When I Was Young

Moms, are you a 'control freak'… do you see yourself in your daughters?

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06/04/2009 | 06:40 AM

ADELANTO, Calif. – Authorities arrested a woman for allegedly trying to kidnap her daughter's boyfriend and haul him away to Northern California. A sheriff's spokeswoman said Tuesday that two women went to the young man's home on Saturday afternoon and tried to tie him up with duct tape.

The victim told authorities the women said they were taking him to get him away from one of the women's 21-year-old daughter. Authorities said both women were arrested on suspicion of attempted kidnapping.

Officials said the girlfriend was later arrested for investigation of dissuading a witness and extortion for allegedly trying to get her boyfriend to recant his statements on the kidnapping to authorities. - AP

From GMANews.tv; see the source article here.

AFP - Thursday, June 4

A French military aircraft joins the search for Flight AF 447 off Cape Verde. Investigators say they may never find the black boxes that could explain why an Air France jet crashed into the ocean as naval teams trawled deep Atlantic waters.

FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil (AFP) - - Investigators said on Wednesday they may never find the black boxes that could explain why an Air France jet crashed into the ocean as naval teams trawled deep Atlantic waters.

An inquiry has begun into the cause of Monday's disaster, but the scattered and sunken remains of the jet will have to be recovered before the hundreds of grieving relatives across the world can expect any answers.

In particular, investigators will want to get a hold of the Airbus A330's black box flight data recorders, which may be lying in Atlantic Ocean waters as deep as 6,000 metres (19,700 feet) and 500 kilometres (312 miles) from land.

The crash is the worst in the airline's history with 228 people on board.

The director of the French air investigation agency, Paul Louis Arslanian, said he was "not totally optimistic" the boxes would be recovered from the "deep and mountainous" place into which they are thought to have sunk.

"We can't rule out not finding the recorders," he told a news conference in Paris, adding that even if they are found there is no guarantee the speed and altitude data and cockpit recordings would be enough to solve the mystery.

A naval mission was launched after the debris was spotted off Brazil's coast, and ships heading to the zone are carrying two mini-submarines, the best hope of tracking down the boxes, which ought to emit a location signal.

The first of Brazilian vessel was to arrive early Wednesday, joining three cargo ships from France and the Netherlands that were rerouted to the area.

A Brazilian air force plane with night-vision sensors has been sweeping a zone 500 kilometres northeast of Brazil's Fernando do Noronha archipelago, itself 400 kilometres from the mainland, officials said.

Another three air force aircraft were to be deployed after dawn, when visual sweeps would also be made for signs of bodies.

Defense Minister Nelson Jobim on Tuesday confirmed that the spot in Brazilian waters was the crash site of the Air France Airbus A330, and a spokesman for the French general staff confirmed this.

"The operation is now changing from being an aerial mission covering a vast expanse of the ocean to a naval operation focusing on a much more limited area," Captain Christophe Prazuck told AFP.

The wreckage extinguished any lingering hopes of finding survivors and confirmed the worst civil aviation accident since 2001, when an American Airlines jet crashed in New York killing all 260 people on board.

Brazil on Tuesday announced three days of national mourning. Christian and Muslim services were to be held in Paris on Wednesday, including one in Paris' Notre-Dame cathedral to be attended by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The flight was four hours into its 11-hour voyage from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it broadcast automatic warnings indicating multiple electrical and pressurisation failures and ceased contact with controllers.

The pilots did not issue a distress call.

A team of investigators from France's BEA air safety agency is already in Brazil, the Brazilian air force said. In Paris, prosecutors launched a formal judicial inquiry.

Any human remains located would be taken by ship to Fernando de Noronha, where they would be flown out on air force aircraft.

More than half of those traveling on the Air France jet were either French or Brazilian. The others came from 30 countries, mostly in Europe.

The 216 passengers included 126 men, 82 women, seven children and a baby. The crew comprised 11 French nationals and one Brazilian.

Air France has suggested the four-year-old jet was struck by lightning , a fairly common hazard that by itself should not knock out a modern airliner.

Other theories advanced by experts include pilot error, mechanical defects or even terrorism. French officials have refused to rule out any possibility, after initially suggesting the crash was accidental.

From Yahoo! News; see the source article here.

