FAA orders inspections of some Boeing 777 jets
Ultra-Orthodox caught between worlds as pandemic rages in Israel
The head of the Federal Aviation Administration said Sunday that he was requiring “immediate or stepped-up inspections” of Boeing 777 planes equipped with a particular Pratt & Whitney engine model one day after the jet suffered a dramatic engine failure over Colorado.
That episode, involving a United Airlines flight Saturday, saw the plane shed debris across three neighborhoods before landing in Denver.
The Boeing 777-200 was headed to Honolulu with 231 passengers and 10 crew aboard. Flames erupted under a wing as the plane began to lose altitude. There were no injuries.
Sunday’s announcement came after the aviation authority in Japan ordered airlines there to stop flying the plane. Both the Japanese and American orders apply to Boeing 777s equipped with Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engines.
“We reviewed all available safety data following yesterday’s incident,” the FAA administrator, Steve Dickson, said in a statement. “Based on the initial information, we concluded that the inspection interval should be stepped up for the hollow fan blades that are unique to this model of engine, used solely on Boeing 777 airplanes.”
Dickson said the FAA was
working with its counterparts around the world and said that its safety experts were meeting “into the evening” with Pratt & Whitney and Boeing to complete details of the required inspections. United Airlines is the only American carrier using planes affected by the FAA order, accord
ing to the agency. Only airlines in the United States, Japan and South Korea operate Boeing 777s with the affected Pratt & Whitney PW4000 engine model, according to the agency.
LONDON — The British government declared Sunday that every adult in the country should get a first coronavirus vaccine shot by July 31, at least a month earlier than its previous target, as it prepared to set out a “cautious” plan to ease the U.K.’s lockdown.
The previous aim was for all adults to get a jab by September. The new target also calls for everyone 50 and over and those with an underlying health condition to get their first of two vaccine shots by April 15, rather than the previous date of May 1.
The makers of the two vaccines that Britain is using — Pfizer and AstraZeneca — have both experienced supply problems in Europe. But U.K. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Sunday that “we now think that we have the supplies” to speed up the vaccination campaign.
The early success of Britain’s vaccination effort is welcome good news for a country that has had more than 120,000 coronavirus deaths, the highest toll in Europe. More than 17.5 million people, a third of U.K. adults, have had at lease one vaccine shot since inoculations began Dec. 8.
Britain is delaying giving second vaccine doses until 12 weeks after the first, rather than three to four weeks, in order to give more people partial protection quickly. The approach has been criticized in some countries — and by Pfizer, which says it does not have any data to support the interval — but it is backed by the U.K. government’s scientific advisers.
News of the new vaccine targets came as Prime Minister Boris Johnson met Sunday with senior ministers to finalize a “road map” out of the national lockdown. He plans to announce details Monday in Parliament.
Faced with a dominant virus variant that scientists say is both more transmissible and more deadly than the original virus, Britain has spent much of the winter under a tight lockdown. Bars, restaurants, gyms, schools, hair salons and all nonessential shops have been closed; grocery stories, pharmacies and takeout food venues are still open.
The U.S. Air Force said Sunday that a flying instructor and a student pilot from the Japanese Air Self Defense Force were killed when a trainer jet crashed in Alabama.
The Air Force released the name of the instructor who died when the T-38C Talon trainer aircraft crashed late Friday afternoon near Montgomery, Alabama.
He was identified as Scot Ames Jr., a 24-year-old instructor pilot with the 50th Flying Training Squadron at Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi. He was from Pekin, Indiana.
The name of the student pilot
Military jet crash:
is not being released at this time, and will be provided according to Japan’s process.
The cause of the incident is under investigation.
The pilots were flying a training mission.
Prince denies accusations:
Responding to accusations by U.N. investigators that he violated an international arms embargo, Erik Prince, the Blackwater Worldwide founder and prominent supporter of Donald Trump, denied playing any role in an $80 million mercenary operation in Libya in 2019.
“Erik Prince didn’t breach any arms embargo and had nothing to do with sending aircraft, drones, arms or people to Libya — period,” he said in an interview with The New York Times.
A confidential report submitted Thursday to the U.N. Security Council and obtained by The Times accused Prince of breaching the decade-old arms embargo on Libya by taking part in an ill-fated mercenary operation in 2019 that sought to support a Libyan commander in his drive to overthrow Libya’s internationally backed government.
Prince, who came under international scrutiny after his Blackwater contractors massacred 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007, has been a prominent supporter of Trump in recent years.
