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Russia's President Putin ordered the shooting down of a passenger plane that was reportedly carrying a bomb and targeting the opening of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, he says in a new film.In the two-hour film, posted online, Mr Putin says he was told a plane from Ukraine to Turkey had been hijacked as the Games were about to start.It was found to be a false alarm, he says. The plane was not shot down.The film comes ahead of an election he is expected to win on 18 March.

The pilots of a Turkish Pegasus Airlines Boeing 737-800, flying from Kharkiv to Istanbul with 110 people on board, said a passenger had a bom

The first part of the documentary, entitled Putin, has been posted on social media accounts, including one belonging to key state media manager and commentator Dmitry Kiselyov, and a pro-Kremlin YouTube account.

The “worst deal ever” will most likely live to see another 120 days.The Associated Press reported Wednesday that President Trump will this week extend relief from nuclear-related economic sanctions on Iran. If it seems like a procedural matter, it is, but it also means in practice that it keeps alive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the Iran deal is known. Reinstating the sanctions would have put the United States in violation of the agreement. The president must decide every 120 days whether to waive the sanctions.  

Trump faced two separate choices. One was whether to certify or decertify the JCPOA under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which Congress passed in 2015 to give it the right to review the accord and require the president to verify Iran’s compliance with the agreement every 90 days. In October, Trump declined to certify compliance, but did not tear up the deal—in decertifying the deal, he left to Congress the decision of what to do about it. Congress has been focused on other things, however. The other and more consequential choice was whether to waive or reimpose sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear activities, and it is on this decision that U.S. participation in the deal lives or dies. If AP’s report is correct, Trump has passed up this opportunity to withdraw.  

The new sanctions will almost certainly anger Iranian officials, but are likely to be cautiously welcomed by the other parties to the JCPOA: the European Union, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the U.K., all of which wanted the deal to be preserved because, they said, it had succeeded in freezing the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and its uranium-enrichment activity.The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris climate deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, both signature foreign-policy initiatives of President Obama, bolster fears that the JCPOA could go the same way. Trump’s remarks on the presidential campaign trail, where he called the agreement the “worst deal ever,” further cast its future into doubt. But the JCPOA’s other signatories, especially the EU and the U.K., have been vocal in their support of the agreement and have made their case to the White House and lawmakers. China and Russia, who are also parties to the deal, have also signaled they will stay in it.

Eighty years ago, as Americans came together to defeat the fascism that threatened civilization, American factories poured out the weapons needed to crush Germany and the other Axis Powers.

Today America can do it again and create the arsenal that defeats this latest threat to civilization: the coronavirus. From ventilators and N95 masks, to anti-viral drugs and ICU equipment and hospital beds, American companies are being mobilized in the face of the most serious public health crisis in more than a century. But these companies will only be successful if we learn the right lessons from the industrial mobilization that won the world's biggest war.

Have a clear objective and a realistic timeline When war mobilization began in 1940-41, no one said the goal was to defeat fascism — and no one was able to mass produce tanks or bombers from a standing start. From the beginning, Washington set a more purposeful goal of building a modern, well-equipped military in case war came.

Like 40 percent of U.S. adults, I regularly wouldn’t be able to scrounge $400 in a crisis. But if you don’t have $400 (or considerably more) on hand, your poverty can trouble you in all sorts of other, more mundane ways, thanks to the abusive nature of the companies that provide us with services.

odysseys like mine are not — or are not merely — tales of airline villainy. They are stories about the background radiation of our rapacious economy, one in which customer and corporate desperation unwittingly amplify each other, accelerating the mutual distrust.

Nowhere is this cycle more apparent than airports, where holidays, weekends and rush hours are attacks on the notion that our time has value

Several people have been detained in Iran over the accidental shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane with a missile, the country's judiciary says.

Ukrainian International Airlines flight PS752 was brought down shortly it took off from Tehran on Wednesday, killing all 176 people on board. Most of the victims were Iranian and Canadian citizens.

For the first three days after the crash, Iran denied that its armed forces had shot down the Boeing 737-800 and suggested there had been a technical failure.But as evidence mounted, the Revolutionary Guards said the operator of a missile defence system had mistaken the aircraft for a US cruise missile and fired at it.

The United States threatened to impose 25% tariffs on cars to push Europeans to initiate proceedings against Iran for violating the nuclear deal, the German defence minister has confirmed.

Kramp-Karrenbauer told reporters on Thursday: “This expression or threat, as you will, does exist.” She is in the UK to meet her counterpart Ben Wallace to discuss Anglo-European defence co-operation post-Brexit.

A Ukrainian Boeing 737 plane was shot down outside Tehran killing all 176 crew and passengers. Iran’s handling of the crash led to four days of street protests mainly in Tehran.

A Sriwijaya Air plane crashed into the sea on Saturday minutes after taking off from Indonesia’s capital Jakarta on a domestic flight with 62 people on board, and their fate was not known.

The nearly 27-year-old Boeing 737-500 was much older than Boeing’s problem-plagued 737 MAX model, one of which crashed off Jakarta in late 2018, killing all 189 people aboard the Lion Air flight. Older 737 models are widely flown and do not have the system implicated in the MAX safety crisis.

There were no immediate clues on what may have caused the sudden descent and safety experts stress most air accidents are caused by a cocktail of factors that can take months to establish.

Janet L. Yellen, collected more than $7 million in speaking fees over the past two years from major corporations and Wall Street banks that have a keen interest in the financial policies she will oversee after her expected confirmation to lead the Treasury Department.

Ms. Yellen’s paid speaking appearances — which included $992,000 from the investment bank Citi for nine appearances — were among the lucrative payments from a range of Wall Street, Big Tech and corporate interests to three prominent prospective members of the incoming Biden administration.

Mr. Biden’s choice for secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, was paid nearly $1.2 million by a consulting firm he helped found, WestExec Advisors, where he advised a range of corporations including Facebook, Boeing, the private equity giant Blackstone and the asset management company Lazard.

this year even Mr. Trump’s speech backdrop, Mount Rushmore with its four presidential faces, is politically charged. Each of those Presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt—is under assault for ancient sins against modern values, as progressives seek to expunge their statues and even their names from American life. Mr. Trump’s great offense against the culturally ascendant progressives was to defend these presidential legacies.

But it was only divisive if you haven’t been paying attention to the divisions now being stoked on the political left across American institutions. Mr. Trump had the temerity to point out that the last few weeks have seen an explosion of “cancel culture—driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.”

Describing this statement of fact as “divisive” proves his point. Newspaper editors are being fired over headlines and op-eds after millennial staff revolts. Boeing CEO David Calhoun last week welcomed the resignation of a communications executive for opposing—33 years ago when he was in the military—women in combat.

China has acknowledged for the first time that a “war” is taking place in Ukraine and appears to be holding back aviation supplies from Russia in signs that Beijing may be seeking to put a little distance between itself and Moscow.

In another indication of a shift in attitude, China has been easing government exchange rate controls to allow the Russian rouble to fall faster in value against the yuan to help protect Beijing from economic sanctions on Moscow.

“We hope to see fighting and the war stop as soon as possible,” Wang Yi, the foreign minister, said in a call with his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian. The remark, reported by state media, represents a shift in the party line, which had avoided the words “war” and “invasion”.