A plane crashed into a river gorge in central Nepal on Sunday, killing at least 68 people and sending Nepalese authorities into a scramble to determine what brought the aircraft down.
The Yeti Airlines turboprop hit the gorge of the Seti River about a mile from its destination, Pokhara International Airport, according to Brig. Gen. Krishna Prasad Bhandari, the spokesman for the Nepalese army. Photos and TV footage showed black plumes of smoke and fire at the site, with crowds swarming around the wreckage.
Gen. Bhandari said that as of Sunday evening the rescue team had retrieved 68 bodies and that search operations had been suspended until Monday morning. There were 72 passengers aboard, including four crew members.
“It’s dark now and the crash site is a river gorge where it’s difficult to work at night,” he said.
Rescue teams worked to retrieve bodies at the crash site of a Yeti Airlines plane.
Photo:
Rohit Giri/REUTERS
The passenger list included 53 Nepalese, five Indians, four Russians, two South Koreans, and one each from Australia, Argentina, France and Ireland, Nepal’s civil aviation authority said. The names of all passengers were released by the aviation regulator on its Twitter account.
Tribhuban Poudel, a 37-year-old publisher and editor of a local newspaper in Pokhara, had been traveling home on the morning of the Nepali Hindu festival of Maghe Sankranti to celebrate with his family after attending a gathering of journalists in Kathmandu, according to his friend Manoj Basnet, a Kathmandu-based media executive.
“He had risen in his life through struggles and was ever available to help whoever he could, including his friends,” Mr. Basnet said. Mr. Poudel is survived by his mother, wife and a 3-year-old son.
The aviation authority said flight number YT-691 took off from the capital of Kathmandu at 10:32 a.m. local time for what is usually a 30-minute journey. The plane’s last communication with the Pokhara airport tower was at 10:50 a.m. from the Seti River gorge, and it crashed soon after.
A Yeti Airlines plane in Pokhara last year.
Photo:
NICOLAS ECONOMOU/REUTERS
Flightradar24, a flight-tracking site, said that the ATR 72-500 aircraft was 15 years old and equipped with an old transponder that had unreliable data. In a Twitter post, the website said that the transponder stopped transmitting position data at 10:50 a.m., and that the last signal from the transponder was received at 10:57 a.m.
The plane was made by aircraft manufacturer ATR, a joint venture between
Airbus SE
and
Leonardo
SpA.
Pokhara is a popular tourist destination, with many flocking to the lakeside city for hiking and yoga. Nepal relies heavily on revenue from tourists, with the industry making up about 6.7% of the country’s GDP, according to the World Bank. In 2019, the tourism industry supported over one million jobs in Nepal.
Nepalese Prime Minister
Pushpa Kamal Dahal
called an emergency cabinet meeting in the aftermath of the crash. The government has formed a five-member probe committee of retired government officials and air-safety experts to ascertain the cause of the crash and give recommendations to avoid such an incident the future, the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation said. The probe committee will have 45 days to present its report.
Rescue workers sifted through the wreckage of the Yeti Airlines turboprop.
Photo:
yunish gurung/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Plane crashes in Nepal have occurred in recent years, with poor weather conditions sometimes being blamed. Nepal is home to eight of the world’s 14 highest mountain peaks, including Mount Everest.
Last May, a Tara Air flight carrying 22 people crashed into the Himalayan mountains, killing all aboard. The plane, which had departed from Pokhara, went down after swerving due to inclement weather, government officials said.
In 2018, a US-Bangla Airlines flight from the capital city of Bangladesh crash-landed and caught fire at Kathmandu Airport, killing 51 of the 71 people aboard. A government investigation blamed the crash on pilot error, saying that he was under severe emotional distress.
On Sunday Mr. Basnet recalled his last words with Mr. Poudel about two months back. “He asked me when I planned to visit Pokhara the next time,” Mr. Basnet said.
Mr. Poudel had helped Mr. Basnet with local contacts and business leads when he was trying to find his footing as a media professional in Pokhara about a decade ago, Mr. Basnet recalled. They hadn’t seen each other in a while, but Mr. Poudel told him he had been keeping up on Mr. Basnet’s posts on social media.
“You are doing really good in life. Continue doing good,” Mr. Basnet remembered his friend telling him.
