers have benefits beyond a provocative, pronounced overbite. It endows him with enhanced vocal range.

Teeth-assisted or not, Mercury’s voice was so expansive that it prompted genuine scientific inquiry. But range is one thing sorely lacking in Bryan Singer’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a slavishly conventional rock biopic that at every turn opts for the stereotypical despite a subject who devoted himself to the unconventional. It’s a remarkably bland movie about a deliciously vibrant performer.

Yet while “Bohemian Rhapsody” is so hollowly, even comically formulaic that even Dewey Cox of “Walk Hard” might snicker, it’s filled, often fantastically, by Malek’s sinuous, fully inhabited performance as the Queen frontman. It’s as if he didn’t get the note about the half-hearted filmmaking going on around him, or if he did, he’s hell-bent on ignoring it.

Malek, the “Mr. Robot” actor, throws himself into every strutting second of screen time as Mercury. He lacks both Mercury’s voice (it was overdubbed for singing and performance scenes) and Mercury’s teeth (Malek was outfitted with fake ones). But Malek’s performance, especially on stage, is so full-bodied that he transcends both his own differences with Mercury and the tepid surrounding melodrama.

That “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a bit of a mess isn’t altogether a surprise. Singer was fired toward the end of shooting for not showing up on set (Singer said it was to visit an ill parent) and was replaced by Dexter Fletcher. Singer remains the credited director; Fletcher is listed as a producer.

The script, too, underwent several passes before one by Anthony McCarten (“Darkest Hour, “The Theory of Everything”) ultimately prevailed. The film opens moments before Queen’s Live Aid performance at Wembley Stadium in 1985, and – as if by rock biopic decree – shifts back in time to young Freddie, in his mid-20s and living with his parents in the London suburbs.

Mercury was born to a Parsi family from Zanzibar (he attended boarding school in India), but we get only the slightest of hints of his family heritage or what made Mercury run from it. By the time we meet him, he hasn’t yet adopted his Roman god moniker (more than a stage name, he made “Mercury” legal), but he might as well have. Young Freddie is already a larger-than-life figure clearly destined to a life of skin-tight jumpsuits and glam-rock anthems. In a flash he goes from slinging luggage on the Heathrow tarmac to convincing guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) that he’s their new lead singer.

Everything in “Bohemian Rhapsody” happens less with the thrust of life than the rapid-fire recounting of a biographical history, sometimes rigorously in step with Wikipedia, sometimes taking shortcuts to avoid anything that strays outside a neatly contrived narrative. In the span of minutes, Queen is a sensation with a record contract (Mike Meyers joins for a tongue-in-cheek cameo as EMI executive Ray Foster) and aspirations for much more: a world tour, a far-out concept album and beyond. Our sense is that Mercury has swiftly – and with curiously little trouble – realized his true self, in all his peacocking glory.

The conflict, hinted at in passing glances in between recording sessions, is that Mercury, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1991 at 45, isn’t quite so free off stage as he is on, despite all his radical flamboyance. Much time is spent with his longtime partner Mary Austin (Lucy Boyton) and, later, with a diabolical personal manager-boyfriend, Paul Prenter (Allen Leech), who gets most of the blame for anything bad Mercury ever did.

But the film mostly sticks to the familiar trajectory of rock stardom: studio magic, backstage excess, band infighting, misguided solo efforts, drug problems and – that most heinous of menaces in the music biopic – the temptation of disco.

The only time “Bohemian Rhapsody” works is when it finally retreats from not just the standard biopic narrative but from storytelling altogether. It concludes with a nearly song-by-song recreation of the band’s reunion show at Live Aid which, despite the movie’s fudged timeline, took place two years before Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis. Still, the power comes mainly from the tunes and from Mercury/Malek’s magnificent stage presence. “Bohemian Rhapsody” might be easy come, easy go, but Malek makes for a show-stopping silhouetto of a man.

“Bohemian Rhapsody,” a 20th Century Fox release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for thematic elements, suggestive material, drug content and language. Running time: 134 minutes. Two stars out of four.

Story: Jake Coyle

Koh Samet Says No More Plastic Bags or Styrofoam on Island

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JINTAMAS SAKSORNCHAI

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31 October 2018, 13:01

A file photo of tourists arriving on Koh Samet.

RAYONG — The top parks official on Koh Samet said Wednesday that plastic bags and styrofoam will no longer be welcome there as of tomorrow.

In a bid to reduce the amount of plastic waste, the chief of the Khao Laem Ya–Mu Ko Samet National Park said tote bags have been distributed to all island residents, and those found using plastic bags and styrofoam containers will face fines. Tourists are unlikely to be penalized, for now.

