Throwing it at you:
"Singaporeans mourn founding father Lee Kuan Yew" by Stephen Wright and Jeanette Tan, Associated Press March 23, 2015
SINGAPORE — Singaporeans wept and world leaders paid tribute Monday as the Southeast Asian city-state mourned the death of its founding father, Lee Kuan Yew.
The government announced that Lee, 91, ‘‘passed away peacefully’’ early Monday at Singapore General Hospital. An increasingly frail Lee was hospitalized in February with severe pneumonia.
State television broke away from regular programming with a hagiographic tribute to Lee’s life. In a live broadcast, one of its reporters called Lee’s death the ‘‘awful and dreaded’’ news.
Lee commands immense respect among Singaporeans, who this year will celebrate the country’s 50th anniversary of independence. He led multiracial Singapore with an iron grip for more than three decades until 1990, and is credited with transforming the resource poor island into a wealthy bustling financial hub with low crime and almost zero corruption.
Lee Hsien Loong, his son and the current prime minister, struggled to hold back tears in a televised address to the nation.
Speaking in Malay, Mandarin, and English, the prime minister said Lee built a nation and gave Singaporeans a proud national identity.
‘‘We won’t see another man like him. To many Singaporeans, and indeed others too, Lee Kuan Yew was Singapore,’’ he said.
At the hospital where Lee spent the last weeks of his life, 55-year-old Maligah Thangaveloo cried as she clasped her hands in prayer before an expansive array of flowers and cards left by Singaporeans. Calling Lee ‘‘father,’’ she recalled shaking hands with him as a 9-year-old when he visited her school.
President Obama called Lee a visionary in a statement, saying he was ‘‘deeply saddened’’ to learn of his death. Obama, who met Lee during a visit to Singapore in 2009, said his remarkable leadership helped build ‘‘one of the most prosperous countries in the world today.’’
He said Singapore’s success meant that Lee’s counsel was sought by political leaders around the world. Lee was also ‘‘hugely important in helping me reformulate our policy of rebalancing to the Asia Pacific,’’ Obama said.
The Singapore government has declared seven days of national mourning and flags will fly at half-staff on state buildings. A private wake for the Lee family will take place Monday and Tuesday. After that, Lee will lie in state at Parliament until a state funeral Sunday.
Sayeed Hussain, an IT executive, said Lee was a ‘‘great hero’’ to Singaporeans as he paid respects at Singapore General Hospital.
‘‘It is our duty to respect him and recognize him as a great hero in the world,’’ said Hussain. ‘‘This is our last chance to do so.’’
Under Lee and his successors, Singapore was known around the world for its strict social order including a ban on chewing gum, restrictions on free speech, and canings for crimes some countries would rule as minor.
Now let me get this straight: all the western leaders are praising this guy? I suppose they are envious.
In recent years, it has become socially more liberal and the fragmented political opposition made gains in Singapore’s last elections in 2011.
After stepping down as prime minister, Lee remained part of the Cabinet and an influential figure in Singapore and the region.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia said Lee was a ‘‘giant of our region.’’
Lee was both feared for his authoritarian tactics and admired for turning the city-state into one of the world’s richest nations.
The country’s first and longest-serving prime minister, Lee guided Singapore through a traumatic split with Malaysia in 1965 and helped transform what was then a sleepy port city into a global trade and finance center.
Thus the gushing politicians and fawning coverage.
Although he could have remained in office for much longer, he stepped aside and handed over leadership of the ruling party, and the country, to a younger generation in 1990. Still, he remained an influential behind-the-scenes figure for many more years until his health deteriorated.
He also leaves another son, Lee Hsien Yang, and a daughter, neurologist Lee Wei Ling. His wife of more than 60 years, Kwa Geok Choo, died in October 2010.
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And now?
"Singapore looks toward an uncertain future" by Stephen Wright, Associated Press March 24, 2015
SINGAPORE — Lee Kuan Yew brought prosperity to Singapore with an authoritarian system designed to outlast him, but that legacy may be ill-suited for the 21st-century challenges facing the tropical city-state.
Yeah, those kinds of guys went out with the last century.
One of the last of a generation of Southeast Asian strongmen, Lee died Monday at age 91. The famously blunt-speaking autocrat stepped down as prime minister in 1990, but for decades after remained a commanding presence in Singapore politics and the region. His son is the current prime minister.
It's the family business.
His death is an inflection point for Singapore. After gaining self-rule from Britain in 1959, the island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula was transformed under Lee’s iron leadership into a wealthy finance and manufacturing powerhouse.
To give his government a free hand to fashion a new society, Lee systematically crushed dissent, muzzled the press, and imprisoned political opponents. A social compact of authoritarian government in exchange for a guarantee of prosperity has endured for two generations.
And he is BEING PRAISED by the self-appointed DEFENDERS of FREEDOM in western governments! One of the reasons no one listens to that sh** spewing from their mouths when it comes to these issues now.
Now, it is increasingly under strain.
Singaporeans prize the pluses such as low crime, harmony between the Chinese majority and Malay Muslim minority, and almost zero corruption in a region where graft is rampant.