Write to Krishna Pokharel at krishna.pokharel@wsj.com and Shan Li at shan.li@wsj.com
KHERSON, Ukraine—Kyiv’s military demolished a hotel complex hosting dozens of Russian military personnel overnight with U.S.-supplied long-range artillery, while more Russian drone strikes continued to destroy Ukraine’s electricity grid.
Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky
said 1.5 million people in Ukraine’s southern Odessa region were left without power after strikes late Saturday. Only critical infrastructure was connected to the power grid, he said, adding that restoring service could take longer than after previous attacks.
Air-raid sirens continued to sound in Ukraine on Sunday as Russia launched more strikes.
Footage of the Ukrainian artillery strike against a hotel in the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol showed burning buildings as well as dead and wounded Russian soldiers among the wreckage. Russian and Ukrainian social-media channels said there were dozens of casualties but gave varying death tolls.
Workers repair high-voltage power lines cut by missile strikes near Odessa, southern Ukraine.
Ukrainian soldiers with a self-propelled howitzer near the front line in eastern Ukraine.
Photo:
ihor tkachov/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The exiled Ukrainian mayor of Melitopol,
Ivan Fedorov,
wrote on his Telegram channel that as many as 200 Russian troops were “roasted” in the strike. The Russian-installed governor of the region said dozens were wounded and two killed.
Ukraine has been using U.S.-supplied long-range artillery, or Himars, to try to break up Russian troop concentrations behind the front lines so that Moscow can’t maneuver its forces for an attack. The strike on the hotel complex in Melitopol, located in southeastern Ukraine about 50 miles from the Sea of Azov, appeared to be at the limit of the range of the Himars munitions supplied by the U.S.
But Ukraine has so far been able to mount only a limited defense against Moscow’s campaign of missile and drone attacks.
Missile strikes late Saturday that hit around Ukraine’s southern port city of Odessa “were critical,” Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address.
“This is the true attitude of Russia toward Odessa, toward Odessa residents—deliberate bullying, deliberate attempt to bring disaster to the city,” he said.
A destroyed house in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine.
Photo:
ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/REUTERS
Odessa regional officials didn’t say what exactly had been hit, but wrote on Facebook that repairing the damage could take two or three months. DTEK, one of the country’s largest energy companies, said almost the entire region was without power late Saturday, and that utility workers were giving priority to reconnecting hospitals and other critical infrastructure to the grid.
“The situation in the energy sector of Odessa region remains difficult,” DTEK wrote on Facebook. “According to preliminary forecasts, it will take much more time to restore energy facilities in the Odessa region than in the previous times after enemy shelling.”
Ukrainian leaders have repeatedly accused Russia of weaponizing the onset of winter to affect the civilian population and compel Kyiv to withdraw from its positions. Russian President Vladimir Putin last week acknowledged doing so and vowed to continue. “There’s a lot of noise about our strikes on the energy infrastructure of a neighboring country,” Mr. Putin said. “Yes, we do that.”
Officials encouraged Odessa residents to go to government-established centers, which have power generators, to warm up and charge devices. In addition, Germany said it would donate 470 electric generators, at a cost of about $20 million.
The attack on Odessa over the weekend suggested that Moscow has replenished its supply of drones following several weeks in which they had disappeared from Ukrainian skies.
People embrace after arriving at the railway station in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine.
Photo:
SHANNON STAPLETON/REUTERS
Meanwhile, Russia continued to step up its shelling of Kherson after withdrawing from the southern regional capital last month. Shelling hit critical infrastructure in the city on Saturday night, said regional governor Yaroslav Yanushevych. A day earlier, shelling killed two people and injured eight others.
Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, fired at Russian positions across the Dnipro River from inside the city. The sound of rockets whistled through neighborhoods near the river.
Fierce fighting also continued in the area around Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine. Russian forces are attempting to regain the city, which they occupied in the early days of the invasion and into the summer before a Ukrainian counteroffensive drove them further into eastern Ukraine.
Many of the Russian personnel who were withdrawn from Kherson in the fall were redeployed to the east to bolster the Russian push toward Bakhmut, where trenches and other fortifications now resemble those seen in World War I.
Apartment buildings without electricity during a power outage in Odessa, southern Ukraine.
Photo:
STRINGER/REUTERS
Write to Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com and Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com
As smoke crept through the 21-story apartment building in far western China, panicked messages filled the residents’ chat group. “On the 16th floor, we don’t have enough oxygen,” a woman gasped in an audio message. “Soon our children won’t be OK.”
