Breaking: Asiana 777 crash-lands at SFO

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USA TODAY: An Asiana Airlines flight from Seoul crashed on landing at San Francisco's airport Saturday, forcing passengers to escape the aircraft using inflatable emergency exit slides.

Passengers who got off the plane told reporters they did not believe there were any fatalities. Images from the scene showed smoke billowing from the plane and emergency exits open from the plane's fuselage, with the tail separated from the aircraft. Gaping holes could be seen in the roof of the plane's body, blackened by fire.

The plane was a Boeing 777, FAA spokesman Lynn Lunsford said. It crashed on runway 28L at San Francisco International Airport, he said.

There were 291 people aboard, KCBS radio reported.

The wreckage was sprayed with white fire retardant.

Laura Brown, spokeswoman for the FAA in Washington, said Asiana Flight 214 from Seoul was attempting to land at San Francisco International Airport when it crashed.

"All we know is that a foreign airline, Asiana Airlines Flight 214 arriving from Seoul, South Korea, crashed while landing,'' she said. "That's all I've got right now.

She said it appeared the plane crashed after touching down for a landing, although the sequence of events was not clear.

A passenger, David Eun, issued Tweets after the crash: "Fire and rescue people all over the place. They're evacuating the injured. Haven't felt this way since 9/11.''

Later, Eun Tweeted: "I'm fine. Most people are totally calm and trying to help. .. the majority of passengers seem OK.''

The National Transportation Safety Board was dispatching a team of crash investigators to the site.

A video clip posted to Youtube showed smoke coming from a silver-colored jet on the tarmac. Passengers could be seen jumping down the inflatable emergency slides. Images showed the the body of the plane largely intact but with severe fire damage.

The tail of the airplane was separated from the aircraft. Weather at the time was clear.

SFO Tower communications posted HERE

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Snowden in Moscow airport - Putin says "Nyet."

Edward Snowden is at a Moscow airport, and no, you can’t have him.

Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the first official acknowledgment of the whereabouts of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden yesterday, and promptly rejected U.S. pleas to turn him over.

Snowden, who is charged with violating American espionage laws, fled Hong Kong over the weekend, touching off a global guessing game over where he went and frustrating U.S. efforts to bring him to justice.

Putin said Snowden is in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport and has not passed through Russian immigration, meaning he technically is not in Russia and thus is free to travel wherever he wants.

After arriving Sunday on a flight from Hong Kong, Snowden registered for a Havana-bound flight Monday en route to Venezuela and then possible asylum in Ecuador, but he didn’t board the plane.

Speculation has been rife that Russian security services have been talking to Snowden and might want to keep him in Russia for a more thorough debriefing, but Putin denied that.

“Our special services never worked with Mr. Snowden and aren’t working with him today,” Putin said at a news conference during a visit to Finland.

Because Moscow has no extradition agreement with Washington, it cannot meet the U.S. request, he said.

“Mr. Snowden is a free man, and the sooner he chooses his final destination the better it is for us and for him,” Putin said. “I hope it will not affect the businesslike character of our relations with the U.S., and I hope that our partners will understand that.”

Secretary of State John Kerry said yesterday that the United States wants Russia to show respect for the rule of law and comply with common practices when it comes to fugitives from justice.

Putin’s staunch refusal to consider deportation shows his readiness to further challenge Washington at a time when U.S.-Russian relations are already strained over Syria and other issues, including a Russian ban on adoptions by Americans.

“Just showing America that we don’t care about our relations, we are down to basically a Cold War pattern: The enemy of your government is our friend,” said Masha Lipman of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

“The Russian administration has not come that far, but we don’t know what it’s up to,” she said.

Despite Putin’s denial, security experts believe Russia’s special services wouldn’t miss the chance to question a man who is believed to hold reams of classified U.S. documents and could shed light on how the U.S. intelligence agencies collect information.

TWA FLIGHT 800 - was it a bomb?

A group of whistleblowers, including a number of aviation experts, have come forward in a new documentary to claim that the official explanation for the crash of TWA Flight 800 was wrong and a gas tank explosion did not bring down the flight off the coast of Long Island 17 years ago.

However, the six whistleblowers, all part of the original investigation team, stopped short of saying the plane was shot down.

Flight 800, a Boeing 747, had just taken off from JFK airport with 230 people aboard on July 17, 1996 enroute to Paris when it exploded and crashed off the coast of nearby East Moriches, Long Island, killing everyone on the plane.

“..This team of investigators who actually handled the wreckage and victims’ bodies, prove that the officially proposed fuel-air explosion did not cause the crash,” reads a statement by the producers of the film, which will debut on cable network EPIX next month. “They also provide radar and forensic evidence proving that one or more ordinance explosions outside the aircraft caused the crash.” However, the statement said they did not speculate about the source or sources of any ordinance explosions.