“Tomorrow we will organize an event calling for people to stop using styrofoam and plastic bags,” Prayoon Pongpan said today. “We want to announce that Koh Samet will no longer be using plastic bags.”

He said visitors won’t be allowed to bring them onto the island, which is national park land. He said staff members at the pier would check if people have plastic bags, an enforcement scheme difficult to imagine in practice.

A campaign video posted online by the park Monday said that the more than 1,500 tourists who visit the island each use about eight plastic bags, making for 12,000 bags dumped every day on the environmentally sensitive island.

It was announced in June that all national parks across country are banning plastic and styrofoam containers, but enforcement appears lacking.

For Samet, shop owners were told to stop distributing plastic bags or risk fines of 1,500 baht, Prayoon said. Residents will first be warned, and repeat offenders face fines between 500 baht and 1,500 baht.

He said tourists won’t be fined just yet if found bringing a plastic bag onto the island, adding that free tote bags will be available for their use.

Belgian Groove Gurus ‘2ManyDjs’ to Mix Things Up in Bangkok

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Chayanit Itthipongmaetee, Staff Reporter

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31 October 2018, 12:34

A promotional poster of an upcoming 2Manydjs gig in Bangkok

BANGKOK — A frontrunning act in Europe’s electronic scene and the ‘00s remix movement are heading to Bangkok late November.

Known under the moniker Soulwax, Belgian brothers David Dewaele and Stephen Dewaele are coming to Bangkok to perform as 2ManyDJs.

The left-of-center progressive duo has been active since mid-1990s. They play and mix everything from prog-rock and R&B to hip-hop and techno (one of their bootleg mashups,“Smell Like Teen Booty,” mixes Nirvana and Destiny’s Child).

Their album “As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2” was highly acclaimed upon its release in 2002 and was named the best popular music album of the year by The New York Times.

For their Bangkok gig, 2ManyDjs will be supported by local veteran DJ Knatz. The concert takes place Nov. 24 at Live Arena. The renovated music venue, at same location of the former Live RCA, can be found in the RCA area just a few kilometers from MRT Phetchaburi.

Tickets are 690 baht and available online.

Hate Rejection? ‘My Taxi’ to Guarantee Trips – For a Premium

By

Teeranai Charuvastra, News Chief

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31 October 2018, 12:31

Police put stickers on a taxi in Bangkok on July 26, 2017, during a campaign to educate cab drivers on laws and etiquettes.

BANGKOK — If you, like so many other Bangkokians, are fed up with taxi drivers refusing your fare, a novel cab service has a pitch to make.

For a fixed monthly price – starting at 6,500 baht – its cabbies would always pick you up and take you to your destination. The founder of the firm, called My Taxi, said he hopes the service would not only end passengers’ complaints, but also offer taxi drivers steady jobs with decent pay.

“Passengers often can’t find cabs when they need them, but we have them for those who buy our service,” Woraphol Kaemkhuntod said in an interview. “Whichever driver is nearest to the customer, he can get it. We will use a GPS pin system.”

Though prices have yet to be announced and My Taxi is still in the planning stages, Woraphol outlined some basics. The cheapest package, at 6,500 baht a month, comes with three daily trips – about 70 baht per ride. There’s also a more expensive monthly fare of 12,000 baht for “long-distance trips” across the metropolis, such as from “Rama II Road to Pathum Thani,” Woraphol said.

Here’s the catch: Trips must be made between 6am and 6pm. Outside those hours, drivers will still pick passengers up but on metered fares.

“We set a target of 2,000 drivers,” said Woraphol, who also heads a taxi association. “The way I see the future is, when all the skytrain lines are completed, taxi drivers will find it harder to make money. So I set up this company as a way for them to earn money.”

But thousands of Bangkokians already sidestep the problem of non-compliant taxis by booking their rides through GrabCar and GrabTaxi. Indonesian ride-booking application Go Jek is also reportedly coming to Thailand soon.

Despite these entrenched competitors who do not require customers to pre-book rides for an entire month, Woraphol said he’s confident the idea will take off.

“It’s business,” he said. “It’s about competition and whose service is better.”

Woraphol added that My Taxi was already registered with the authorities, and its “official opening” would be announced at a later time.