Another person added a plea about the people in apartment 1901: “They wouldn’t be able to open the door. Can you break into it and take a look? There are many children inside.”
Many who heard the reports were shocked, not by a tragedy in the remote city of Urumqi, but because it had taken firefighters three hours to control the fire. People across the country believed the delays happened in part because of the pandemic restrictions that have been a running source of discontent throughout the country. The impact has reached into the heart of Chinese politics.
Excerpts of residents’ panicked conversation began to circulate on social media, along with videos of the emergency response. They showed fire crews struggling to get around barriers to approach the building. Videos showed fire crews’ water streams falling short of the fire as its flames slithered toward the top of the apartment tower.
Pandemic controls imposed by Chinese authorities around, and possibly inside, the apartment building had delayed the fire response, neighbors and family members of those killed have said. That would mean that the death toll, which many believed was much higher than the official tally of 10, was ultimately in part a product of China’s strict, already widely detested zero-tolerance Covid policy. The government denies all that.
Outrage spilled onto the streets of Urumqi, the capital of the heavily Muslim Chinese region of Xinjiang, where residents had been locked down for more than 100 days. Footage of the fire and the protest in Urumqi spread on Chinese social media and on the popular do-everything app
WeChat.
Firefighters sprayed water on a residential-building fire in the city of Urumqi that killed 10 and triggered protests against Covid-19 lockdowns.
Photo:
Associated Press
To large numbers of Chinese people who have had the experience of being locked inside their own apartments because of Covid controls, the words and images flowing out of Xinjiang conjured a scenario that seemed terrifyingly plausible.
“The 100-plus day lockdown is real. The many deaths from Covid controls are real. Discontent has accumulated and is destined to erupt,” said a user on the Twitter-like
Weibo
platform in one widely endorsed comment about the fire.
Within days, the protest would spread throughout China, growing into the largest show of public defiance the Communist Party has faced since the 1989 pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square. The demonstrations have posed a rare challenge to the recently extended rule of Chinese leader
Xi Jinping,
compounding the government’s challenges over how to ease its Covid restrictions.
Large protests erupted across China as crowds voiced their frustration at nearly three years of Covid-19 controls. Here’s how a deadly fire in Xinjiang sparked domestic upheaval and a political dilemma for Xi Jinping’s leadership. Photo: Thomas Peter/Reuters
China has experienced public outrage over its strict Covid-19 restrictions before, most of which the authorities had managed to contain online. Going back nearly three years, the death from the coronavirus of Li Wenliang, a doctor who was punished for warning others about the initial outbreak in Wuhan, unleashed a flood of grief and anger.
This September, a bus crash in Guizhou province that killed 27 people who were being sent to quarantine in the middle of the night raised an outcry about steps taken to control the coronavirus.
Mourners in Hong Kong paid their respects in February 2020 to Chinese physician Li Wenliang. Dr. Li raised early alarms about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan but was silenced by police, only to die of the disease himself.
Photo:
jerome favre/EPA/Shutterstock
More recently, after an announcement that Covid restrictions would be eased led to little actual change, public frustration spilled out onto the streets. Workers at
Foxconn Technology Group’s
main plant in the city of Zhengzhou, the world’s largest iPhone factory, clashed with police while protesting a contract dispute with roots in pandemic lockdowns. In some Beijing neighborhoods, people argued with officials over the legality of controls.
In maintaining the lockdowns in Xinjiang, local authorities have been able to rely on the country’s most advanced and suffocating security apparatus, originally built to carry out a campaign of ethnic re-engineering against the region’s 14 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims.
Most if not all of the fire’s victims belonged to these groups, according to relatives and overseas Uyghur activists. Discrimination by China’s Han majority against Turkic minorities has long fueled ethnic tensions in the region, which exploded into deadly race riots in Urumqi in 2009.
Yet in the past week, the sides found common cause, at least temporarily, in anger over the fire.
According to an official account published in the state-run Xinjiang Daily newspaper, the blaze began on the 15th floor, in the apartment of a Uyghur woman who was having a bath in a home spa when a circuit breaker flipped. She flipped it back, then was alerted by her daughter to the smell of smoke. When she re-emerged from the bathroom, flames had risen to the wooden ceiling from the bed.
A community worker arrived just as they were fleeing the flames, according to Xinjiang Daily. He called the fire service at 7:49 p.m. last Thursday, then helped rush the pair and their neighbors downstairs.