His sister, Betsy DeVos, was Trump’s education secretary.
Speaking by phone, Prince challenged key assertions in the U.N. report, lashed out at critics and played down his links to the former president.
He said he met Trump just once as president, at a Veterans Day event, and never discussed Libya or any other policy matter with him.
Libyan official survives: The interior minister of Libya’s U.N.backed government survived an ambush by gunmen on his motorcade Sunday, a brazen attack highlighting the challenges that remain for the newly appointed government that is trying to unite the country before elections late this year.
Men opened fire at Fathi Bashagha’s motorcade on a highway in Tripoli, wounding at least one of his guards, said Amin al-Hashmi, a spokesman for the Tripoli-based Health Ministry.
He said the minister survived the attack and his guards chased the assailants, killing one and detaining two others.
The Interior Ministry said in a statement that Bashagha was returning to his residence in the Janzour neighborhood when the incident occurred.
The statement called the attack an “attempted assassination” of the minister.
The U.S. Ambassador in Libya Richard Norland also condemned the attack and called for an investigation to hold those responsible accountable.
The U.N. special envoy to Libya Jan Kubis also urged a “full, rapid, and transparent investigation” into the incident.
It could take up to another week to restore power to all the remaining customers in the wake of an ice storm that wreaked havoc on the electrical grid in greater Portland, Oregon, beginning more than a week ago, a utility official said.
Almost 39,000 customers remained without power on Sunday. Portland General Electric said more than 400 crews were at work trying to restore power.
The worst ice storm in 40 years knocked out power to more than 350,000 residents at its peak and killed five people, including four who died from carbon monoxide poisoning as they tried to stay warm.
It could take as long as seven days to fully restore power, said
Oregon storm recovery:
utility spokeswoman Elizabeth Lattanner. Some customers have experienced multiple outages, she said.
Niger elections turn deadly:
Violence struck Niger’s presidential elections Sunday when seven members of the National Electoral Commission were killed when their car hit an explosive device, the government announced.
Three others were severely injured in the explosion which occurred in Gotheye village in the Tillaberi region in the country’s west, Addine Agalass, an adviser to Tillaberi’s governor told The Associated Press.
The attack happened while Nigeriens were nearly finished voting in the second round of the country’s presidential elections.
It’s unclear if it was intended to target the electoral commission officials or if it was related to the election, said Agalass.
TEHRAN, Iran — Iran will begin to offer U.N. inspectors “less access” to its nuclear program as part of its pressure campaign on the West, though investigators will still be able to monitor Tehran’s work, the U.N. atomic watchdog’s chief said Sunday.
Rafael Grossi’s comments came after an emergency trip to Iran in which he said the International Atomic Energy Agency reached a “technical understanding” with Tehran to continue to allow monitoring of its nuclear program for up to three months. But his remarks to journalists underlined a narrowing window for the U.S. and others to reach terms with Iran, which is already enriching and stockpiling uranium at levels far beyond those allowed by its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
“The hope of the IAEA has been to stabilize a situation which was very unstable,” Grossi said at the airport after his arrival back in Vienna, where the agency is based.
Grossi, the IAEA’s director general, offered few specifics of the agreement he had reached with Iranian leaders. He said the number of inspectors on the ground would remain the same but that “what changes is the type of activity” the agency was able to carry out, without elaborating further. He stressed monitoring would continue “in a satisfactory manner.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who under President Hassan Rouhani helped reach the atomic accord, said the IAEA would be prevented from accessing footage from their cameras at nuclear sites.
Zarif ’s comments marked the highest-level acknowledgment of what Iran planned to do when it stopped following the so-called Additional Protocol, a confidential agreement between Tehran and the IAEA reached as part of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal.
The IAEA has additional protocols with a number of countries it monitors.
Under the protocol with Iran, the IAEA “collects and analyzes hundreds of thousands of images captured daily by its sophisticated surveillance cameras,” the agency said in 2017. The agency also said then that it had placed “2,000 tamper-proof seals on nuclear material and equipment.”
There are 18 nuclear facilities and nine other locations in Iran under IAEA safeguards.
In 2018, then-President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. unilaterally out of the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, saying it needed to be renegotiated.
From Washington, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said President Joe Biden remained willing to negotiate with Iran over a return to the nuclear deal, an offer earlier dismissed by Zarif.
“He is prepared to go to the table to talk to the Iranians about how we get strict constraints back on their nuclear program,” Sullivan told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “That offer still stands, because we believe diplomacy is the best way to do it.”
