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Flight data, voice recorders retrieved from Nepal crash site

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Flight data, voice recorders retrieved from Nepal crash site

A spokesman for Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority says a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder have been retrieved from the site of the crash of a passenger plane that went down on approach to a newly opened airport in the tourist town of Pokhara.

Jagannath Niraula said the boxes were found on Monday, a day after the ATR-72 aircraft crashed, killing 68 of the 72 people aboard. He said they will be handed over to investigators.

Pemba Sherpa, spokesperson for Yeti Airlines, also confirmed that both the flight data and the cockpit voice recorders have been found.

Nepal began a national day of mourning Monday, as rescue workers rappelled down a 300-meter (984 feet) gorge to continue the search. Two more bodies were found Monday morning.

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It remains unclear what caused the crash, the Himalayan country’s deadliest airplane accident in three decades. The weather was mild and not windy on the day of the crash.

A witness who recorded footage of the plane’s descent from his balcony said he saw the plane flying low before it suddenly veered to its left. “I saw that and I was shocked… I thought that today everything will be finished here after it crashes, I will also be dead,” said Diwas Bohora. After it crashed, red flames erupted and the ground shook violently, like an earthquake, Bohora said. “I was scared. Seeing that scene, I was scared.”

Another witness said he saw the aircraft twist violently in the air after it began descending to land, watching from the terrace of his house. Finally, Gaurav Gurung said, the plane fell nose-first towards its left and crashed into the gorge.

Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority said the aircraft last made contact with the airport from near Seti Gorge at 10:50 a.m. before crashing.

The twin-engine ATR 72 aircraft, operated by Nepal’s Yeti Airlines, was competing the 27-minute flight from the capital, Kathmandu, to Pokhara, 200 kilometers (125 miles) west. It was carrying 68 passengers, including 15 foreign nationals, as well as four crew members, Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority said in a statement. The foreigners included five Indians, four Russians, two South Koreans, and one each from Ireland, Australia, Argentina and France.

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Hundreds of people gathered outside the Pokhara Academy of Health and Science, Western Hospital, where the bodies are being kept. Relatives and friends of victims, many of whom were from Pokhara, consoled each other as they waited.

Bimala Bhenderi was waiting outside the post-mortem room Monday. She was planning to meet her friend, Tribhuban Paudel, on Tuesday when she heard that his flight had crashed. “I’m so sad, I can’t believe it still,” she said in tears.

Gyan Khadka, a police spokesperson in the district, said 31 bodies have been identified and will be handed over to family after officials finish post mortem reports. The bodies of foreigners and those that are unrecognizable will be sent to Kathmandu for further investigation.

On Sunday, Twitter was awash with images that showed plumes of smoke billowing from the crash site, about 1.6 kilometers (nearly a mile) away from Pokhara International Airport. The aircraft’s fuselage was split into multiple parts that were scattered down the gorge.

Hours after dark, scores of onlookers remained crowded around the crash site near the airport in the resort town of Pokhara as rescue workers combed the wreckage on the edge of the cliff and in the ravine below.

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Local resident Bishnu Tiwari, who rushed to the crash site near the Seti River to help search for bodies, said the rescue efforts were hampered by thick smoke and a raging fire.

“The flames were so hot that we couldn’t go near the wreckage. I heard a man crying for help, but because of the flames and smoke we couldn’t help him,” Tiwari said.

At Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, family members appeared distraught as they waited for information.

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal rushed to the airport after the crash and set up a panel to investigate the accident.

”The incident was tragic. The full force of the Nepali army, police has been deployed for rescue,” he said.

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South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it’s still trying to confirm the fate of two South Korean passengers and has sent staff to the scene. The Russian Ambassador to Nepal, Alexei Novikov, confirmed the death of four Russian citizens who were on board the plane.

Omar Gutiérrez, governor of Argentina’s Neuquen province, wrote on his official Twitter account that an Argentine passenger on the flight was Jannet Palavecino, from his province.

The Facebook page of Palavecino says she was manager of the Hotel Suizo in Neuquen city. She described herself as a lover of travel and adventure tourism.

Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers told reporters Monday that “our hearts go out to all of the families of the crew and passengers” who died, adding that the government was providing consular support to the family of an Australian who was aboard the plane.

Pokhara is the gateway to the Annapurna Circuit, a popular hiking trail in the Himalayas. The city’s new international airport began operations only two weeks ago.

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The type of plane involved, the ATR 72, has been used by airlines around the world for short regional flights. Introduced in the late 1980s by a French and Italian partnership, the aircraft model has been involved in several deadly accidents over the years.

In Taiwan two earlier accidents involving ATR 72-500 and ATR 72-600 aircrafts happened just months apart.

In July 2014, a TransAsia ATR 72-500 flight crashed while trying to land on the scenic Penghu archipelago between Taiwan and China, killing 48 people onboard. An ATR 72-600 operated by the same Taiwanese airline crashed shortly after takeoff in Taipei in February 2015 after one of its engines failed and the second was shut down, apparently by mistake.

The 2015 crash, captured in dramatic footage that showed the plane striking a taxi as it hurtled out of control, killed 43, and prompted authorities to ground all Taiwanese-registered ATR 72s for some time. TransAsia ceased all flights in 2016 and later went out of business.

ATR identified the plane involved in Sunday’s crash as an ATR 72-500 in a tweet. According to plane tracking data from flightradar24.com, the aircraft was 15 years old and “equipped with an old transponder with unreliable data.” It was previously flown by India’s Kingfisher Airlines and Thailand’s Nok Air before Yeti took it over in 2019, according to records on Airfleets.net.

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Yeti Airlines has a fleet of six ATR 72-500 planes, company spokesperson Sudarshan Bartaula said.

Nepal, home to eight of the world’s 14 highest mountains, including Mount Everest, has a history of air crashes. Sunday’s crash is Nepal’s deadliest since 1992, when all 167 people aboard a Pakistan International Airlines plane were killed when it plowed into a hill as it tried to land in Kathmandu.

According to the Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety database, there have been 42 fatal plane crashes in Nepal since 1946.

According to a 2019 safety report from Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority, the country’s “hostile topography” and “diverse weather patterns” were the biggest dangers to flights in the country. The report said such accidents happened at airports that had short strips of runway for takeoff and landing and most were due to pilot error.

The report added that 37% of all air crashes in Nepal between 2009 and 2018 were due to pilot error, not counting helicopters and recreational flights.

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The European Union has banned airlines from Nepal from flying into the 27-nation bloc since 2013, citing weak safety standards. In 2017, the International Civil Aviation Organization cited improvements in Nepal’s aviation sector, but the EU continues to demand administrative reforms.

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‘At what cost?’ Ukraine strains to bolster its army as war fatigue weighs

‘At what cost?’ Ukraine strains to bolster its army as war fatigue weighs

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'At what cost?' Ukraine strains to bolster its army as war fatigue weighs

When Antonina Danylevych’s husband enlisted in the Ukrainian army in March 2022, he had to line up at the draft office alongside crowds of patriotic countrymen.

There are no crowds now, she says.

Danylevych, a 43-year-old HR manager, gave her blessing when Oleksandr joined up with tens of thousands of other Ukrainian citizens to defy the Russian invasion.

Now she’s finding it hard to cope, with no end in sight. Her husband has only had about 25 days’ home leave since he enlisted and their two children are growing up without a father.

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“We want Ukraine to win, but not through the efforts of the same people,” she said in an interview at her home in Kyiv. “I can see they need to be replaced and that they also need to rest, but for some reason other people don’t understand.”

Women on the home front have also had to become stronger, she added: “But at what cost did we become stronger?”

Her husband – a university lecturer with no prior combat experience who’s now a platoon commander – watched his son get married this year on his phone by video call from the ruined city of Bakhmut. His 14-year-old daughter misses her dad.

Almost two years into the grinding war, this family and others around the country are coming to terms with the prospect of a much longer and costlier conflict than they had hoped for, and one that some now acknowledge they’re not guaranteed to win.

This autumn, Danylevych was one of 25,000 people to sign a petition to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy saying that military service cannot remain open-ended and calling for troops to be given a clear timeline for when they will be discharged.

