Iran called on Western governments to prove claims the Boeing Co. 737-800 passenger jet that crashed near Tehran on Wednesday was shot down, intensifying a standoff that could complicate an already difficult investigation fraught with geopolitical hurdles.
Ali Abedzadeh, head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization, told a televised news conference he was “certain that no missiles hit the aircraft” and that Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 wasn’t shot down, building on earlier government denials.
“If they are certain and have the courage, they should share any finding that has scientific and technical backing,” said Abedzadeh Friday.
Iran accused Western governments of “psychological warfare” in claiming the jet came under fire.
Intelligence from multiple sources, including Canada’s allies, “indicates that the plane was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa on Thursday. “This may well have been unintentional.”
Two surface-to-air missile launches were detected by a U.S. spy satellite from an Iranian battery near the airport minutes after the jet took off, followed by an explosion near the plane, said a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Russian-made SA-15 missile, also known as a Gauntlet or a Tor, is suspected of being involved. They are short-range weapons designed to attack planes, helicopters and other airborne targets.
An image grab from footage obtained from the state-run Iran Press news agency on January 10, 2020 shows Iran’s civil aviation chief Ali Abedzadeh delivering a press statement in Tehran.
IRAN PRESS/AFP via Getty Images
The Washington Post obtained a video that allegedly shows the moment the airliner was struck in midair. The video, first published by the New York Times, purportedly shows a missile intercepting the aircraft near the city of Parand, followed by a loud boom.
But Abedzadeh said that video “cannot be confirmed.”
The crash, which killed all 176 people on board, comes at a time of heightened tensions between the U.S. and Iran, whose economy has been crippled by sanctions. The U.S. Friday announced a fresh wave of sanctions against the Iranian regime, and took action against eight Iranian officials who they said were involved in Tuesday’s ballistic missile strikes on an American base in Iraq — strikes which came just hours before the airliner went down. The sanctions target steel, aluminum, copper and iron, and sectors of the economy such as construction, manufacturing, textiles and mining.
Asked if he believed Iran shot it down the plane with a missile, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Friday reiterated the U.S. line that “we do believe that it is likely.”
NEW: Iranian state TV aired footage purporting to show the two black boxes recovered from the downed Ukrainian airliner, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo doubled-down on the U.S. belief Iran shot down the plane – allegations Iran denies. https://t.co/9cvSzff8alpic.twitter.com/zCLN8x8mYF
Raising concern that the investigation into the crash might be compromised, a crew of U.S. broadcaster CBS found the impact site unguarded and unsecured, with virtually all pieces of the plane cleared away and scavengers picking the location clean of remaining debris.
On Sky News on Friday, the Iranian ambassador to Britain denied Friday reports that Iran had bulldozed the site. Taking to Twitter after his appearance, Hamid Baeidinejad said such reports were “absolutely absurd.”
Iran has said it invited Boeing and investigators from foreign countries including Canada to assist in the probe into the crash. More than a third of the passengers on the jet were from Canada, which said it is sending a team to help with the effort. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said it is monitoring the situation.
The flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders will be examined Friday at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport and any claims of what happened should be considered speculation until the information is retrieved, Abedzadeh said. Hassan Rezaeifar, Iran’s head investigator, said in the same briefing that Iran is open to allowing Russia, Ukraine, France or Canada to take charge of extracting the data.
We are analyzing this new video supposedly showing a mid-air explosion. By our initial estimation, the video shows an apartment block in western Parand (35.489414, 50.906917), facing northeast. This perspective is directed approximately towards the known trajectory of #PS752. pic.twitter.com/nDvjRIkFU4
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a statement earlier Thursday saying there is evidence Flight 752 was shot down. “We are working closely with Canada and our international partners and there now needs to be a full, transparent investigation,” Johnson said.
Rescue workers carry the body of a victim of a Ukrainian plane crash in Shahedshahr, southwest of the capital Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020.