A still taken from a social media video shows a fire truck shooting water at the burning residential building in Urumqi. The fire and delays in fighting it proved a catalyst for nationwide protests against Covid-19 lockdowns.
Photo:
REUTERS
At the ground level, burning debris had begun falling over the doorway. Those who couldn’t leave through the front gate in time had to climb out of a window from an apartment, the newspaper reported.
Firefighters didn’t reach some of the apartments until around 90 minutes after they were called, according to posts on the chat group.
Video footage showed that traffic-control structures had to be removed as a line of fire trucks waited, causing delays. The government denied the structures had been installed for pandemic-control reasons.
At a press briefing convened late Friday night as protests unfolded, officials said that three fire trucks from a nearby station arrived at the scene five minutes after the fire was reported, but they were blocked by cars that had to be moved.
On social media, residents said those cars had been parked there for months during the fall Covid lockdown, and the engines couldn’t start.
Li Wensheng, Urumqi’s fire chief, said at the press briefing that some residents’ “self-rescue abilities were weak,” a comment that added to the simmering anger.
The Xinjiang and Urumqi governments didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Han residents of Urumqi led the protests that unfolded in the freezing night air the day following the fire. Uyghur residents have faced the strictest lockdowns and largely stayed home out of fear they would bear the brunt of any reprisals, overseas activists said.
Demonstrations were fueled by the group chat conversations and footage of obstructed fire trucks, as well as by videos circulating online that appeared to capture the screams of people from the smoldering building. “Open the gate!” one woman could be heard shouting in horror in one video.
On Saturday night, several female students stood for hours on the campus of Communication University of China in Nanjing, holding blank sheets of paper in silence, widely taken to be a reference to Chinese censorship. A male student from Xinjiang offered a tribute to the victims in Urumqi and to “all other victims nationwide,” saying he had been a coward for too long.
A man was arrested on a Shanghai street when protests erupted following a deadly apartment-building fire in China’s Xinjiang region.
Photo:
hector retamal/AFP/Getty Images
That same night, dozens of people in Shanghai gathered for a vigil with flowers and candles near a street named after Urumqi. Passersby joined in, and the crowd grew into the hundreds. Just past midnight, some demonstrators began chanting for Mr. Xi to step down.
Similar protests emerged in half a dozen Chinese cities and more than a dozen university campuses in the following days. In several instances, demonstrators chanted “We are all Xinjiang people.” Others called for democracy and free speech.
Chinese authorities have devoted enormous resources to building domestic security and surveillance systems specifically designed to prevent such wide and unified outbreaks of dissent. While protests aren’t uncommon, scholars who study China say they are almost always local events with little capacity to spread.
The Cyberspace Administration of China issued guidance to companies on Tuesday, including Tencent Holdings Ltd. and ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese owner of short video apps TikTok and Douyin, asking them to add more staff to internet censorship teams, according to people familiar with the matter. The companies were also asked to pay more attention to content related to the protests, particularly any information being shared about demonstrations at Chinese universities and the fire.
In imposing its stringent Covid controls, human-rights activists and other observers say, the Communist Party created an issue that China’s citizens only have to look out their front door to understand. Some Uyghurs affected by the fire said the fear and frustration stemming from pandemic controls crossed deep-seated ethnic divides.
Marhaba Muhammad, now a resident of Turkey, said she read news of the fire with a sense of horror. She recognized the building as the home of her aunt, whom she last visited in 2016, shortly before leaving China. The family lived in apartment 1901, the subject of one of the desperate messages left in the residents’ chat group.
Ms. Muhammad said she and her family abroad learned that the aunt, Qemernisahan Abdurahman, 48, had died in the apartment, along with four children age 5 to 13.
Ms. Abdurahman’s husband wasn’t there. He and an elder son were detained as part of the crackdown in Xinjiang in 2017 and now are imprisoned, said Ms. Muhammad and her brother, Abdulhafiz Maiamaitimin, who lives in Switzerland.
“This news is so painful. No one imagined,” she said.
Qemernisahan Abdurahman, 48, with 3 of her four children who died in the fire in Urumqi.
Photo:
Marhaba Muhammad
In apartment 1801, directly below where Ms. Muhammad’s aunt and children died, a woman also died along with her children, according to Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur activist in Norway who spoke with relatives and neighbors of the fire victims.
Han Chinese don’t have to fear the level of oppression faced by Uyghurs, Ms. Muhammad said, referring to the Chinese government’s detention of upwards of a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in internment camps and prisons—a practice the United Nations has said may constitute a crime against humanity.
