Macron: IS responsible for Russia concert attack
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun will step down by year-end in a broad management shake-up brought on by the plane-maker’s sprawling safety crisis exacerbated by a January midair panel blowout on a 737 MAX plane.
Stan Deal, Boeing Commercial Airplanes president and CEO, will retire, and Stephanie Pope will take over that business, the company said Thursday. Steve Mollenkopf, former CEO of tech company Qualcomm, has been appointed new chair of the board and is leading the search for the next CEO.
The leadership changes cap weeks of turmoil at Boeing, after the midair incident involving an Alaska Airlinesoperated MAX 9 jet carrying 171 passengers turned into a full-blown safety and reputational crisis for the iconic company.
Boeing shares have lost roughly onequarter of their value since the incident.
The January incident was only the most recent in a series of safety crises that have shaken the industry’s confidence in Boeing and hampered its ability to increase production. Calhoun himself was brought in as CEO following a pair of crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed nearly 350 people.
Some investors expressed concern that this shake-up would not be enough to address these issues.
“We’ve long thought that the issues at Boeing have been seated in cultural challenges,” said Cameron Dawson, chief investment officer at NewEdge Wealth.
Analysts and investors called the shake-up positive for Boeing, but stressed that much depends on Calhoun’s successor and changing the company’s culture from the top.
Some suggested Spirit AeroSystems CEO Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive and U.S. government official, as a possible successor to Calhoun.
“We think it will require someone with pedigree and patience, as fixing
Boeing is probably a multiyear non-linear journey,” Vertical Research Partners aerospace analyst Robert Stallard said in a note to clients.
Following the January incident, the FAA curbed Boeing production to a rate of 38 jets per month, but CFO Brian West said last week it had not even reached that figure.
Since Calhoun, 66, took the reins, the company has endured ongoing production delays. Still, in October, Calhoun was upbeat over how fast Boeing could raise output of its MAX jets, saying Boeing would get back to 38 jets a month and was “anxious to build from there as fast as we can.”
But weeks after the midair cabin panel blowout in January, Calhoun said it’s time to “go slow to go fast.”
The company’s crisis has frustrated airlines already struggling with delivery delays from both Boeing and its main rival, Airbus, and the plane-maker has been burning more cash than expected in this quarter than expected.
“For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right, and that’s got to change,” West said last week.
Airbus clinched orders for 65 jets from two of Boeing’s key Asian customers recently, in what some saw as a sign of executives’ concerns about Boeing.
MOSCOW – France on Monday joined the United States in saying intelligence indicated the Islamic State was responsible for an attack on a concert hall outside Moscow that killed 137 people, while Russia continued to suggest that Ukraine was to blame.
In the deadliest attack inside Russia in two decades, four men burst into the Crocus City Hall Friday night, spraying people with bullets during a concert by Soviet-era rock group Picnic. Alongside the dead, 182 were wounded.
Four men, at least one a Tajik, were remanded in custody on terrorism charges. They appeared separately, led into a cage at Moscow’s Basmanny district court by Federal Security Service officers.
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, a claim that the United States has publicly said it believes, and the militant group has since released what it says is footage from the attack. U.S. officials said they had warned Russia of intelligence about an imminent attack earlier this month.
“The information available to us ... as well as to our main partners, indicates indeed that it was an entity of the Islamic State which instigated this attack,” French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters, referring to the Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan, known as ISIS-Khorasan or ISIS-K.
“This group also tried to commit several actions on our own soil,” he said during a visit to French Guiana.
France raised its terror alert to its highest level on Sunday following the shooting in Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has not publicly mentioned the Islamist militant group in connection with the attackers, who he said had been trying to escape to Ukraine.
Putin said some people on “the Ukrainian side” had been prepared to spirit the gunmen across the border. Ukraine has denied any role in the attack, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Putin of seeking to divert
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blame for the attack by mentioning Ukraine, something Macron said was a mistake.
“I think that it would be both cynical and counterproductive for Russia itself and the security of its citizens to use this context to try and turn it against Ukraine,” he said, adding that France had offered cooperation to help find the culprits.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, earlier called into question U.S. assertions that the Islamic State, which once sought control over swaths of Iraq and Syria, was behind the attack.
Two U.S. officials said on Friday that the United States had intelligence confirming the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia could not comment on the Islamic State claim while the investigation was ongoing, and would not comment on the U.S. intelligence, saying it was sensitive information.
Putin said 11 people had been detained, including the four suspected gunmen, who he said had fled the concert hall and made their way to the Bryansk region, about 210 miles southwest of Moscow, to slip across the border to Ukraine.