Boeing company was aware of safety issue before two crashes, but ignored.
One Boeing employee worried the 737 Max might be “vulnerable.” A company document said if pilots didn’t respond to a new automated system within seconds it would be “catastrophic.” A plan to include an alert for the system, known as MCAS, was considered but scrapped. The new revelations about how Boeing wrestled with the safety questions surrounding the new system on its best-selling plane came at a congressional hearing in Washington, adding to evidence that the company was aware of concerns about the plane‘s safety before two crashes that left 346 people dead.
Panic in Pakistani City After 900 Children Test Positive for H.I.
RATODERO, Pakistan – Nearly 900 children in the small Pakistani city of Ratodero were bedridden early this year with raging fevers that resisted treatment. Parents were frantic, with everyone seeming to know a family with a sick child. In April, the disease was pinned down, and the diagnosis was devastating: The city was the epicenter of an H.I.V. outbreak that overwhelmingly affected children. Health officials initially blamed the outbreak on a single pediatrician, saying he was reusing syringes. Since then, about 1,100 citizens have tested positive for the virus, or one in every 200 residents. Almost 900 are younger than 12. Health officials believe the real numbers are probably much higher, as only a fraction of the population has been tested so far.
Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopian Prime Minister
Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for his work in restarting peace talks with neighboring Eritrea and beginning to restore freedoms in his country after decades of political and economic repression. Mr. Abiy, 43, broke through two decades of frozen conflict between his vast country, Africa’s second most populous, and Eritrea, its small and isolated neighbor. When he became prime minister of Ethiopia in 2018, he threw himself at a breakneck pace into reforms at home, and peace negotiations with the rebel-turned-dictator Isaias Afwerki, president of Eritrea.
The two nations share deep ethnic and cultural ties, but until July last year they had been locked into a state of neither peace nor war, a conflict that had separated families, complicated geopolitics and cost the lives of more than 80,000 people during two years of border violence.
In its official announcement, the Nobel Committee detailed a litany of accomplishments for Mr. Abiy in his first 100 days as prime minister: lifting the country’s state of emergency, granting amnesty to thousands of political prisoners, dis-continuing media censorship, legalizing outlawed opposition groups, dismissing military and civilian leaders suspected of corruption, and increasing the influence of women in political and community life.