The campaign, which has included two protests by 50 to 100 people in Kyiv’s main square in recent weeks, illustrates a growing level of exhaustion among Ukrainian troops and the mounting toll that is taking on families back home.

Ukraine’s vaunted summer counteroffensive has so far failed to deliver a decisive breakthrough, both sides are dug in along largely static front lines and questions are being asked over whether foreign military aid will be as forthcoming as it was.

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The country has relied on tens of billions of dollars in arms from the United States and other allies to sustain its war effort, but stockpiles of artillery shells are emptying and governments are cooler on sustaining previous levels of support.

Such protests would have been unthinkable a year ago when national morale soared as Ukraine beat Russian forces back from Kyiv and retook swathes of the northeast and south. Martial law, declared at the war’s start, prohibits public demonstrations.

Danylevych’s campaign points to difficult choices war planners face as they try to maintain the flow of recruits to defeat a much larger army amid steady losses, while retaining a big enough workforce to sustain the shattered economy.

Only Ukrainian men aged between 27 and 60 can be mobilised by draft officers. Men aged between 18 and 26 can’t be drafted, though they can enlist voluntarily.

Ukraine, which has said it has about 1 million people under arms, has barred military-age men from going abroad. Its constantly running mobilisation programme, which was declared at the start of the war, is a state secret. So are battlefield losses, which U.S. estimates put in the tens of thousands.

The Ukrainian defence ministry referred questions for this article to the military, which declined to comment, citing wartime secrecy.

DROWNED TRYING TO FLEE

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This month, Ukraine’s military chief said one of his priorities was to build up the army’s reserves as he laid out a plan to prevent the war settling into a stalemate of attritional warfare that he warned would suit Russia. The plan focuses on boosting Ukraine’s aerial, electronic warfare, drone, anti-artillery and mine-clearance capabilities.

He added that Ukraine, like Russia, had limited capacity to train troops and alluded to gaps in legislation that he said allowed citizens to shirk mobilisation.

“We are trying to fix these problems. We are introducing a unified register of draftees, and we must expand the category of citizens who can be called up for training or mobilisation,” he wrote in rare comments published as an article by The Economist.

The recruitment process largely takes place out of the public eye. Draft officers stop men in the street, at the metro or at checkpoints and hand out call-up papers to them, instructing to report to recruitment centres.

Over the last year, social media videos occasionally surface showing draft officers dragging away or threatening men they want to mobilise causing public outcry.

Many Ukrainians have also been angered by a string of corruption cases at draft offices that have allowed people to avoid the call-up, prompting Zelenskiy to sack all the heads of the regional recruitment offices this summer.

Seldom does a week go by without a law enforcement agency announcing criminal cases against people including draft officials accused of taking between $500 and $10,000 to provide fake documents for people to shirk mobilisation or travel abroad.

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At the River Tisa, which acts as the border from southwestern Ukraine to Romania, guard patrols used to focus on catching tobacco smugglers but now collar fleeing draft dodgers.

About 6,000 people have been detained trying to leave across that stretch, the border guards told Reuters. One of them, Dyma Cherevychenko, said at least 19 people had drowned trying to flee the country during the conflict.

“They died for nothing, died in the river when they could have contributed to the war effort,” the 29-year-old added.

UNIVERSITY ESCAPE HATCH?

The Ukrainian parliament has meanwhile been debating legislation that would stop people over the age of 30 using higher education as a legal way around mobilisation.

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The number of men aged over 25 who booked places at universities in the first year of the invasion shot up by 55,000 compared with the year before, Education Minister Oksen Lisovyi wrote on Facebook in September.

Some voices in the West have suggested that Kyiv step up the scale of its recruitment by drawing on younger men.

Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence minister until the end of August, said the average age of Ukrainian soldiers at the front was over 40 and suggested it was time to “reassess the scale of Ukraine’s mobilisation”.

“I understand President Zelenskiy’s desire to preserve the young for the future, but the fact is that Russia is mobilising the whole country by stealth,” he wrote in the Telegraph newspaper.

David Arakhamia, a senior lawmaker and Zelenskiy ally, said on Thursday that parliament planned to draw up legislation to improve the mobilisation and demobilisation procedure by the year’s end.

