Crew and passengers escape as plane lands in field

Tomsk: A small Russian passenger plane made an emergency landing in Siberia after engine failure, emergency officials said, with all 19 passengers and crew safe.

Soon after the Antonov An-28 disappeared in the Tomsk region of western Siberia, rescue helicopters spotted it sitting on its belly in a field.

Emergency officials said the passengers and crew did not sustain any serious injuries and were being flown by helicopter to the city of Tomsk.

The crew made an emergency landing after one of the two engines failed, Russian news reports said.

The plane belongs to the local Sila airline and was flying from the town of Kedrovoye to Tomsk.

The flight crew had not reported any problems before the plane disappeared, but the emergency beacon activated during the flight, signalling that it had made a forced landing or crashed.

Bradford: The pilot of a hot-air balloon has died in the US after becoming entangled in gear underneath the basket and then falling to the ground.

The balloon took off from Post Mills airport in Bradford, Vermont, on Thursday afternoon, carrying five people.

Some time later it touched down in a field and one passenger fell out, but was unhurt.

At that point, the pilot became entangled in gear fixed to the balloon as it re-ascended. He eventually fell to the ground in a field where he was pronounced dead.

After the pilot fell, three other passengers remained in the balloon until it caught in a grove of trees about 1.5 miles north in Piermont, New Hampshire, where they escaped without injury.

Maryland: The Hubble Space Telescope should be back in action soon after a tricky, remote repair job by Nasa.

The orbiting observatory went dark in mid-june, with all astronomical viewing halted.

Nasa initially suspected a 1980s-era computer as the source of the problem but, after the back-up payload computer also failed, flight controllers at Maryland’s Goddard Space Flight Centre focused on the bigger command-and-data unit, installed by spacewalking astronauts in 2009.

Engineers successfully switched to the back-up equipment on Thursday, and the crucial payload computer kicked in.

Nasa said yesterday that science observations should resume quickly if everything goes well.

A similar switch took place in 2008 after part of the older system failed.

Minsk: Belarusian authorities have widened their crackdown on independent media, raiding media offices and journalists’ homes across the ex-soviet country.

The Belarusian Association of Journalists said the authorities searched apartments and offices of at least 21 journalists in the capital Minsk and in Brest, Gomel, Grodno and Pinsk.

“The authorities are using an entire arsenal of repressions against journalists – intimidation, beatings, searches and arrests,” said the association’s head,

Andrei Bastunets.

Among those targeted were journalists who co-operated with the Belsat TV channel funded by Poland and the Us-funded RFE/RL broadcaster.