Ferguson no-fly zone aimed at media
WASHINGTON – The U.S. government agreed to a police request to restrict more than 37 square miles of airspace surrounding Ferguson, Missouri, for 12 days in August for safety – but audio recordings show that local authorities privately acknowledged the purpose was to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests.
On Aug. 12, the morning after the Federal Aviation Administration imposed the first flight restriction, FAA air traffic managers struggled to redefine the flight ban to let commercial flights operate at nearby Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and police helicopters fly through the area – but ban others.
“They finally admitted it really was to keep the media out,” said one FAA manager about the St. Louis County Police in a series of recorded telephone conversations obtained by The Associated Press. “But they were a little concerned of, obviously, anything else that could be going on.”
At another point, a manager at the FAA’s Kansas City center said police “did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this TFR (temporary flight restriction) all day long. They didn’t want media in there.”
FAA procedures for defining a no-fly area did not have an option that would accommodate that.
Branson: Better Earth travel is ultimate goal
LOS ANGELES – The Virgin Galactic spaceship destroyed in an explosion high over the Mojave Desert was designed to take tourists on a fleeting thrill ride through the lower reaches of space.
But even in the aftermath of Friday’s fatal accident, company founder Richard Branson reminded reporters that he has always intended to build a system to take people to faraway places on Earth.
“This is the start of a long program,” he said Saturday, describing plans to eventually offer “point-to-point travel.” Point-to-point travel would link distant points on the Earth’s surface with flights that leave the atmosphere and enter space, then re-enter the atmosphere to land. The advantage over regular airlines would be a significant reduction in travel time. A trip from London to Sydney, Australia, for example, would take only a few hours. A trip from New York to London would take less than an hour.
Jerusalem in row over contested shrine
JERUSALEM – This combustible city at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been edging toward a new conflagration, with politicians on both sides stoking religious fervor over an ancient Jerusalem shrine sacred to Muslims and Jews.
After months of escalating violence, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday made his clearest attempt yet to cool tempers, saying he won’t allow changes to a long-standing ban on Jewish worship at the Muslim-run site, despite such demands from ultranationalists in his coalition.
Netanyahu’s reassurances to Muslims came just days after the religious feud over the Old City shrine, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount, threatened to spin out of control.
Israel closed the compound for a day last week, a rare move, after a Palestinian shot and wounded a prominent activist who has campaigned for more Jewish access to the site.
Associated Press