Yet “after the fire, they realized that Uyghurs today would be the Chinese tomorrow,” she said.
Police have targeted protest participants by using some of the surveillance techniques honed in Xinjiang to target Uyghurs. In chat rooms used to organize demonstrations, protesters have reported police scanning the smartphones of pedestrians for overseas apps such as Twitter and Telegram, a common experience on the streets of Urumqi.
A lawyer representing more than a dozen protesters taken by police said she believes many of her clients were tracked through mobile-phone data, another echo of the Uyghur experience in Xinjiang.
On Tuesday, Chinese-Australian activist and cartoonist Badiucao, who goes by one name, reposted a widely shared video of police on the Shanghai subway checking the phones of passengers on Twitter. He appended a single phrase: “Xinjiang-ization.”
Protesters in Beijing lighted candles during a protest against China’s strict zero-Covid measures.
Photo:
Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Write to Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com and to Wenxin Fan at Wenxin.Fan@wsj.com
Utility crews across Ukraine were working to restore water and electricity supplies after a barrage of Russian missiles a day earlier knocked out service to hundreds of thousands of people, while Russian authorities expanded the movement of civilians out of the southern Kherson region.
Kyiv Mayor
Vitali Klitschko
said the water supply in the city was fully restored and the electricity system had been repaired, but added that rolling blackouts would continue Tuesday. Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s electricity-transmission-system operator, said the supply of electricity would be limited in seven regions, including Kyiv and the northeastern Kharkiv region.
The restrictions “are necessary to reduce the load on the networks” after the recent attacks, Ukrenergo wrote on Telegram. “This enables energy companies to restore damaged energy facilities as quickly as possible, balance the system and provide consumers with energy.”
Newsletter Sign-up
The 10-Point.
A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal.
The missile assault on Monday was the latest Russian attack on Ukraine’s energy system, which has become the Kremlin’s foremost target over the past several weeks. More than a third of Ukraine’s power-generation capacity had already been destroyed before Monday’s attack. Though Ukrainian officials said 45 of the 55 missiles Moscow launched were shot down, the country’s energy system has continued to sustain damage, raising the specter of a winter in which much of the country might not have power, heat or running water.
“Stabilizing blackouts continue in nine regions of Ukraine. Energy workers and local authorities are doing everything to reduce the time of blackouts,” Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky
said in his nightly address on Tuesday.
“We will do everything to give people electricity and heat this winter. But we must understand that Russia will do everything to destroy the normality of life,’’ he said.
On Monday, Mr. Zelensky said Russian forces had lost 72,000 troops in Ukraine since February. In September, Moscow said that 5,937 of its soldiers had been killed in Ukraine.
“Russian terrorists do not have such missiles that could hit the Ukrainian desire to live,” Mr. Zelensky said. “There will be a response on the battlefield.”
Mr. Zelensky, in a meeting Tuesday with European Commissioner for Energy
Kadri Simson
in Ukraine, called on the Commission to play a coordinating role in attracting the assistance from EU member states needed to restore Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Ms. Simson said on Twitter that Ukraine needs specific equipment and tools to repair the damage and that she assured Mr. Zelensky that “we are reaching out to partners to help with the dedicated support needed.”
Though attacks on Ukraine’s energy system have grown frequent in recent weeks, Russian President
Vladimir Putin
said that the assault on Monday was in response to a drone strike in Crimea on Saturday. Russia’s Defense Ministry has blamed that attack on Ukraine, with the help of the U.K. Russia has also suspended its participation in a United Nations-brokered deal to safely export grain from Ukraine in response.
Mr. Putin told Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
in a call Tuesday that for Russia to cooperate with the grain deal again, it would need an investigation into the attack and guarantees from Kyiv that the grain corridor wouldn’t be used for military purposes, according to the Kremlin.
The U.N. has said Russian accusations that Ukraine has used the grain corridor for armed attacks are false, since no military vessels are allowed to approach the shipping lane, which is monitored by the U.N. and Turkey.
Ukraine hasn’t claimed credit for the attack, and the U.K. has denied involvement. Still, strikes deep inside Russian-held territory have become more common. On Monday afternoon, Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency wrote on Twitter that two Ka-52 helicopters had been destroyed and two others damaged at an airfield in Russia’s Pskov region, which is hundreds of miles north of Ukraine near Russia’s border with Estonia.