I'm surprised their economy is doing so well.
But an increasing number fret that the ruling party has pushed their country of 5.4 million in the wrong direction in the past two decades.
So the feeling is not just among Americans regrading their nation?
Income inequality has soared and large-scale immigration has increased competition for jobs and depressed wages.
OMG! Same thing here! No wonder he's being praised by the very same $hits that are behind the policies.
Destitute elderly Singaporeans pushing carts along the city’s immaculate streets, collecting cardboard and plastic that they sell to recyclers, are vivid evidence of the gaping holes in its social safety net.
‘‘There’s dissatisfaction; you can feel it, and people are stirring for change,’’ said Lynn Su-lin, a 56-year-old business owner. She is of a generation that hails Lee’s achievements as ‘‘amazing’’ and worries younger Singaporeans don’t fully appreciate their inheritance. Without Lee, ‘‘we’re a bit frightened of what will happen.’’
The ruling party suffered a stinging setback in 2011 elections. By the standards of Western democracies it was an overwhelming victory, but the People’s Action Party’s share of the vote fell and the tiny opposition picked up seats.
In response, the government has doled out more social welfare in recent budgets and slowed immigration, but the changes may not yet be bold or fast enough to placate an increasingly vocal electorate.
‘‘The idea that people only vote for the opposition when they are desperate is no longer true, if it ever was true,’’ said Garry Rodan, a Southeast Asia expert at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. ‘‘Some of the last budget measures may not have come without opposition gains in elections.’’
Singapore, said Yeoh Lam Keong, a former chief economist of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, is being buffeted economically and politically by ‘‘huge transformative forces.’’
Like other developed countries, it is facing the pains of globalization.
I was told that was supposed to be good for everyone. That's how those corporate leaders that control government had their political pitch men sell it to us!
New technology is displacing workers and competition from the vast labor forces of China and India is holding down wages.
And who benefits?
At the same time, a well-educated and Internet-connected generation of young Singaporeans with high expectations has reached voting age.
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Related: Malaysian Monday
Seeing as we were stopping there:
"Malaysia air controller faces inquiry" by Eileen Ng, Associated Press March 13, 2015
Yeah, blame it all on him.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysia’s transport minister on Thursday vowed to take stern action against an air traffic control supervisor if it is confirmed that he was asleep on the job when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared a year ago.
An interim investigation report last Sunday contained transcripts of conversations between air traffic controllers and the airline that revealed confusion after the Boeing 777 dropped off radar with 239 people aboard while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The last voice contact was a ‘‘good night’’ message from the cockpit to the controllers at 1:19 a.m. on March 8. The shutdown of the transponder one minute later removed the plane’s identification from commercial radar.
In one conversation four hours later, a Kuala Lumpur air traffic controller told a Malaysia Airlines official that he would need to wake up his supervisor when pressed on the exact time of the last contact with the plane. The controller came on duty after 3 a.m.
Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said his department viewed the matter seriously and was conducting an internal investigation, including whether the supervisor was on duty at the time in question.
‘‘The work is on rotation. . . . If he is on a working shift, this is serious,’’ he said.
Liow said the ministry did not investigate the matter earlier because they were waiting for Sunday’s report by the independent investigation team.
After the last contact, the plane deviated from its flight path, turning sharply west and then south, according to analyses of transmissions to a satellite.
Despite an exhaustive search in the southern Indian Ocean where the plane was believed to have run out of fuel and crashed, no trace of wreckage has been found.
In late January, Malaysia’s government formally declared the plane’s disappearance an accident and said all those on board were presumed dead.
The report also showed that the battery of the underwater locator beacon for the plane’s data recorder had expired more than a year before the jet vanished, because of a computer data error that went unnoticed by maintenance crews.
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Also see: No distress call sent before plane crash in French Alps
I'm sorry I no longer believe official accountings of aircraft crashes, readers.
Related: Among fallen Marines in helicopter crash was recent Silver Star honoree
Hmmm.
NDU:
"Black box found damaged in fatal Alpine plane crash" by Greg Keller and Lori Hinnant, Associated Press March 25, 2015
My printed byline lists an Angela Charlton, not Lori Hinnant, so here we go. What are they covering up now?
SEYNE-LES-ALPES, France (AP) — A cockpit voice recorder badly damaged when a German jetliner slammed into an Alpine mountainside and a crucial two-minute span when the pilot lost contact offer vital clues into the crash’s cause, officials said Wednesday.
I no longer believe official anything, particularly when it comes to plane crashes.
All 150 people on board were killed in Tuesday’s crash of the Germanwings Airbus 320 in the southern French Alps.
Helicopters surveying the scattered debris lifted off at daybreak, hours ahead of the expected arrival of bereaved families and the French, German and Spanish leaders. The flight from Spain to Germany went into an unexplained eight-minute dive before crashing.
Crews were making their way slowly to the remote crash site through fresh snow and rain, threading their way to the craggy ravine. On Tuesday, the cockpit voice recorder was retrieved from the site, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.
‘‘The black box is damaged and must be reconstituted in the coming hours in order to be useable,’’ Cazeneuve told RTL radio.