Ebrahim Noroozi /
Associated Press
In Australia on Friday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a radio interview that his country had intelligence that an Iranian missile had shot down the jetliner. In another radio interview, he said he had been briefed by Trudeau and described the episode as “a terrible accident.” In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said while a missile hit hadn’t been ruled out, it also hadn’t been confirmed, “as of today.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky had phone conversations Thursday with heads of state from Canada, Britain, Sweden and Iran — each of whose citizens were among the passengers. While Ukraine’s readouts of those calls said Zelensky intended to keep those leaders abreast of Ukraine’s findings and encouraged their countries to participate in the investigation, he has now had to publicly ask to be briefed in return.
[embedded content]
This handout picture shows Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky meeting with relatives of the crew members of the Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 from Tehran to Kiev that crashed on January 8 shortly after take-off, in Kiev on January 9, 2020.
HO/UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SER/AFP via Getty Images
“Given the recent statements by the heads of state in the media, we call on all international partners, especially the governments of the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, to provide data and evidence relating to the disaster to the commission investigating the causes,” Zelensky said in a statement on Facebook.
Whether accidental or intentional, a shoot-down would echo two other instances of surface-to-air missiles striking civilian jets. In 2014, pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine fired on and destroyed a Malaysia Airlines jetliner. In 1988, an Iranian airliner was felled by a U.S. cruiser after being mistaken for a hostile aircraft following a skirmish with Iranian boats.
Some airlines aren’t taking any chances. Deutsche Lufthansa AG tweeted Friday that it turned around a plane headed to Tehran.
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers a statement on Iran’s missile attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq, in the Grand Foyer at the White House in Washington, U.S., January 8, 2020.
Jonathan Erns /
Reuters
President Donald Trump, speaking to reporters in Washington on Thursday, said, “I have my suspicions” about why the plane went down but he didn’t say what those suspicions are.
“It was flying in a pretty rough neighbourhood,” Trump said. “Somebody could have made a mistake.”
A flight recorder, also known as a black box, purportedly recovered from the crashed Ukrainian airliner, Boeing 737-800, is seen in Teheran, Iran January 10, 2019.
IRIB VIA WANA/Handout via REUTERS
The Ukrainian president’s office has said 45 Ukraine experts were working in Iran on the investigation and there are “several versions” for the cause under consideration.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani spoke by phone with Zelenskiy on Thursday and agreed to form a task force involving their transport officials and foreign ministries, the semi-official Fars news agency reported, citing Rouhani’s deputy head of communications.
Information provided by the United States will help investigate the crash, Zelenskiy said on Friday after a phone call with Secretary of State Pompeo.
The U.S. intelligence assessment is consistent with what some aviation accident experts have said. The apparent rapid spread of the fire combined with the sudden halt of radio transmissions from the plane after a normal climb aren’t consistent with previous crashes, said Jeffrey Guzzetti, the former head of accident investigations at the Federal Aviation Administration.
While Iranian officials initially said they suspected a problem with one of the plane’s engines, they retracted that in a preliminary report issued Thursday. The government also took the unusual step of setting up an investigative group to examine whether “any unlawful actions” initiated the fire on the plane, the preliminary report said.
Rescue workers search the wreckage of a Boeing Co. 737-800 aircraft, operated by Ukraine International Airlines, which crashed shortly after takeoff near Shahedshahr, Iran, on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020.
Ali Mohammadi/Bloomberg
Iran notified the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United Nations, about the crash, which should trigger involvement of other nations in the investigation, including the U.S., the agency said in a press release Thursday.
Under rules known as Annex 13, the nation in which a crash occurs usually is in charge of an investigation. Other nations are permitted to take part, such as the country in which the plane was made. Since Boeing manufactured the Ukrainian jet, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board would have a right to participate.
It remains unclear whether NTSB will send a representative to the Iran because U.S. law restricts travel to that country and the exchange of certain data. The agency said in a statement on Thursday night that it had “designated an accredited representative to the investigation of the crash.”
The U.S. Treasury has granted waivers for U.S. investigators to work in Iran in the past, but it has been a cumbersome process. Also, the NTSB has at times declined to send investigators to countries it deems unsafe.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