A school hit by a Russian missile in Mykolaiv, Ukraine.
Photo:
Carl Court/Getty Images
Moscow hasn’t commented on the alleged Pskov attack.
Russian Defense Minister
Sergei Shoigu
said Tuesday that Russia had sent 87,000 newly mobilized men to fight in Ukraine, up from the 82,000 figure he reported on Friday. In total, Moscow says it has mobilized 300,000 men, some of whom are currently in training.
Ms. Shoigu said some 3,000 instructors with combat experience in Ukraine were involved in training those mobilized.
“We continue to effectively hit military infrastructure facilities with precision-guided strikes, as well as facilities that reduce Ukraine’s military potential,” Mr. Shoigu said.
Many of the mobilized soldiers have been deployed to the Kherson region, according to residents and military analysts. Ukrainian forces have been closing in on the city of Kherson, the only regional capital that Moscow has seized this year. Supply lines into the city, which sits on the West bank of the Dnipro River, have been largely cut, and two weeks ago Russian-installed authorities in the region began moving civilians east across the river into territory that Moscow more firmly controls.
On Monday night, the Russian-installed head of the Kherson region, Volodymyr Saldo, announced an expansion of the evacuation, saying civilians within 15 kilometers of the Dnipro River would be moved still farther into Russian-held territory.
The evacuation was necessary, he said, because of a threat that the Ukrainians could blow up the Kakhovka dam and flood the region. Mr. Saldo had previously warned of a threat to the dam, and then played down the possibility of major damage and the risk of severe flooding.
Residents collect food aid in Mykolaiv region, Ukraine.
Photo:
Carl Court/Getty Images
A damaged apartment in Mykolaiv, Ukraine.
Photo:
hannibal hanschke/Shutterstock
“This decision will make it possible to create a layered defense that will make it possible to repel an attack by Ukrainian armed forces and protect our civilians,” he said. Civilians relocated deeper into Russian-held territory would receive a one-time payment of 100,000 rubles, equivalent to about $1,600, as well as a housing stipend, he added.
Military analysts have said it is unlikely that Ukraine would attack the dam, a move that would make reclaiming territory in the region more difficult.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said Russian claims about the dam served several other purposes, including driving civilians away from territory that Ukraine might soon reclaim.
“[There] is no scenario in which it would be advantageous for Ukraine to blow the dam,” the institute wrote.
Darkened streets in Dnipro, Ukraine, during scheduled power outages.
Photo:
hannibal hanschke/Shutterstock
Write to Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com and Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com
’s shares slid nearly 5% in morning trading Monday, following news of a $1.7 billion jury verdict involving a fatal rollover accident in one of its older-model heavy-duty trucks.
A jury in Georgia on Friday reached the verdict after a three-week trial, determining punitive damages should be imposed on
Ford
F -4.98%
for selling 5.2 million Super Duty trucks that the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued had dangerously weak roofs vulnerable to collapsing in a rollover crash.
Ford’s stock, trading at about $15.12 a share Monday morning, fell more sharply than the broader market.
The lawsuit, brought by the children of the victims who died in the crash, centered on a 2014 accident in which a couple driving a 2002 Ford F-250 truck were killed when the right front tire blew out and the pickup rolled over. The victims, Melvin and Voncile Hill, were crushed inside the truck, according to court records.
“While our sympathies go out to the Hill family, we don’t believe the verdict is supported by the evidence, and we plan to appeal,” Ford said Sunday. “In the meantime, we aren’t going to litigate this matter through the news media.”
The verdict is believed to be one of Georgia’s largest and puts a spotlight on other older-model Super Duty trucks sold by Ford over a roughly 17-year period that the plaintiffs’ lawyers have argued have a similar roof design.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs’ attorneys allege that Super Duty trucks sold through the 1999-2016 model years had defectively designed roofs and Ford knew of the dangers posed at the time. The lawyers pointed to evidence they said showed that the trucks failed internal company testing and that in 2004, Ford developed a stronger roof but didn’t use it in sellable pickups until the 2017 model year, according to court documents.
Ford has identified 162 lawsuits and 83 similar incidents of roof crush in 1999-2016 Super Duty trucks, according to the pre-trial order.
Ford contends that Mr. Hill, the driver of the F-250 truck involved in the accident, improperly steered the vehicle after the tire ruptured, causing it to leave the roadway at a dangerous angle, the court records show.