Reuters - Wednesday, June 3

By Alonso Soto

RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazilian navy divers rushed on Wednesday to reach the wreckage of an Air France jet and start pulling debris from the Atlantic Ocean, where the plane with 228 people went down in the airline's worst disaster in its 75-year history.

Four navy ships with recovery equipment and a tanker were headed to a 3-mile northeast of the coastal city of Recife.

Rear Admiral Domingos Nogueira said the navy was battling tough weather as officials predicted the hardest task would be finding the flight data and voice recorders that hold clues to why the plane fell out of the sky during a severe storm in the middle of the night.

Distraught relatives who had prayed for a miracle gave up hope as experts were certain that all aboard died on the flight, which left Rio de Janeiro on Sunday night bound for Paris.

"I just want to find my son's body so that he can have a dignified burial," said Aldair Gomes, the father of Marcelo Parente, who was the head of the Rio mayor's cabinet.

So far no bodies have been sighted on flyovers by the air force, which spotted evidence of the catastrophe on Tuesday, allowing the navy to mount a retrieval operation.

"The ships are equipped to arrive and pick up pieces of the Airbus," Nogueira said. "Each ship has two divers on board and smaller ships to throw into the ocean to try and get pieces."

Helicopters would then be used to take wreckage of the Airbus A330 from the ships to a base on the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, 430 miles from the crash site.

On Wednesday, armed forces spokesman Christophe Prazuck told Reuters that the French army had no doubt that the debris belonged to the stricken plane.

MYSTERY

Officials said the recorders needed to identify the causes of the mysterious crash could be on the ocean floor at a depth of 6,600 to 9,800 feet.

The recorders are designed to send homing signals for up to 30 days when they hit water.

One expert said it could be among the hardest recoveries since the decades-long search to find the Titanic.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said he was confident that the black boxes would be located.

"I think a country that can find oil 6,000 metres down," he told reporters on Tuesday in Guatemala, referring to recent oil finds by Brazil's state energy company in ultra-deep waters.

Authorities were at a loss to explain how a storm could have caused the plane, operated by three experienced pilots, to crash without sending a mayday call.

Officials from France have arrived in Brazil to lead the investigation with help from Brazilian teams.

Brazil's air force last had contact with Flight AF 447 at 0133 GMT from its coast. The last automated signals, which reported an electrical failure, were received about 40 minutes later.

One theory is that a lightning strike or brutal weather set off a series of failures. But lightning routinely hits planes and could not alone explain the downing, aviation specialists said.

Two Lufthansa jets believed to have been in the same area half an hour before the Air France mishap could provide clues for investigators, the World Meteorological Organisation said.

From Yahoo! News; see the source article here.

Posted: 03 June 2009 1132 hrs

A French military aircraft joins the search off Cape Verde.

FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil: Navy ships are due to arrive Wednesday at a zone in the Atlantic off Brazil's coast where an Air France plane carrying 228 people crashed this week, as investigators focused on finding answers to the tragedy.

The first of the Brazilian navy vessels is to arrive early Wednesday, joining three cargo ships from France and the Netherlands that were rerouted to the area on Monday after debris from Air France flight AF 447 was spotted.

A Brazilian air force plane fitted with night-vision sensors conducted overnight sweeps of the zone, located around 500 kilometres (300 miles) northeast of Brazil's Fernando do Noronha archipelago, itself 400 kilometres from the mainland, officials said.
Another three air force aircraft were to be deployed after dawn, when visual sweeps would also be made for any sign of bodies.

Defence Minister Nelson Jobim on Tuesday confirmed that the spot in Brazilian waters was the crash site of the Air France Airbus A330.

"There are no doubts" a five-kilometre strip of floating debris - including cables, plane components and fuel slicks - marked the spot where the full flight went down, he told reporters.

The evidence extinguished any lingering hopes of finding survivors and confirmed the worst civil aviation accident since 2001, when an American Airlines jet crashed in New York killing all 260 people on board.

Brazil on Tuesday announced three days of national mourning for those who perished on the Air France plane. Catholic and Muslim services were to be held in Paris on Wednesday, including one in Notre-Dame cathedral to be attended by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Flight AF 447 was four hours into its 11-hour voyage from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it suddenly issued a series of automated data alerts indicating multiple electrical and pressurisation failures and ceased contact with controllers.

The pilots did not issue any mayday distress call, leaving the accident a mystery - one that only the plane's black boxes can elucidate, if they can be found in Atlantic waters as deep as 6,000 metres.