Airport Taxis Back Down From Strike Threat

Govt Hopes New Apps Will Mean Better, Safer Bangkok Taxis

Synagogue Extremist Was Obsessed With Jewish Refugee Agency

By

Associated Press

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31 October 2018, 11:49

From left, President Donald Trump, accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, and Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, puts down a stone from the White House on Tuesday at a memorial for those killed at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Photo: Andrew Harnik / Associated Press

Just moments before the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left 11 people dead, the suspect is believed to have posted a final social media rant against a Jewish refugee settlement agency most people had never heard of, but which has increasingly become the target of right-wing rage and conspiracy theories.

“HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” Robert Gregory Bowers wrote on the platform Gab early Saturday. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

The group, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, was founded in 1881 in a Manhattan storefront to assist Jews persecuted in Russia and Eastern Europe. HIAS is now among nine groups that contract with the State Department to help refugees settle in the United States, and it has recently clashed with the Trump administration over policies that have throttled the flow of such newcomers.

Leaders of HIAS and the group’s Pittsburgh affiliate vowed to continue their work.

“We were the perfect target for this murderer, because we’re Jewish and we help refugees. So he gets to check off the two hate boxes,” Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS, told a news conference Tuesday in Pittsburgh.

Hetfield said HIAS is getting flooded with donations, with more coming in from non-Jews around the world than Jews for the first time in the organization’s history.

Analysts who follow the extreme right say the fixation some extremists have with HIAS appears to be fueled by a mix of anti-Semitism and the recent caustic rhetoric about an immigrant caravan trudging slowly toward the United States.

Specifically, they believe Bowers ascribed to the “white genocide” conspiracy, which holds that Jews are prominent among the forces seeking to destroy the “white race” by bringing in non-white people. The Gab.com account believed to be Bowers’ includes several recent postings or re-postings critical of HIAS.

Based in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Silver Spring, HIAS has an annual operating budget of USD$42 million and receives about half of its money from the federal government. It has resettled refugees of different faiths from Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iran and elsewhere. Among the thousands of people it has aided are Google co-founder Sergey Brin and singer Regina Spektor.

As the Trump administration restricted the number of refugees allowed into the U.S., HIAS and its local affiliates went from resettling 4,191 refugees in 2016 to 1,632 for the fiscal year that just ended.

Though HIAS strongly supports the rights of asylum seekers to a fair hearing, it has no connection to the immigrant caravan, said spokesman Bill Swersey.

“We’re the people who go to the airport, that bring the refugees home, that make sure there’s food in the fridge, make sure their kids know where the school is,” said Melanie Nezer, HIAS’s senior vice president for public affairs.

But right-wing extremists see HIAS in a more sinister light.

Heidi Beirich, who directs the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, said HIAS’s name comes up on white-supremacist message boards whenever posters become angry about refugees or immigrants. She noted that other resettlement agencies, such as those associated with Christian religions, have not raised the same sort of ire.

It happened toward the end of the Obama administration during the debate over Syrian refugees. Attention ratcheted up recently as President Donald Trump and others started drawing attention to the migrant caravan slowly making its way through Mexico toward the U.S. border.

Trump intensified his warnings about the caravan Monday, tweeting, “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!” as the Pentagon announced plans to deploy 5,200 troops to the Southwest border.

“White supremacists are ginned up right now,” Beirich said. “Their words are being echoed back to them by high-profile public figures.”

HIAS also has been public in its opposition to Trump’s immigration policies. It sued the administration in 2017 over the executive order halting refugee resettlement. In August, HIAS and the ADL led a delegation of national Jewish organizations to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said the high-profile visit this summer could have drawn the attention of right-wing extremists.

As Bowers appeared in federal court in a wheelchair Monday, HIAS-affiliated offices across the country increased security.

Nezer said the group is still processing the tragedy.

“I think we need to redouble our efforts to stand up for these values and not cower and hide,” she said, “because to me that would be the most dangerous response.”

Story: Michael Hill

Kepler Telescope Dead After Finding Thousands of Worlds

By

Associated Press

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31 October 2018, 11:33

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — NASA’s elite planet-hunting spacecraft has been declared dead, just a few months shy of its 10th anniversary.

Officials announced the Kepler Space Telescope’s demise Tuesday.

Already well past its expected lifetime, the 9 1/2-year-old Kepler had been running low on fuel for months. Its ability to point at distant stars and identify possible alien worlds worsened dramatically at the beginning of October, but flight controllers still managed to retrieve its latest observations. The telescope has now gone silent, its fuel tank empty.

“Kepler opened the gate for mankind’s exploration of the cosmos,” said retired NASA scientist William Borucki, who led the original Kepler science team.

