Category Archives: Malaysia Airlines flight MH17

Search continues for entrepreneur after Sydney boat crash – as it happened

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Police extend search for Andrew Findlay after body of art dealer Tim Klingender was found. This blog is now closed

A man and woman will face court today in Melbourne accused of murder after the body of a man in his 40s was found in a city street, AAP reports.

Police say the charges follow an alleged incident at a home near Glen Waverley train line in Binalong Avenue, Chadstone on Tuesday, where a man in his 40s was fatally assaulted.

It can be a sensitive and confronting topic for many people so it is important that any future legislation is done through intensive and thorough consultation with all Territorians.

This is an imperative step forward for the Territory and I am honoured to play my part in this important consultation process.

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Albanese says Russia should withdraw from Ukraine; Australia sanctions three MH17 culprits – as it happened

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Australian prime minister says ‘it is Russia and its involvement that keeps this war going’. This blog is now closed

Forced property sales on the rise in outer Sydney as interest rate hikes start to bite

My colleagues, Peter Hannam and Nick Evershed have this report on the rise in forced property sales as interest rate rises begin to bite.

Sydney’s outer suburbs are showing signs of rising numbers of distressed property sales with higher interest rates the likely cause, a trend that can be expected to spread to other capitals, according to property data group Domain.

Distressed listings as a share of the national market remain low, at about 2.8% across the capital cities, compared with a record 5.1% in late 2018.

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Apec leaders condemn North Korean missile test – as it happened

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Multi-employer bargaining should be limited to low paid sectors – Westacott

The second thing Jennifer Westacott tells Patricia Karvelas the BCA doesn’t like, is that big business could bargain together:

The second thing we’re really concerned about is the kind of expansion of the multi-employer agreement remember at the summit of the jobs and skill set that this was very much about low paid workers.

So our argument is, well, why wouldn’t you just fix up that low paid stream rather than what we’re currently doing, which was more we have to carve the sector out. The issue and this is more complex is than in the current proposal, and we’re very worried about this, that big employers could be forced to bargain together and that is not good for wages.

The first is and the government to be fair, let’s be clear, we are working constructively with the government. We’re working constructively with the crossbench I think everyone wants Australians wages to go up.

I don’t think the legislation in its current form is going to do that and let me give you those three reasons.

Well, we want to see obviously that period longer, but we want to see kind of much clearer kind of restatement of the objects of the act that the single enterprise system is the system that we want people to use. We want it to be much easier for people where they agree they just keep bargaining.

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Three men found guilty of murdering 298 people in shooting down of MH17

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Court says Russia had overall control of the separatist forces in eastern Ukraine at the time when the plane was shot down

A Dutch court has found three men guilty of the murder of 298 people onboard flight MH17, which was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile when it was flying over eastern Ukraine in 2014.

The court handed down sentences of life imprisonment to the Russian nationals Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy and a Ukrainian, Leonid Kharchenko, after finding them guilty of bringing down the plane and the murder of everyone onboard. They were ordered to pay “more than €16m” in compensation to the victims. The three men remain at large and it remains unclear if they will ever serve their sentences.

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‘Get Igor Girkin’: hopes MH17 suspect could be captured fighting in Ukraine

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Flight victims’ relatives say it would be a ‘miracle’ if former separatist leader finally faced justice

Piet Ploeg felt a glimmer of hope that justice would, at last, be served when he read the news that the prominent Russian nationalist Igor Girkin may be returning to the battlefield in Ukraine.

Ploeg’s brother, sister-in-law and nephew were killed alongside 295 other passengers and crew when the plane they boarded in Amsterdam on 17 July 2014 was shot down over Ukraine’s separatist-held territory of Donetsk by what international investigators believe was a Russian-made surface-to-air missile.

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‘I am full of feelings of revenge’: families of flight MH17 victims demand justice

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Relatives of 298 people killed when Malaysia Airlines plane shot down in 2014 give their testimonies at trial of suspects

The families of 298 people killed when flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine in 2014 have demanded justice from Russia as they testified in the Dutch trial of four suspects.

People who lost close relatives in the crash of the Malaysia Airlines plane said they could not truly say goodbye to their loved ones until those responsible had been brought to account.

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Multiple sightings of missile launcher before MH17 shot down, court told

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Four men on trial in absentia in the Netherlands over downing of flight with 298 onboard over Ukraine

Multiple witnesses saw an anti-aircraft missile launcher that had secretly crossed into eastern Ukraine from Russia in the hours before it shot down the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, a trial in the Netherlands has heard.

The Buk system crossed the border in darkness in the early hours of 17 July 2014. It was then loaded on to a trailer and taken to the rebel-held city of Donetsk, the court heard on Wednesday, before it headed east towards the town of Snizhne.

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MH17 trial: Russia keen to thwart investigation, says prosecutor

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Several witnesses in ‘fear for their lives’ if their identities are revealed, hearing into shooting down of airliner is told

Dutch prosecutors have accused Russia of trying to sabotage the investigation into the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 17 in Ukraine in 2014, saying this has cast “a dark shadow” over the impending trial of four suspects.