Brazil's air force said France's Bureau of Investigations and Analyses (BEA) was responsible for the investigation into what was Air France's worst accident in its 70-year history.

A team of BEA officials were already at work in Brazil, it said.

Two operations would be conducted in parallel, Jobim said: the recovery of the debris, and the search for bodies.

Any human remains would be taken by ship to Fernando de Noronha, where they would be flown out on air force aircraft.

More than half of those travelling on the Air France jet were either French or Brazilian. The others came from 30 countries, mostly in Europe.

The 216 passengers included 126 men, 82 women, seven children and a baby. The crew comprised 11 French nationals and one Brazilian.

The 58-year-old French captain had been flying for Air France since 1988 and had a great deal of experience, the airline said.

Air France has suggested the four-year-old plane could have been struck by lightning - a fairly common hazard that by itself should not knock out a modern airliner, but coupled with other problems such as violent turbulence it could be dangerous.

Other theories advanced by experts include pilot error, mechanical defects or even the remote possibility of terrorism.

"No hypothesis is being favoured at the moment," French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said Tuesday.

"Our only certainty is that there was no distress call sent by the plane, but regular automatic alerts sent over three minutes indicated the failure of all systems," he said.

A French ship was on its way to the zone, carrying two mini-submarines capable of operating at depths of 6,000 metres (19,700 feet), which is also the limit aircraft black boxes can survive for up to 30 days.

But any recovery would be extremely tricky, not only because of the depth, but also because of powerful currents and storms in the zone.

"To find the plane, you'll need ships equipped with a special sonar, and possibly also rescue submarines - it's an enormous undertaking," Commander Ronaldo Jenkins, safety coordinator for Brazil's airline association, told

- AFP/yb

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

Updated 1 hour, 2 minutes ago

Story Highlights

• NEW: Pilots' failure to issue mayday "ominous sign," former NTSB spokesman says
  
• NEW: Memorial service to be held Wednesday at Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral
  
• 2 debris fields found about 400 miles northeast of Fernando de Noronha Islands
  
• Flight 447, traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, was carrying 228 people
  

A French search and rescue crew scans the Atlantic for wreckage Tuesday.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (CNN) -- Debris located early Tuesday in the Atlantic Ocean off the northeast coast of Brazil is wreckage from the Air France jet that disappeared Monday, Brazil's Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said.

No survivors have been found, he said.

Jobim made the announcement after meeting with relatives and friends of Brazilians who were among the 228 people aboard Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, France.

Two debris fields were found about 650 km (400 miles) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha Islands, an archipelago 355 kilometers (220 miles) off the northeast coast of Brazil -- or at latitude 2 north, longitude 30 west, the Ministry of Defense said on its Web site.

One of the fields was 5 km (3 miles) long and that both lie near the flight path between Rio de Janeiro and Paris.

Among the wreckage was an airplane seat, metal debris, an orange float, a drum and an oil spill, the posting said.

Brazilian air force planes spotted the debris field Tuesday morning, but it was not until a French commercial vessel arrived on the scene that the debris' origin was confirmed. The planes searched 10,000 square kilometers (3,861 square miles) of ocean throughout the day and will continue to search for more debris overnight, the Brazilian Air Force Said.

Two Netherlands-flagged vessels were expected to arrive in the area later in the day; a Brazilian navy ship was expected to arrive Wednesday, officials said. Brazilian air force jets were continuing to comb the area for other debris, and a U.S. P-3 Orion maritime patrol aircraft was assisting as well.

The searchers also want to find the cockpit voice and data recorders, which might shed light on what caused the jet to disappear before any of the three pilots was able to issue a mayday.

"That really is an ominous sign," said former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board Managing Director Peter Goelz. "It means, whatever happened, it happened so quickly that the pilots were not able to radio out. It probably indicates a catastrophic failure at altitude."

He said that meteorologists have been checking weather data over the area "to see if there was some phenomenon that was taking place -- so far, we haven't seen it."

The Airbus A330 encountered heavy turbulence early Monday, about three hours into what was supposed to be an 11-hour flight, according to the airline.

The plane carried 216 passengers -- 126 men, 82 women, seven children and a baby -- and 12 crew members, Air France said.

The majority of the people on the flight came from Brazil, France and Germany. Other victims were from 29 other countries, including three from the United States. Of the crew, 11 were French, and one was Brazilian.

