Benjamin Netanyahu has said it is too early to tell who was ultimately behind the apparent attempt to crash a Tel Aviv-bound flydubai flight, even as Israel’s ambassador to the UN called the incident a “terror attack”. Flydubai said its flights to and from Israel would be suspended while an investigation takes place. What is believed to have taken place in the cockpit?
Pilot Smit Machchhar, an Indian citizen from Mumbai, has been hailed as a hero after releasing the cockpit door to allow passengers in to wrestle back control of the plane, after his co-pilot – reportedly an Omani national – stabbed him and sent the jet plunging nearly 14,000ft (4,267 metres) in less than 30 seconds. One passenger said: “There were two spare pilots who were supposed to operate the next flight. The relief pilots … entered [the cockpit] and pulled the aircraft up, pulled the yoke, stabilised the plane and landed us in Saudi Arabia.” How has Donald Trump responded?
The president said: “It seems as though the co-pilot was perhaps a terrorist, or perhaps a whack-job, and he stabbed the pilot.” Tennessee officials were unable to carry out the execution of Christa Pike despite her being administered two doses of a lethal injection drug, her lawyers said, adding that she had been taken to hospital in an ambulance. The Tennessee department of correction later confirmed that Pike had survived the state’s effort to execute her. Pike, 50, had been scheduled for execution at 10am Wednesday, and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
In 1995 she and her then boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, brutally beat and murdered an acquaintance, Colleen Slemmer, 19. Why has the death sentence for Pike been so controversial? As Ed Pilkington reported for the Guardian last month, at the time of the crime she was 18, and her co-accused was 17.
That age difference meant he was spared the death penalty. Pike, at that age, had already been subjected to serious abuse, including multiple rapes by three separate men and beatings by numerous relatives. The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has confirmed plans to cut 20% of generals and admirals and declared “no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps” would be tolerated inside the country’s military.
He also dismissed claims of low morale within the US armed forces as “false”. What were Hegseth’s words? Addressing lower-ranking troops at the Marine Corps Base, the defense secretary said: “The complainers, the ideologues and the poor performers are no longer in the driver’s seat.
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