CANBERRA, Australia: The director of a seabed hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on Tuesday disagreed with a new book’s conclusion that the pilot likely flew the plane beyond the search area to deliberately sink it in unexplored depths of the Indian Ocean.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau believes the airliner mostly likely ran out of fuel and crashed after flying far off course en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8, 2014. It believes all 239 passengers and crew on board were likely long dead inside a depressurized cabin and cockpit.
Search director Peter Foley, who coordinated the search on Malaysia’s behalf, was quizzed by a Senate committee on theories in Canadian air crash investigator Larry Vance’s new book “MH370: Mystery Solved.”
The book argues that two wing flaps found on islands off Africa in 2015 and 2016 point to pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah performing a controlled ditching outside the 120,000 square kilometers (46,000 square miles) that were scoured by sonar in an A$198 million search that ended in January last year. It says Shah’s aim was to keep the plane largely intact so it would disappear as completely as possible in the remote southern ocean.
Foley, who said he has read the book, pointed to evidence that the plane was not under anyone’s control when it hit the water.
He said analysis of the satellite transmissions of the flight’s final moments showed the jet was in a fast and accelerating descent at the end. Debris from within the plane’s interior found washed up on the west coast of the Indian Ocean suggested significant energy on impact, Foley said.
“If it was being controlled at the end, it wasn’t very successfully being controlled,” Foley said. “The flaps weren’t deployed,” he added.
The book argues that the two recovered flaps show evidence that they had been deployed as the pilot slowed the plane for a gentle landing on water.
Foley said an analysis at the bureau’s headquarters in Canberra of the second flap found on the island of Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania, in June 2016 determined it was “probably not deployed.”
But French authorities prevented an Australian analyst from “doing anything meaningful in terms of analysis” of the first flap found. That flap, known as a flaperon, was found on the French island of Reunion in July 2015. French authorities are holding the flaperon as evidence for a potential criminal prosecution.
Foley said his bureau could not conclude that the flaperon had lost its trailing edge because it was deployed when the plane hit the water.
While the bureau has not said who had initially flown the plane off course, Foley said “it’s absolutely evident” that someone had, ruling out some mechanical or electrical malfunction.
Texas-based technology company Ocean Infinity renewed the search this year on the basis that Malaysia would pay it up $70 million if it could find the wreckage or the plane’s black boxes.
Foley said he still hopes the search will succeed within weeks.
“If they’re not, of course, that would be a great sadness for all of us,” he said.
MH370 search director disagrees with pilot ditch theory
MH370 search director disagrees with pilot ditch theory
US bars five Europeans it says pressured tech firms to censor American viewpoints online
WASHINGTON: The State Department announced Tuesday it was barring five Europeans it accused of leading efforts to pressure US tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints.
The Europeans, characterized by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as “radical” activists and “weaponized” nongovernmental organizations, fell afoul of a new visa policy announced in May to restrict the entry of foreigners deemed responsible for censorship of protected speech in the United States.
“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,” Rubio posted on X. “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”
The five Europeans were identified by Sarah Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, in a series of posts on social media. They include the leaders of organizations that address digital hate and a former European Union commissioner who clashed with tech billionaire Elon Musk over broadcasting an online interview with Donald Trump.
Rubio’s statement said they advanced foreign government censorship campaigns against Americans and US companies, which he said created “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the US.
The action to bar them from the US is part of a Trump administration campaign against foreign influence over online speech, using immigration law rather than platform regulations or sanctions.
The five Europeans named by Rogers are: Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate; Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, leaders of HateAid, a German organization; Clare Melford, who runs the Global Disinformation Index; and former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, who was responsible for digital affairs.
Rogers in her post on X called Breton, a French business executive and former finance minister, the “mastermind” behind the EU’s Digital Services Act, which imposes a set of strict requirements designed to keep Internet users safe online. This includes flagging harmful or illegal content like hate speech.
She referred to Breton warning Musk of a possible “amplification of harmful content” by broadcasting his livestream interview with Trump in August 2024 when he was running for president.
Breton responded Tuesday on X by noting that all 27 EU members voted for the Digital Services Act in 2022. “To our American friends: ‘Censorship isn’t where you think it is,’” he wrote.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said France condemns the visa restrictions on Breton and the four others. Also posting on X, he said the DSA was adopted to ensure that “what is illegal offline is also illegal online.” He said it “has absolutely no extraterritorial reach and in no way concerns the United States.”
Most Europeans are covered by the Visa Waiver Program, which means they don’t necessarily need visas to come into the country. They do, however, need to complete an online application prior to arrival under a system run by the Department of Homeland Security, so it is possible that at least some of these five people have been flagged to DHS, a US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss details not publicly released.
Other visa restriction policies were announced this year, along with bans targeting foreign visitors from certain African and Middle Eastern countries and the Palestinian Authority. Visitors from some countries could be required to post a financial bond when applying for a visa.