Kepler discovered 2,681 planets outside our solar system and even more potential candidates. It showed us rocky worlds the size of Earth that, like Earth, might harbor life. It also unveiled incredible super Earths: planets bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

NASA’s astrophysics director Paul Hertz estimated that anywhere from two to a dozen of the planets discovered by Kepler are rocky and Earth-sized in the so-called Goldilocks zone. But Kepler’s overall planet census showed that 20 to 50 percent of the stars visible in the night sky could have planets like ours in the habitable zone for life, he said.

The USD$700 million mission even helped to uncover last year a solar system with eight planets, just like ours.

“It has revolutionized our understanding of our place in the cosmos,” Hertz said. “Now we know because of the Kepler Space Telescope and its science mission that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy.”

Almost lost in 2013 because of equipment failure, Kepler was salvaged by engineers and kept peering into the cosmos, thick with stars and galaxies, ever on the lookout for dips in in the brightness of stars that could indicate an orbiting planet.

“It was like trying to detect a flea crawling across a car headlight when the car was 100 miles away,” said Borucki said.

The resurrected mission became known as K2 and yielded 350 confirmed exoplanets, or planets orbiting other stars, on top of what the telescope had already uncovered since its March 7, 2009, launch from Cape Canaveral.

In all, close to 4,000 exoplanets have been confirmed over the past two decades, two-thirds of them thanks to Kepler.

Kepler focused on stars thousands of light-years away and, according to NASA, showed that statistically there’s at least one planet around every star in our Milky Way Galaxy.

Borucki, who dreamed up the mission decades ago, said one of his favorite discoveries was Kepler 22b, a water planet bigger than Earth but where it is not too warm and not too cold – the type “that could lead to life.”

A successor to Kepler launched in April, NASA’s Tess spacecraft, has its sights on stars closer to home. It’s already identified some possible planets.

Tess project scientist Padi Boyd called Kepler’s mission “stunningly successful.”

Kepler showed us that “we live in a galaxy that’s teeming with planets, and we’re ready to take the next step to explore those planets,” she said.

Another longtime spacecraft chasing strange worlds in our own solar system, meanwhile, is also close to death.

NASA’s 11-year-old Dawn spacecraft is pretty much out of fuel after orbiting the asteroid Vesta as well as the dwarf planet Ceres. It remains in orbit around Ceres, which, like Vesta, is in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Two of NASA’s older telescopes have been hit with equipment trouble recently, but have recovered. The 28-year-old Hubble Space Telescope resumed science observations last weekend, following a three-week shutdown. The 19-year-old Chandra X-ray Telescope’s pointing system also ran into trouble briefly in October. Both cases involved critical gyroscopes, needed to point the telescopes.

Hertz said all the spacecraft problems were “completely independent” and coincidental in timing.

Now 94 million miles from Earth, Kepler should remain in a safe, stable orbit around the sun. Flight controllers will disable the spacecraft’s transmitters, before bidding a final “good night.”

Story: Marcia Dunn

Leicester to Return to Action Saturday After Death of Owner

By

Associated Press

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31 October 2018, 11:17

Buddhist Monks pay their respects at Leicester City soccer club Tuesday Oct. 30, 2018, after Leicester Chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, seen in poster, died along with four other people Saturday evening in a helicopter crash outside King Power Stadium. Photo: Mike Egerton / Associated Press

Leicester’s grieving players will take to the field for the first time since the death of the club’s owner in a helicopter crash when they visit Cardiff for a Premier League game on Saturday.

The two teams said Tuesday the match will go ahead as planned in the Welsh capital, with a minute’s silence before kickoff and players wearing black armbands as a mark of respect for Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha and four other people who were killed in the tragedy.

Leicester’s players have been visibly affected by the incident and have spent Monday and Tuesday attending commemorative events to pay tribute to Vichai, the club’s popular Thai owner whose helicopter spiraled out of control as it left the King Power Stadium following a Premier League game against West Ham on Saturday.

“We will be offering our support to Leicester City in any way necessary in respect of this weekend’s fixture,” Cardiff chief executive Ken Choo said.

Leicester’s English League Cup match against Southampton, scheduled for Tuesday, had been canceled, while games involving the club’s women’s team were also called off in wake of the crash.

Leicester opened a book of condolence inside a specially erected marquee in memory of Vichai on Tuesday, as more supporters and people from the wider community arrived at the stadium to pay their respects.

Leicester striker Jamie Vardy and his wife, Rebekah, wept as they placed a wreath among an ever-growing shrine to Vichai that includes flowers, scarves and soccer jerseys. Leicester goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel, who was present at the scene of the crash on Saturday, was in tears as floral tributes were laid inside and outside the King Power Stadium on Monday.

