Six In The Morning

Virgin Galactic crash: SpaceShipTwo probe ‘may take year’

2 November 2014 Last updated at 08:38

BBC

The investigation into the Virgin Galactic spacecraft crash in California’s Mojave Desert could take about a year, the head of the US transport safety agency has said.

Christopher Hart said Virgin Galactic would be able conduct further test flights while the investigation took place.

SpaceShipTwo broke up in mid-air during a test flight on Friday.

One of the pilots was killed and the other injured.

Virgin chief Sir Richard Branson says he is “determined to find out what went wrong” and learn from the tragedy.

The West is silent as Libya falls into the abyss

 World View: In 2011, there was jubilation at Gaddafi’s demise. Not any more: the aftermath of foreign intervention is calamitous and bloody

PATRICK COCKBURN Sunday 2 November 2014

Remember the time when Libya was being held up by the American, British, French and Qatari governments as a striking example of benign and successful foreign intervention? It is worth looking again at film of David Cameron grandstanding as liberator in Benghazi in September 2011 as he applauds the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi and tells the crowd that “your city was an example to the world as you threw off a dictator and chose freedom”.

Mr Cameron has not been back to Benghazi, nor is he likely to do so as warring militias reduce Libya to primal anarchy in which nobody is safe. The majority of Libyans are demonstrably worse off today than they were under Gaddafi, notwithstanding his personality cult and authoritarian rule. The slaughter is getting worse by the month and is engulfing the entire country.

Kurds march for Kobani as peshmerga arrive

 Tens of thousands of Kurds have rallied in cities across Turkey in solidarity with the Syrian city of Kobani, as US airstrikes continued and peshmerga fighters from neighboring Iraq arrived for the first time.

 DW

In Diyarbakir, in the Kurdish region of southeast Turkey, peaceful protesters marched while chanting: “Long live the struggle for Kobani.”

The assault on Kobani has largely emptied the Turkish border city that was once home to hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

“The rallies in Turkey were the largest of scores of such pro-Kobani rallies worldwide,” said Yekbun Eksen, a member of the Federation of Kurdish Associations of France. A rally in Paris, meanwhile, mobilized some 8,000 people on Saturday and hundreds of Kurds also marched peacefully in cities in Sweden and Denmark.

Unloved and ineffective, US Congress slouches towards polling day with Republicans favoured



    November 2, 2014 – 12:12PM Nick O’Malley

US correspondent for Fairfax Media

Washington: It is hard to exaggerate just how unloved and how ineffective the current Congress, which faces midterm elections on Tuesday in the United States, has been.

The metrics are there, of course. This Congress has passed less legislation than any other in modern American history – around a tenth of that enacted by the infamous “do-nothing” Congress of 1947-1949.

The American people know how badly they have been let down, too. Though US President Barack Obama remains deeply unpopular, with a job approval of around 42 per cent, he is streets ahead of Congress, which enjoys the approval of just 13.4 per cent of its citizens, according to the Real Clear Politics poll average.

 In missing students case, Mexico draws world attention it doesn’t want



 BY TIM JOHNSON

McClatchy Foreign Staff

COCULA, MEXICO – The clock ticks. A nation waits. More than a month after 43 student teachers went missing, a frantic search unfolds in the hills of western Mexico’s Guerrero state.

By some counts, more than three dozen potential grave sites have been searched. Some have yielded bodies. All have added to anguish. Yet no grave has relinquished a body identified as one of the missing students.

Police reputation and morale at stake in Hong Kong protests



By John Ruwitch

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Hong Kong police have been pushed and pulled in all directions during weeks of pro-democracy street protests, obeying orders to clear protest sites, allow protest sites to stay put, push back demonstrators and protect them from attack.

With no end to the standoff in sight, the police, long known as “Asia’s finest”, risk being cast as enforcers for an unpopular central government in Beijing or failing in their duty to ensure the city remains one of the safest in the world.

“Your friendly ‘bobby on the beat’ image … has been taken for granted in Hong Kong,” said Steve Tsang, head of the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham in England.