A team of approximately 20 Air France staff members, including two doctors and a nurse, arrived Tuesday in Rio de Janeiro to assist families of the victims, the airline said.

An inter-religious ceremony is to be held Wednesday afternoon inside Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral for family and friends of the victims. Though it will be closed to news media, a sound recording of the ceremony will be broadcast into the square outside.

An official list of victims by name was not available Tuesday afternoon, but two Americans on board -- Michael Harris, 60, and his wife, Anne, 54 -- were identified by the couple's family and his employer.

Prince Pedro Luis de Orleans e Braganca, a member of Brazil's non-reigning royal family, was also on the flight, his family said Monday. Pedro Luis was 26.

Also on the flight were two executives of the French tire company Michelin: Michelin Latin America President Luiz Roberto Anastacio and Antonio Gueiro, director of informatics. Read more about victims on Air France Flight 447

The jet was 4 years old and had last undergone routine maintenance April 16.

The Air France plane has built-in homing devices, said Greg Feith, a former investigator with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

Homing devices such as "pingers," which are underwater locator beacons attached to flight data and cockpit voice recorders, can transmit signals from as deep as 14,000 feet, about the maximum depth of the waters in the area.

The average depth of the Atlantic Ocean is about 12,000 feet: more than 2 miles.

"They're water-activated, so if they're sitting at the bottom of the ocean, of course, then the military assets will have to go in there with listening devices and try and home in on those particular signals," Feith said.

Shortly before it disappeared, the plane's automatic system initiated a four-minute exchange of messages to the company's maintenance computers, indicating that "several pieces of aircraft equipment were at fault or had broken down," Air France CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon said Monday.

The jet, which was flying at 35,000 feet and at 521 mph, also sent a warning that it had lost pressure, the Brazilian air force said.

There was no contact with the crew during or after the time that the automatic messages were sent, Gourgeon said.

"It was probable that it was a little bit after those messages that the impact of the plane took place in the Atlantic," he added.

From CNN.com; see the source article here.

Posted: 03 June 2009 0537 hrs

A French military crew flying over the Atlantic Ocean in search of a missing Air France jet.

RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazil's government confirmed late on Tuesday that debris spotted by aircraft in the Atlantic Ocean came from a missing Air France flight that had been carrying 228 people when it vanished without a trace.

Defence Minister Nelson Jobim told a media conference in Rio de Janeiro "there are no doubts" that jet fuel slicks and debris, including a seat from a plane, were from flight AF 447, which had been flying from Rio to Paris on Monday when it went missing.
The debris was scattered over a five-kilometre area, he said, "confirming that the plane fell at this spot."

Jobim said three merchant vessels were in the debris zone and the first of several Brazilian navy vessels would arrive on Wednesday.

"They will start the work to recover these items that were spotted" on Tuesday by Brazilian air force planes, he said.

If any bodies were found, they would be transported by ship to the nearest airport, on Brazil's archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, 460 kilometres away. From there, they would be flown out on air force planes, he said.

Jobim made the announcement after visiting relatives of those on board the flight who were being looked after in a Rio hotel by teams including psychological and medical personnel. - AFP/de

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

Posted: 03 June 2009 0233 hrs

A French military personnel checking with binoculars the Atlantic Ocean for the missing Air France jet.

PARIS: A French research ship equipped with two mini-submarines is on its way to a stretch of the Atlantic where an Air France flight carrying 228 people vanished, officials said on Tuesday.

The "Pourquoi Pas" ("Why Not") will join the hunt currently being carried out by French and Brazilian air force jets hundreds of kilometres off the Brazilian coast, the ecology ministry said in a statement.

The mini-subs it carries can work at depths of up to 6,000 metres. The ocean area where the plane disappeared has maximum depths of 4,700 metres, French naval experts said.

The black boxes aboard the missing Air France jet can survive as deep as 6,000 metres underwater and emit a signal for one month, according to French air disaster investigators.

But none has ever been found this deep in the ocean, they said.

A French military spokesman meanwhile said he believed that aircraft debris found by the Brazilian air force "appeared to be a very serious lead."

The items include a seat from a plane, bits of white material, an orange buoy, a barrel and fuel slicks, according to the air force, which said it could not be immediately confirmed that the debris was from the Air France flight. - AFP/de

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.