The whistleblower team, which includes investigators-at the time-from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), TWA, and the Airline Pilots Association, have since retired from their positions. They claim that at the time, they were placed under a gag order by the NTSB, which they charged falsified the official conclusion of the cause of the crash. They indicated they would elaborate more in a Wednesday media briefing.

The NTSB report, the culmination of a four-year investigation, suggested the cause of the explosion was due to an explosion in the gas tank caused by a short circuit.



Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/06/18/twa-flight-800-investigators-break-silence-in-new-documentary-claim-original/#ixzz2Wd8WHnlSå

NSA "PRISM" program detailed

The Washington Post: 

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind.


The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

London’s Guardian newspaper reported Friday that GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, also has been secretly gathering intelligence from the same internet companies through an operation set up by the NSA.

According to documents obtained by The Guardian, PRISM would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required in Britain to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside of the country.

PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush’s secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority.

Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection. PRISM recruited its first partner, Microsoft, and began six years of rapidly growing data collection beneath the surface of a roiling national debate on surveillance and privacy. Late last year, when critics in Congress sought changes in the FISA Amendments Act, the only lawmakers who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

The court-approved program is focused on foreign communications traffic, which often flows through U.S. servers even when sent from one overseas location to another. Between 2004 and 2007, Bush administration lawyers persuaded federal FISA judges to issue surveillance orders in a fundamentally new form. Until then the government had to show probable cause that a particular “target” and “facility” were both connected to terrorism or espionage.

In four new orders, which remain classified, the court defined massive data sets as “facilities” and agreed to certify periodically that the government had reasonable procedures in place to minimize collection of “U.S. persons” data without a warrant.

In a statement issue late Thursday, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said “information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats. The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.”

READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE

Leak hints at China's design for next-gen stealth bomber

FP: You're looking at what some people are speculating is China's design for a stealth bomber. It may look like a simple model right now. But these Chinese models have a habit of turning into working airplanes. And if that happens in this case, watch out. Because it could potential give these Chinese the ability to penetrate deep, deep into enemy territory without the opponents ever knowing what hit them.

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Remember, designs very similar to China's J-31 stealth fighter and its Li Jian stealthy-ish drone appeared as trade show models only two years before full-size versions of the planes were revealed in the past year.

The latest plane resembles a cross between Russia's PAK DA stealth bomber design, it'sT-50 PAK FA stealth fighter and Northrop's YF-23 Black Widow -- the stealth jet that lost the contest to be the world's first fifth-generation fighter to Lockheed Martin's YF-22 Raptor. (The cockpit also resembles this fictional monstrosity.)

What could such a plane be used for? It would likely serve as a penetrating bomber designed to keep an enemy far from China's shores by sneaking past enemy radar and attacking enemy bases and ships with cruise missiles. Some have speculated that China'sJ-20, which is huge for a fighter, was meant to fulfill this role; similar to a stealthy version of the F-111 Aardvark or F-15E Strike Eagle. However, we're seeing the J-20 conducting flight tests with air-to-air missiles; a possible indication that it may be a high-speed interceptor -- similar to the Soviet Union's giant MiG-25 Foxbat and MiG-31 Foxhound interceptors -- designed to steak out and shoot down approaching bombers.

Chinese Web forums claim the new stealth bomber might have a length of 91-feet and a wingspan of 72-feet. This is smaller than all of the U.S. and Russia's strategic bombers such as the B-1 Lancer or Tu-22M but slightly larger than the U.S.'s F-15E Strike Eagle tactical bomber. The jet is also rumored to have an operational radius of just under 2000-miles.

It should be pointed out that earlier rumors about China investing in a fleet of Russian-designed Tu-22M supersonic bombers were reportedly untrue. Rather than field the supersonic jets, China is developing a new version of its H-6 bomber -- which is based on the Soviet Tu-16 Badger that was designed in the 1950s and retired by Russia in the early 1990s.

Chinese military officials have even said that buying a 1970s-design like the Tu-22M makes little sense given the fact that U.S. radars could spot the planes coming from a long way off. This could be taken as a hint that the PLA navy or air force recognizes the need for a stealthy-bomber capable of keeping adversaries at bay.

Basically, it costs a ton of money and time to develop and field an effective bomber force. It's not just the cost of building and buying stealth planes. The Chinese will need to develop an entire support network of maintenance crews, basing infrastructure capable of handling the planes, a large aerial tanker fleet to refuel them and perhaps most importantly learning how to effectively use them.

One interesting thing to note about the design shown above is that its engine exhaust outlets appear to be square -- a stealthier design than the traditional round nozzles seen on China's current version of stealthy planes. This could be a sign that China is making progress in the extremely challenging art of jet engine design. This could also be an indication that it will be a long time before China gets the technological knowhow to develop this aircraft. Current reports indicate that China has a long way to go when it comes to engine-making.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE!