Then it means war, doesn't it?
"The death toll could increase drastically.... White House spokesman Jay Carney said the United States and its Seventh Fleet stood ready to assist, including the USS Bonhomme Richard, which was in the region."
"Captain was among first to escape S. Korea ferry as it sank; Passengers were instructed to stay below deck" by Choe Sang-Hun, Su-Hyun Lee and Jiha Ham | New York Times April 18, 2014
JINDO, South Korea — The captain was among the first to flee. Only a couple of the 44 life rafts aboard were deployed. The hundreds of passengers were instructed over the intercom to “stay inside and wait” as the ship leaned to one side and began to sink, dragging scores of students on a school trip down with it.
“I repeatedly told people to calm themselves and stay where they were for an hour,” Kang Hae-seong, the communications officer on the South Korean ferry that sank Wednesday, said from his hospital bed. He added that he could not recall taking part in any evacuation drills for the ship, and that when a real emergency came, “I didn’t have time to look at the manual for evacuation.”
It took 2½ hours for the ferry, the Sewol, to capsize and become submerged in the blue-gray waters off the southwestern tip of South Korea. Yet in that time, only 179 of the 475 people believed to have been on board were rescued. By Thursday evening, the confirmed death toll was 25.
As rescuers battle bad weather and dwindling hopes to search for the 271 people still missing, most of them students, evidence is growing that human error contributed to one of South Korea’s worst disasters in recent decades.
Kim Su-hyun, a provincial Coast Guard chief, told reporters Thursday that the ship’s captain, Lee Jun-seok, stood accused of violating his responsibilities by abandoning the ferry ahead of most of his passengers. Coast Guard officials said they were reviewing possible criminal charges.
“I can’t lift my face before the passengers and family members of those missing,” Lee said during a brief appearance before reporters Thursday.
But he provided little clarity on what had led the 6,825-ton Sewol to lean so far to its side before sinking, and why so many aboard had been unable to escape.
For some maritime experts, the captain’s decision to abandon ship and the crew’s emergency performance seemed to echo problems in the wreck of the Costa Concordia, an Italian cruise ship that ran aground in 2012, killing 32 people.
You can knox around some links I suppose.
James T. Shirley Jr., an accident investigator in Newtown, Pa., said that in the 2½ hours it took the ship to sink, the crew “certainly had enough time to get most of the people off.”
“I don’t understand why the crew would be instructing passengers to stay inside the ship,” Shirley said. “I would think that if nothing else, they would be getting them outside with life jackets on so if it sank, they could at least get into the cold water with their jackets.”
For the 325 students from Danwon High School who made up the bulk of the passengers, it was a trip they had been eagerly awaiting, a last chance for fun before a grueling year of studying for South Korea’s university entrance exam. Soon after the ferry left port Tuesday night bound for the resort island of Jeju, they celebrated by launching fireworks from the deck.
(Blog editor frowned and had eyes water a bit at this point; poor kids)
According to survivors, the students were having a morning break after breakfast Wednesday, roaming through the floors and snapping pictures on the deck, when the ship began tilting.
When the situation became critical, survivors said, many students were still on the third floor, where the cafeteria and game rooms were....
Grainy video footage taken with a smartphone and sent to a relative showed frightened passengers huddled in the corner of a room as a voice on the ship’s intercom urged people to “stay inside and wait because the cabins are safer.”
The communications officer, Kang, 32, said he and another crew member had been forced to make a quick decision. They thought that if passengers fled in a panicked rush, it could make matters worse, he said.
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NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"As hope dwindled that any of the 236 missing students would be found alive, the high school was stunned Friday by more tragic news — the death of its vice principal in what was suspected to be a suicide. The vice principal, Kang Min-kyu, 52, of Danwon High School, who survived the ferry accident Wednesday, was found hanging from a tree on a hill near a gymnasium where families of the missing had gathered. Police suspected that Kang had hanged himself."
Add one more to the death toll in what is the Asian way I guess.
Maybe they should have just cancelled the cruise, but the cause may have been "too sharp a turn on a curve in the sea route" and that reminds me of Malaysia Flight 370.
While searching the sea:
"The submersible, towed by the Ocean Shield and operated by an American team from the contractor Phoenix International, crawls just above the seabed, with each deployment lasting up to 20 hours. It takes two hours for the Bluefin to descend, 16 hours to conduct the search, and two hours to return to the surface. Analysts then need four hours to download and analyze the data."
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"Britain’s Prince William and his wife, Catherine, arrived in Sydney this week for an official tour in a country that has been independent from Britain for 113 years, and is worried about the long-term costs of public benefits and the end of a mining and energy boom, the decision led many Australians to question prime minister Tony Abbott’s priorities."
Hey, you guys voted him in. Hope things have cooled down for the Prince, Princess, and boy.
I'm mystified as to the censorship (and maybe it is North Korea that is responsible), but speaking of mystery planes (that did not appear in my printed paper):
"Plane owned by Utah bank seen at Iran airport" by Michael Corkery, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Thomas Erdbrink | New York Times April 18, 2014
President Barack Obama has warned that Iran is not open for business, even as the United States has loosened some of its punishing economic sanctions as part of an interim nuclear pact.
Yet, on Tuesday morning, Iran had an unlikely visitor: a plane, owned by the Bank of Utah, a community bank in Ogden that has 13 branches throughout the state. Bearing a small American flag on its tail, the aircraft was parked in a highly visible section of Mehrabad Airport in Tehran.