JERUSALEM — The crowd surged and swirled, like the eddies of an ocean. Crushed against one another, hundreds of men stretched their arms toward the rabbi’s body, trying to touch the bier in a display of religious devotion.
It was the height of Israel’s third lockdown, in an ultra-Orthodox district near the heart of Jerusalem. Gatherings were banned. Masks were mandatory. Infection rates were spiking, particularly among ultra-Orthodox groups.
Yet here were hundreds of mourners, most with mouths uncovered, attending an illegal funeral procession for a revered rabbi who had himself died of the coronavirus.
For these deeply devout Jews, attendance was a religious and personal duty. To briefly grip the rabbi’s bier, and symbolically assist his passage from this world, was a sign of profound respect for the dead.
But for secular Israeli society, and even for some within the ultra-Orthodox world, this kind of mass gathering suggested a disrespect for the living.
“What is more important?” wondered Esti Shushan, an ultra-Orthodox women’s rights activist, after seeing pictures of the gathering. “To go to funerals and study Torah? Or to stay alive?”
It is a question that channels one of the central conflicts of the pandemic in Israel: the spiraling tension between the Israeli mainstream and the growing ultra-Orthodox minority, an insular group of highly religious Jews, also known as Haredim, who eschew many trappings of modernity in favor of intensive religious study.
When the pandemic began, one Haredi leader promised that adherence to Jewish law would save his followers from the virus.
Throughout Israel’s history, the Haredim have been reluctant participants in mainstream society, often prioritizing the study of scripture over conventional employment and army service.
The coronavirus has widened this divide.
Since the start of the pandemic, parts of ultra-Orthodox society have resisted the restrictions and protocols ordered by the secular state to counter the virus, preferring to follow the counsel of their own leadership.
The Haredim are not monolithic, and many have adhered faithfully to antivirus measures. Some Haredi leaders instructed their followers to wear masks, sign up for vaccines and close their institutions.
But other leading rabbis did not, and some ultra-Orthodox sects continued to hold mass weddings and funerals. They kept open their schools and synagogues, even as the rest of Israel was shutting down. A few on the radical fringe even rioted against the measures and clashed with the police.
“It’s a dispute that’s been running for decades,” said Eli Paley, chairman of the Haredi Institute for Public Affairs, a Jerusalem-based research group. “There is tension between the Haredim and the rest of the society that touches on the most deep questions about Jewish identity.”
“Then came the coronavirus,” he said, “which made all the underlying tensions even stronger.”
Throughout the pandemic, the government has been reluctant to penalize Haredim who violate antivirus protocols; analysts argue that the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, fears upsetting ultra-Orthodox lawmakers within his governing coalition.
Israel leads the world in vaccinating its citizens, and is viewed as a bellwether for what a post-pandemic world might look like.
But even as the vaccination rate rises, the country is still months from normality: The number of infections remains high — and the Haredim have borne the brunt.
Rivka Wertheimer, a 74-yearold Haredi homemaker, was among the most recent wave of infected people. Late one recent night, she was close to death.
Two ambulances were parked outside her cramped apartment in north Jerusalem, ready to rush her to the hospital. Two paramedics were inside, ready to lift her onto a gurney. A nurse at her bedside said she had just hours to live — unless she left now.
But the Wertheimers were not sure.
For more than three weeks, Wertheimer’s seven sons and daughters had cared for her at home. Hasdei Amram, one of a handful of Haredi charities providing at-home health care to coronavirus patients, had been sending nurses, oxygen tanks and medicine to her groundfloor apartment.
Wary of hospitals and outside intervention, her family was reluctant to change course even now, as their matriarch suffered another complication of the virus — a suspected hemorrhage.
Midnight approached. The oxygen machines bubbled away. To help them decide, the family called the man they trust more than any doctor: their rabbi.
“Everyone knows that human intellect has a limit,” said Chaim, Wertheimer’s eldest son. “When we ask a rabbi, we are asking him what blessed God wants.”
Science is of value, but for the Haredim it takes a back seat to faith, which governs every aspect of life in their community.
To see how this balance plays out, you can head south from Wertheimer’s apartment and into the narrow streets of the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Mea Shearim.
A maze of alleyways, Mea Shearim was built in the 19th century, before the first major waves of Zionist immigration. The neighborhood has long been a stronghold of the ultra-Orthodox. Some of its residents have always been skeptical of the Israeli state, and the pandemic has given fresh impetus to that tradition.