Stinks of cover up already!
Key to the investigation is what happened during the minutes 10:30 and 10:31 a.m., said Segolene Royal, a top government minister whose portfolio includes transport. From then, controllers were unable to make contact with the plane.
The voice recorder takes audio feeds from four microphones within the cockpit and records all the conversations between the pilots, air traffic controllers as well as any noises heard in the cockpit. The flight data recorder, which Cazeneuve said had not been retrieved yet, captures 25 hours’ worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane.
Not that we would believe what we are told it says, but....
Royal and Cazeneuve both emphasized that terrorism is considered unlikely.
That raises some interesting questions since it is dismissed out of hand. Isn't Israel angry at the E.U. on the Palestinian issue? Wasn't Malaysia outspoken on the topic? I am only reiterating what other bloggers have mentioned. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
Investigators retrieving data from the recorder will focus first ‘‘on the human voices, the conversations’’ followed by the cockpit sounds, Transport Secretary Alain Vidalies told Europe 1 radio. He said the government planned to release information gleaned from the black box as soon as it can be verified.
Meaning when they get the cover story written they will disseminate it.
Victims included two babies, two opera singers, an Australian mother and her adult son vacationing together, and 16 German high school students and their teachers returning from an exchange trip to Spain.
In Seyne-les-Alpes, locals had offered to host bereaved families because of a shortage of rooms to rent, said the town’s mayor, Francis Hermitte.
The plane, operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, was less than an hour from landing in Duesseldorf on a flight from Barcelona when it unexpectedly went into a rapid eight-minute descent. The pilots sent out no distress call and had lost radio contact with their control center, France’s aviation authority said.
Very strange indeed!
Germanwings said 144 passengers and six crew members were on board.
An Air France flight from Paris to Saigon crashed just a few kilometers (miles) from the same spot in 1953, killing all 42 people on board.
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Kind of a cheeky photo at the bottom, isn't it? Looks like Pennsylvania on 9/11, and more like a shoot down anything else (if it even happened at all).
Were there any war games going on in the area?
What I was told:
"Plane crash kills 150 people in French Alps; Europe in shock" by Greg Keller and Angela Charlton | AP March 24 at 7:55 PM
SEYNE-LES-ALPES, France — A black box recovered from the scene and pulverized pieces of debris strewn across Alpine mountainsides held clues to what caused a German jetliner to take an unexplained eight-minute dive Tuesday midway through a flight from Spain to Germany, apparently killing all 150 people on board.
The victims included two babies, two opera singers and 16 German high school students and their teachers returning from an exchange trip to Spain. It was the deadliest crash in France in decades.
The Airbus A320 operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, unexpectedly went into a rapid descent. The pilots sent out no distress call and had lost radio contact with their control center, France’s aviation authority said, deepening the mystery.
The plane acted almost as if it were overtaken by remote control (if it happened at all).
While investigators searched through debris from Flight 9525 on steep and desolate slopes, families across Europe reeled with shock and grief.
*************
It took investigators hours to reach the site, led by mountain guides to the craggy ravine in the southern French Alps, not far from the Italian border and the French Riviera.
“Everything is pulverized. The largest pieces of debris are the size of a small car. No one can access the site from the ground,” Gilbert Sauvan, president of the general council, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, told The Associated Press.
Hmmmmmmmmm!!
“This is pretty much the worst thing you can imagine,” said Bodo Klimpel, mayor of the German town of Haltern, rent with sorrow after losing 16 tenth graders and their two teachers.
The White House and the airline chief said there was no sign that terrorism was involved, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged reporters not to speculate on the cause.
Hmmmmmmmmm!!
“We still don’t know much beyond the bare information on the flight, and there should be no speculation on the cause of the crash,” she said in Berlin. “All that will be investigated thoroughly.”
Lufthansa Vice President Heike Birlenbach told reporters in Barcelona that for now “we say it is an accident.”
In Washington, the White House said American officials were in contact with their French, Spanish and German counterparts. “There is no indication of a nexus to terrorism at this time,” said U.S. National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said a black box had been located at the crash site and “will be immediately investigated.”
Except it is now damaged.
************
Germanwings is low-cost carrier owned by Lufthansa, Germany’s biggest airline, and serves mostly European destinations. Tuesday’s crash was its first involving passenger deaths since it began operating in 2002. The Germanwings logo, normally maroon and yellow, was blacked out on its Twitter feed.
Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr called it the “blackest day of our company’s 60-year history.” He insisted, however, that flying “remains after this terrible day the safest mode of transport.”
***************
Authorities faced a long and difficult search-and-recovery operation because of the area’s remoteness. The weather, which had been clear earlier in the day, deteriorated Tuesday afternoon, with a chilly rain falling. Snow coated nearby mountaintops.
French Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said the crash site covered several acres, with thousands of pieces of debris, “which leads us to think the impact must have been extremely violent at very high speed.”
Uh-oh.
Search operations were suspended overnight and were to resume at daybreak, though about 10 gendarmes remained in the desolate ravine to guard the crash site, authorities said....
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UPDATE: Gaining new appreciation for Singapore’s titan