Pre-trial hearings began in Amsterdam on Monday. Prosecutors say the defendants – three Russians and a Ukrainian – helped arrange the Russian missile system that shot down MH17, a civilian airliner. All 298 people on board were killed. Most of the passengers were Dutch nationals.

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MH17 families fear they still face a long road to justice as trial begins

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Family of Richard Mayne say it could be years before they know why 298 people died

On Sunday Liz Mayne will make a familiar “pilgrimage” to the Netherlands. In 2015, she flew in to inspect the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, shot down over eastern Ukraine the previous summer. “You could still smell the burning,” she says. “It was an overwhelming experience.”

Her son Richard, a second-year student at Leeds University, was one of 298 people on board. Ten were Britons. All perished. Richard was 20. His body was recovered intact from sunflower fields near the village of Hrabove. He was returned in the clothes he had set off in: sweatshirt and socks bearing the logo of his favourite rugby team, the Leicester Tigers.

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Catastrophic failure of Ukraine jet in Iran suggests missile strike

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Experts say debris fragments and sudden loss of fail-safe systems point to missile

To civil aviation professionals, including pilots, engineers and former crash investigators, there was something immediately puzzling about the crash of the Ukraine International Airlines passenger jet that fell burning out of the sky minutes after takeoff from Tehran.

Conversation on forums, and in a risk assessment that was rapidly produced by the organisations OpsGroup, pointed to the sudden and catastrophic nature of the event, including the loss of both communications and tracking systems.

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Ukraine releases MH17 plane crash ‘suspect’

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Vladimir Tsemakh, who was arrested in June, may be part of prisoner swap deal with Russia

A Ukrainian court has released a potential suspect and key witness in the shooting down of MH17, as Russia’s president said the two countries were working on a deal to swap prisoners.

Vladimir Tsemakh had bragged on video of commanding an anti-air brigade in separatist-held east Ukraine and indicated he hid evidence of a Buk missile system, the kind Dutch investigators say shot down the Malaysia Airlines jet with 298 people on board.

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In Moscow, Riyadh and Washington, this is the age of the shameless lie

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As David Miliband argues in his Fulbright lecture, world leaders have found they can lie with impunity. We must not be complicit in their mendacity

Truth or consequences, a parlour game in which players are penalised for dishonesty or wrongdoing, is mostly fun – but it also reflects a broad moral consensus about the unacceptability of lying. This long-held belief is deeply rooted in popular culture. Truth or Consequences was the title of a postwar American TV quiz show whose success was so great that a New Mexico town was named after it. Put simply, and as a general rule, most people expect that if you tell whoppers, you get punished.

Why, then, do so many modern leaders seem to think they can lie and get away with it? A propensity to deny, dodge or disown the consequences of political actions is spreading globally like a toxic virus. There was a time, as David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, argues in this year’s Fulbright Lecture, when public accountability was on the rise. Not any more. In what he calls the age of impunity, “those engaged in conflicts around the world believe they can get away with anything, including murder”.

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MH17: Four suspects named for shooting down plane – video

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Four suspects, three of them Russian, will face murder charges for the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014, international investigators have said. A trial is due to start next March in the Netherlands. The suspects were named as Igor Girkin, a former colonel of Russia’s FSB spy service; Sergey Dubinskiy, employed by Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency; Oleg Pulatov, a former soldier with the GRU’s special forces Spetsnaz unit; and Leonid Kharchenko, a Ukrainian man.


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MH17 court case will finally put truth on record

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Legal process essential even if those charged over killing of 298 passengers never go to jail

Wash kits, bags of duty-free shopping and sections of overhead compartment lay strewn across the fields. In one spot, there was a stack of holiday reading. The body of a young Malaysian boy had landed outside a babushka’s cottage.

The aftermath of the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was a landscape of carnage and chaos. Parts of the plane and its contents landed across several kilometres of the normally peaceful Ukrainian countryside, where villages had already been disturbed by months of war and people now witnessed bodies falling from the sky.

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Three Russians and one Ukrainian to face MH17 murder charges

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Four named as first to be charged over death of 298 people on flight downed over Ukraine

Four suspects will face murder charges for the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, three of them Russians, international investigators said on Wednesday, with a trial due to start next March in the Netherlands.

Almost five years after the plane was downed over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board, prosecutors said there was enough evidence to bring criminal charges.

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MH17: prosecutors to identify suspects and file first charges

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Inquiry expected to name first four suspects over downing of flight that killed 298 in 2014

Dutch prosecutors are to identify suspects and file the first criminal charges over the 2014 downing of flight MH17 over east Ukraine which killed 298 people in the worst atrocity in five years of war between Ukraine and Russia-backed separatists.

The charges are likely to target members of a Russia-backed separatist movement and may include Russian service personnel who commanded or helped transport the anti-aircraft missile system used to bring down the plane.

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