At a large yeshiva, or seminary, students gathered freely in clear violation of a government shutdown of the education system.
Down a nearby lane, hundreds of Haredim gathered for another street funeral for a coronavirus victim. They stood shoulder to shoulder in a tight crowd, blocking the street. The rabbi leading the funeral halfheartedly asked the mourners to cover their faces. Most did not.
One man, Ezekiel Warszawa, 32, wove his way through the crowd, whispering to the mourners to reject the antivirus measures.
“Remove your masks,” he said. “Take them off.”
The virus was a punishment from God, he said — retribution for the Jews’ failure to obey religious rules. The only cure was religious observance, he said.
Not everyone took that view. Several mourners shushed and tutted, telling Warszawa to leave. The rabbi reminded mourners to cover their mouths.
And at other ceremonies that week, there was a more orderly air.
The posters were old-fashioned death notices: large white signs with simple black type that announced the passing of prominent local residents and rabbis, often from the coronavirus.
Spliced among these notices were announcements of a different kind: subversive messages that questioned the existence of the virus and the need for antivirus measures.
“Jews, open your eyes, why rush?” read one poster on the walls of several streets. “The gentiles can get vaccinated first.”
But for every ultra-Orthodox person attending a crowded funeral, or posting a subversive sign, there is another diligently staying at home.
The Haredim have many leaders and sects, and are divided between Hasidic, Lithuanian and Sephardic traditions, each with its different subgroups. Many are frustrated by those who endanger others by breaking the lockdown rules.
“They have to wake up, because people are dying,” said Shushan, the Haredi activist. “How many funerals will come out of this one?”
Yet even internal critics of the Haredim, like Shushan, feel unable to fully break ranks. Despite their differences with other Haredim, they still feel defensive of their community and reluctant to provide ammunition to secular critics. And they feel intimidated by the level of secular vitriol.
“I feel caught between two sides,” she said. “I feel fear from the pandemic and I want to keep my family safe from it. But I also feel fear from the secular side.”
“When they look at the Haredi people, they see all of us as one group,” she said. “All of us in black.”
Across the Haredi world, there is a widespread sense of being misunderstood. Many feel they are victims of a double standard, one in which secular people are allowed to protest in large crowds outside the prime minister’s residence every week, but the ultra-Orthodox are vilified for seeking to mourn en masse.
They also feel their critics do not understand just how important religious study, rabbinical leadership and the mourning of the dead are to their way of life. Nor how much of an existential disruption it is to close the religious schools where many ultra-Orthodox spend most of their waking hours in search of divine truth.
“Without learning, we cannot live,” said Chaim Wertheimer, Rivka Wertheimer’s eldest son. “This is our life.”
“The Torah is the will of God,” he said. “The more a person studies the Torah, the more he will know about God’s will.”
Hasdei Amram, the charity, is trying to bridge this divide. Based in an underground storeroom in Mea Shearim, the group fields thousands of calls a week from Haredim who have fallen ill with the virus.
The emergence of new virus variants has made the past month particularly devastating. The more contagious B.1.1.7 variant, first identified in Britain, now accounts for up to 80% of the cases in Israel.
“This wave is the hardest we’ve had,” said Menachem Markowitz, a coordinator for the charity. He drives across Jerusalem every night, rushing oxygen tanks and medicine to patients’ apartments, often until dawn.
The charity’s core team is made up of Haredi volunteers with no formal medical qualifications. They crisscross the city, delivering oxygen, blood tests and steroids to coronavirus patients who call for their assistance.
Their work is regularly supplemented by a pool of sympathetic private nurses and doctors who also journey from neighborhood to neighborhood each night, often after finishing their day jobs. Donations cover some of the costs, while the patients pay the doctors themselves.
When patients like Wertheimer become too sick to be treated at home, the charity advises them to go to a hospital. But in general, Hasdei Amram believes many patients recover far faster when surrounded by their family in a familiar environment.
It is a ramshackle operation, staffed by hard-charging workaholics displaying little regard for their own safety.
But some experts fear that these volunteers might be too slow to detect when a patient needs hospital care.
“Basically I think it’s a good thing,” said Ronny Numa, a senior health ministry official who oversees Haredi affairs. “But it depends on cooperation and transparency. If something goes wrong, we need to know as fast as we can.”
At her home in northern Jerusalem, Wertheimer’s family finally agreed to send her to the hospital after consulting with their rabbi.
She died shortly after reaching the hospital, as her second son, Moshe, waited in the darkness outside.