But from there, the story surrounding the plane, and why it was in Iran — where all but a few US and European business activities are prohibited — grows more mysterious.
While federal aviation records show the plane is held in a trust by the Bank of Utah, Brett King, one of its executives in Salt Lake City, said, “We have no idea why that plane was at that airport.”
He said the Bank of Utah acted as a trustee for investors who have a financial stake in the plane and that the bank was investigating further.
The Federal Aviation Administration said it had no information about the investors in the aircraft or who was operating it. Officials waiting at the gangway at Mehrabad Airport said only that the aircraft was “VIP.”
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the federal government’s primary enforcer of sanctions against Iran, declined to comment on the plane’s presence there. Under US law, any American aircraft would usually need prior approval from the department to go to Iran without violating a complicated patchwork of rules governing trade.
Then the trip has been approved.
So what important interests and wealthy individuals were on that plane that is above the law?
In the case of this particular aircraft, powered by engines made by General Electric, the Commerce Department typically would have to grant its own clearance for US -made parts to touch down on Iranian soil.
In other words, the government knows who the plane is carrying. They can't not know.
Iranian officials also declined to comment on the purpose of the plane’s visit or passengers’ identities. A spokesman for Iran’s U.N. mission in New York, Hamid Babaei, said: “We don’t have any information in this regard. I refer you to the owner.”
The tracking of planes has become a kind of global sport, as largely amateur photographers post thousands of images showing arrivals and departures in their attempts to chronicle flight paths.
Except in the case of Flight 370.
In the case of this plane, for example, one spotter spied it leaving an airport in Zurich around the time of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January.
See: Wrapping Up the W.E.F.
Another photographer tracked the plane, identified by its call letters N604EP on the tail engines, departing a London-area airport for Ghana in October.
But this week’s spotting by a New York Times reporter in Tehran carries particular intrigue because it involves Iran, a country still effectively shunned by the global financial system.
Even some former federal officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the very presence of an American-flagged aircraft parked in broad daylight suggested its flight had been approved as part of a legitimate business trip. What is more, they said, the easily identifiable plane was not likely to be part of a covert diplomatic mission.
Then I suspect it is because this government and its mouthpiece media are the biggest liars on the planet, especially the NYT!
The secrecy surrounding the plane is compounded by federal aviation regulations that can make it virtually impossible to determine who was flying it.
Yeah, secrecy and privacy is for government not you, citizen.
The private plane, like thousands of similar ones, is owned through a trust — a complex legal structure often established to help foreign individuals or corporations invest in planes that can fly freely within the United States. Aside from that benefit, the structure enables investors and operators to remain largely anonymous to the public.
Sounds like a rendition jet the CIA would use.
The trustee — in this case, the Bank of Utah — is the sole entity recorded as owner in a vast database maintained by the Federal Aviation Administration.
The Bank of Utah is listed as a trustee for 1,169 aircraft, ranging from Boeing 747s to single-engine Cessnas, according to a review by The New York Times of the database.
The Bank of Utah looks like a cover for a CIA air fleet! They need that many planes? Isn't Utah also where the gigantic NSA collection center is?
The Bank of Utah acts as a trustee for more planes than just about any other bank, the review shows.
The Bank of Utah is a FRONT COMPANY, folks!
King, who helps run the bank’s trust services business, said the bank had no “operational control” or “financial exposure” to any of the planes.
He said he was not allowed to disclose the identity of the plane’s investors. “As fiduciary, we must keep information confidential when it comes to the beneficiary,” King said.
While the trusts allow celebrities and corporate executives to travel discreetly, they also help obscure who is operating vast fleets of aircraft and why.
All AFTER 9/11 and the alleged hijackings of planes, huh?
Is that inside job cover story ever starting to stink of rot!
The shadowy role of US banks in private aircraft ownership has grown even as financial regulators work to shine a light on Wall Street’s activities, a legacy of the 2008 financial crisis.
Tells you who is flying high and in the captain's seat of power, doesn't it?
Bank dealings with Iran in particular are subject to extraordinary scrutiny by the US government, part of a broader crackdown on the flow of money to foreign countries and individuals that US officials say is tied to terrorism.
Well, you know....
The British bank HSBC, for example, reached a record $1.92 billion settlement with federal authorities in 2012 to resolve accusations that it funneled billions of dollars on behalf of Iran and enabled Mexican drug cartels to move tainted money through its US subsidiaries.
They made that back in less than two weeks, and it's bu$ine$$ as u$ual at money-laundering banks these days. Why wouldn't it be when government is the biggest drug trafficker around?
Even before the current sanctions, US aircraft rarely landed in Iran. The animosity between the two countries has grown so intense that even the occasional emergency landing by a US commercial airliner sets off a flurry of speculative news reports.
For his part, King said Thursday in an interview that he was trying to get to the bottom of the aircraft’s presence in Tehran. “The Bank of Utah is very conservative, and located in the conservative state of Utah,” he said. “If there is any hint of illegal activity, we are going to find out and see whether we need to resign” as trustee.
Pfft!
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Related:
China Helped Iran Get Nuclear Bomb
All in a day, for it's the last I've seen of it.
Iran Executes Jewish Rabbi
Sticking with the theme and trying to help rekindle the war-promoting media.
And remember, there were Iranian hijackers on the Malaysian flight that disappeared.
That means a false flag nuclear attack with a plane that appears out of nowhere to be blamed on Iran is a definite possibility!