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The bill, he said on TV, would cover what to do with people who have been fighting for two years without rotation, how to demobilise soldiers who have returned after being prisoners of war, and also address “issues related to the conscription age”.

TANKS AND TRANQUILISERS

A temporary lull in major Russian missile and drone strikes on the capital over the summer made the war seem more distant, although that calm was shattered over the weekend as Russia launched its biggest drone assault on Kyiv of the war so far.

Some sociologists say a gloomier mood has set in nationwide.

They point to surveys showing declining trust in the government, which had surged in the first months of the war when Ukrainian forces repelled Russian advances. Zelenskiy’s ratings remain very high, although they too are down from last year.

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Trust in the government and parliament has tumbled from 74% in 2022 to 39%, and 58% to 21%, respectively, according to Anton Hrushetskyi, executive director at the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, a research organisation.

“We’d hoped to be in a better position this autumn than we are right now,” he told Reuters.

Hrushetskyi said other contributing factors were various corruption scandals and a belief that Western military supplies for Ukraine could and should have been more robust.

Danylevych is now preparing their home for what many Ukrainians fear will be another winter of Russian airstrikes that will target the power grid and energy system, causing sweeping blackouts and other outages.

“I feel depressed because I understand all the challenges of winter and if there is heavy shelling and there is neither electricity nor heating, I will have to face all these problems on my own.”

Her husband Oleksandr and his unit, Ukraine’s fourth tank brigade, couldn’t be reached for comment.

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This summer Danylevych stumbled across a group on the Telegram messaging site that now has 2,900 like-minded people including wives, mothers and family members who banded together to campaign for the right of war veterans to be demobilised.

“A lot of the women are on sedatives and tranquilisers,” she said, describing a “very depressed” mood of resignation among them.

The group staged a first demonstration of around 100 people on Kyiv’s Independence Square on Oct. 27, after which they wrote a letter addressed to Zelenskiy to make their case. No police action was taken against them.

Dozens of them returned to the square for a further protest in the rain on Nov. 12. One held up a sign saying: “My husband and father have given others the time to get ready. It’s time to replace the first people!”

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Nearly 2,500 rescued after snowstorm in Ukraine’s Odesa region

Nearly 2,500 rescued after snowstorm in Ukraine’s Odesa region

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Nearly 2,500 rescued after snowstorm in Ukraine's Odesa region

Nearly 2,500 people were rescued after a snowstorm in Ukraine’s southern region of Odesa, local governor Oleh Kiper said, adding that 313 settlements in the region were without power as a result of the bad weather.

Odesa region, which lies on the shore of the Black Sea, has been hit by severe snowstorms since Sunday, stranding vehicles and downing power lines.

“849 vehicles have been towed out, including 24 buses and 17 ambulances,” Kiper wrote on the Telegram app.

He said all those trapped by the snow since the start of the snowstorm had now been rescued.

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Thailand to allow clubs, bars to stay open longer to boost tourism

Thailand to allow clubs, bars to stay open longer to boost tourism

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Thailand to allow clubs, bars to stay open longer to boost tourism

Thailand’s cabinet has approved a ministerial regulation that extends the opening hours of night clubs and entertainment venues in a bid to draw in more tourists, a government spokesperson said on Tuesday.

Entertainment venues, clubs and karaoke bars in Bangkok, Phuket, Pattya, Chiang Mai and Samui, popular tourist destinations, will be allowed stay open two extra hours until 4 AM, Traisulee Traisaranakul said.

Thailand’s Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin had previously said the new rules would start on December 15.

The tourism industry is a key driver of the economy, which has seen sluggish growth compared with regional peers, and which Srettha’s government is keen to revive with stimulus measures.

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The decision to allow entertainment venues to stay open longer is the latest step taken by the government to boost foreign arrivals after the government in September waived visa requirements for Chinese visitors, a key source of tourists for Southeast Asia’s second-biggest economy.

Thailand has so far welcomed 24.5 million foreign tourists this year and is forecasting 28 million arrivals for the full year.

Before the pandemic, Thailand booked a record 39.9 million arrivals, with 11 million from China. This year, the government expects just 3.5 million arrivals from China.

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