She was buried the next day, under the noon sun, high up on the eastern flank of the Mount of Olives.
A group of 30 mourners, all men, picked their way toward the grave. Their black coats and wide-brimmed hats disrupted the beige monotone of the mountainside behind them.
By the evening, their public grief had given way to a private calm.
They received guests, sipped juice and ate food prepared by their female relatives, who worked in a kitchen cordoned behind a white sheet.
Outside, a group of neighborhood children chatted about Wertheimer’s death, wondering why she hadn’t been taken to the hospital sooner.
Her sons said they had no regrets. The timing of her death was set by God, they said. They were glad they had kept her at home, comforted by her family, as long as they had.
“The truth is,” Moshe Wertheimer said, “if we had been stronger we would have kept her here. We wouldn’t have sent her to hospital at all.”
Americans were shocked to witness the assault on the Capitol building on Jan. 6, the day Congress was scheduled to ratify the presidential election. Washington and the nation’s state capitals remained on alert as right-wing groups promised more violent attacks.
It is easy to trace the proximate cause of this assault — a president who long cultivated the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Prior to the Capitol assault, he exhorted his “Save America” rally on the Mall to “stop the steal” and “fight much harder,” asserting “You have to show strength, you have to be strong.”
It is important to understand how we got to such a place. It goes well past Trump to 40 years of dysfunctional American politics, and beyond that to the racism deeply embedded in this nation’s history. Both political parties share responsibility for our current condition.
In 1968, President Nixon rode a law and order campaign into the White House, appealing to a so-called “silent majority” frightened, if not alienated, by the images of antiwar protesters, inner-city “rioters” and counterculture “freaks” during the 1960s.
The mass media, of course, fed this dynamic by refusing to take seriously the actual claims of black, antiwar and feminist activists, instead, making sure the public saw the most inflammatory examples of their behaviors and appearances. That is a story I have documented elsewhere.
Nixon’s racist “southern strategy” set
in stone the future of the Republican Party, although it remained for Ronald Reagan to seal the deal. Reagan’s rhetoric about basic “decency” and “family values” played on the feelings of those disaffected by the 1960s. Yet Reagan’s actual policies focused on eliminating ways the government addresses public needs, cutting taxes on the wealthy, rebuilding a huge military complex and aggressive foreign policy, and deregulating the economy.
The people drawn to Reagan’s so-called “conservative” rhetoric — whether religious traditionalists, rural folks or members of the white working class — economically speaking, were
left behind under Reagan’s neoliberalism. They got symbolic gratification while their attention was diverted to the Democrats, liberals, and “Eastern elites” who supposedly caused their problems.
That is the Republican path that leads directly to Trump and his true believers.
What, then, of the Democratic Party? Smarting from Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984, Democratic centrists — including Dick Gephardt, Sam Nunn and Bill Clinton — took steps to move the party away from its more liberal wing, into the corporate-dependent center. In its more liberal moments, the
party voiced hopeful rhetoric about defending the rights of minorities, women and LGBTQ people, defending the environment, etc.
The reality has consistently fallen far short of the rhetoric. Indeed, the two “liberal” Democratic presidents of the neoliberal era — Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — were responsible for a host of repressive and “free market” (e.g., neoliberal) policies.
Republicans, in short, have been all about giveaways to the rich while manipulating the emotions of lesswell-off white Americans. Democrats have ignored the latter populations, becoming increasingly dependent on corporate money while also manipulating the aspirations of marginalized communities.
In their more liberal moments, Democrats embrace “identity politics” — race, gender and sexuality, in particular. Republicans use Democrats’ rhetoric to cement the emotional attachment of their rank-and-file supporters. As Republican rhetoric becomes increasingly outrageous, Democrats gain support. The corporate center, with all its sanctimonious rhetoric, is reinforced when something like the Capitol assault occurs.
Yet the country remains stuck in this seesaw battle that goes nowhere. Neither party speaks a word against a capitalist system that feeds inequality, threatens the planet’s ability to sustain life and generates a foreign policy marked by militarism and war. The “problem” is always the “other party.”
And neither party dares to confront class inequality. Yet, unlike identity concerns — important as they are — class analysis reveals the systemic forces that keep both parties’ rankand-file in their place at the margins of American politics.
Ultimately, the only way out of this will occur when enough people become aware, not only of the seriousness of the hazards facing us, but of the need to come together in a well-mobilized mass movement addressing systemic concerns.
We already can see where we are heading if we don’t do this.