Former Leicester manager Nigel Pearson, who guided the team away from relegation trouble the season before it won the Premier League in improbable fashion in 2016, said Vichai’s “quiet yet authoritative aura, presence and personality have had an immeasurable influence on English football.”

“A manager could not have wished for a better boss,” Pearson wrote in a personal letter published on the website of Belgian team OH Leuven, where he has been coach since last year.

Story: Denise Lavoie, Alanna Durkin Richer

Possible Seabed Position of Crashed Lion Air Jet Located

By

Associated Press

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31 October 2018, 10:52

Rescuers Tuesday carry a body bag containing the remains of victims retrieved from the waters where Lion Air flight JT 610 is believed to have crashed at Tanjung Priok Port in Jakarta, Indonesia. Photo: Binsar Bakara / Associated Press

JAKARTA — A massive search effort has identified the possible seabed location of the crashed Lion Air jet, Indonesia’s military chief said Wednesday, as experts carried out the grim task of identifying dozens of body parts recovered from a 15 nautical mile search area.

The 2-month-old Boeing plane plunged into the Java Sea on Monday just minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board.

“Based on the presentation of the head of the National Search and Rescue Agency, the coordinates of the suspected body of the aircraft have been found. We will send a team there to confirm,” said armed forces chief Hadi Tjahjanto.

The disaster has reignited concerns about safety in Indonesia’s fast-growing aviation industry, which was recently removed from European Union and U.S. blacklists, and also raised doubts about the safety of Boeing’s new generation 737 MAX 8 plane.

Boeing Co. experts are expected to arrive Indonesia on Wednesday and Lion Air has said an “intense” internal investigation is underway in addition to the probe by safety regulators.

Locating the fuselage will bring the search effort closer to finding the airplane’s flight recorders, which are crucial to the accident investigation.

Data from flight-tracking sites show the plane had erratic speed and altitude in the early minutes of a flight on Sunday and on its fatal flight Monday. Safety experts caution, however, that the data must be checked for accuracy against the plane’s “black boxes,” which officials are confident will be recovered.

Passengers on the Sunday flight from Bali to Jakarta have recounted problems that including a long-delayed takeoff for an engine check and terrifying descents in the first 10 minutes in the air.

Officials said the non-stop search effort has sent 48 body bags containing human remains to police identification experts.

Anguished family members have been providing samples for DNA tests and police say results are expected within 4-8 days.

Daniel Putut, a Lion Air managing director, said the airline and Boeing will meet Wednesday afternoon.

“Of course there are lots of things we will ask them, we all have question marks here, why? What’s the matter with this new plane,” he said.

Indonesia’s Transport Ministry has ordered all Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes operated by Lion Air and national carrier Garuda to be inspected.

Boeing declined to comment about potential inspections globally.

The aircraft manufacturer told airlines in a bulletin, “Boeing has no recommended operator action at this time,” according to two people familiar with the matter.

Story: Niniek Karmini, Stephen Wright

Louis Cha, Hong Kong Martial Arts Novelist, Dies at 94

By

Associated Press

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31 October 2018, 10:46

In this 2007 photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, Louis Cha smiles during a speech at Peking University in Beijing. Photo: Luo Xiaoguang / Xinhua via AP

HONG KONG — Louis Cha, a Hong Kong journalist and best-selling Chinese martial arts novelist, has died at age 94 after a long illness.

The Hong Kong newspaper founded by Cha, Ming Pao Daily News, said he passed away Tuesday at a Hong Kong hospital.

Cha’s novels about ancient Chinese swordsmen have sold millions and are among the most widely read in the Chinese-speaking world. They inspired film adaptations, TV and radio dramas, comic books and videogames, and greatly influenced Hong Kong popular culture.

They include “The Heaven Sword and the Dragon Saber,” about a kindhearted hero who is indecisive but uses his kung fu skills to unify a divided gang and is elected its leader, and “The Eagle-Shooting Heroes,” about a tragic hero who sacrifices his life in guarding the country against invading Mongolians.

Cha was born in 1924 in Hangzhou in mainland China and graduated from the Law School of Suzhou in 1948, the South China Morning Post said. He had planned to become a diplomat, but began work as a journalist in 1947 to support his studies. The communist revolution in 1949 closed off his opportunities to enter diplomacy.

Cha’s first novel, “The Book and the Sword,” was published in 1955 and became an instant hit. He went on to write 14 martial arts novels, often under the pen name Jin Yong.

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