Ford also said that the tire on the truck had the incorrect load-carrying capacity, which led it to fail, and the Hills had improperly used their seat belts, according to the court documents.
Often, high-dollar verdicts such as this one are later reduced by judges or the appeals court.
In the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city that hosts Europe’s largest nuclear-power plant, residents are taping up windows in fear of a radioactive leak and sticking close to home as fighting rages around the complex and Moscow-installed authorities gear up for a possible annexation of the region by Russia.
Residents in Enerhodar, a city that has been under Russian occupation for more than five months, paint a picture of a pitched battle on the front lines in Ukraine’s south that risks sparking Europe’s biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.
Enerhodar has become the focus of an international crisis as Russia and Ukraine trade blame for attacks on the city’s sprawling Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. The plant is being defended by hundreds of Russian soldiers—effectively transforming it into a military garrison—who are facing off against Ukrainian soldiers stationed just a few miles away.
There has been no reported damage to the reactors and no radioactive release so far, but Ukraine said plant staff had to close one of six reactors over the weekend after a high-voltage power line was severed and three radiation monitors damaged.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear-power plant is being defended by hundreds of Russian soldiers.
Photo:
ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/REUTERS
“God forbid something irreversible happens,” Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky
said in a video address Sunday. “No one will stop the wind that will spread radioactive pollution.”
The city, with a prewar population of 53,000 and whose name means “the giver of energy,” has been running out of food supplies and begun circulating the Russian ruble as reserves of Ukraine’s hryvnia currency run out, residents say.
Andriy, a former car salesman and a 36-year-old resident of Enerhodar, said that occupying authorities told residents the area around the plant is mined and that unexploded ordnance from cluster munitions litters the city.
“They told us that the Ukrainians were shelling the plant and that it was necessary to seal window frames with Scotch tape so that if they hit the warehouse of radioactive waste, the dust would not enter our homes,” he said by phone. “They say that the first day will be the most dangerous, so you have to stay at home and not go out. Everyone is afraid that something will happen to the plant.”
Occupation authorities in Enerhodar have begun circulating the Russian ruble as reserves of Ukraine’s hryvnia currency run out.
Photo:
ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/REUTERS
Andriy said Russian forces positioned beside the plant are firing artillery from the city at Ukrainian forces positioned across the Dnipro River near Nikopol. At night he sees what look like tracer bullets in the sky as the Russians fire antiaircraft guns from the territory of the station.
Communications with Enerhodar residents are steadily worsening as the occupying authorities tighten their control and fear spreads among locals. Many people worry that their phones have been tapped. Russia is also gradually disconnecting Ukrainian telecom providers and attempting to roll out Russian cell service. Sim cards from major Ukrainian providers no longer work properly.
“People are afraid,” said the Ukrainian mayor of Enerhodar,
Dmytro Orlov,
who fled after the occupation. “Workers of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant go to work not knowing if they’ll return home after their shift, or whether everything is fine with their loved ones while they’re away.”
One Enerhodar woman in her early 60s said shelling of the city has become much more frequent in recent days, adding that she has seen trucks and armored personnel carriers driving regularly toward the plant complex. The woman said residents are trying to go about their daily lives, buying produce from local markets because supermarket prices have become too high, and increasingly paying in Russian rubles circulated by occupation authorities as supplies of Ukraine’s hryvnia run out.
Himars—long-range rocket launchers from the U.S.—have helped Ukraine target Russian ammunition stores, command posts and fuel depots, slowing down Moscow’s forces. As Washington sends more weapons, WSJ looks at why Kyiv is asking for other advanced tools. Photo composite: Eve Hartley
People fear speaking in public, she said, afraid that a passerby could inform on them to the occupation authorities. The woman said her son, a city council member before the war, is now in hiding after having failed to escape to Ukrainian-controlled territory. He was sleeping in friends’ garages and basements, escaping both the Russian-installed government and the constant shelling.
“Most people keep their opinions to themselves because you can’t know what your interlocutor might do,” said Yury, a local resident. He added that many Russian-installed officials and security service members now appear in civilian clothing, making residents even more afraid of inadvertently saying something that could be used against them.
“Sometimes people you know disappear,” the woman said. “We think they probably said something wrong.” Mr. Orlov, the mayor, said several hundred residents of the city have been abducted and are being held in Russian custody, and months have passed in some cases with no information about their whereabouts. The Kremlin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
When Russia took control of Enerhodar in early March, residents like Andriy and Yury came out to stage protest rallies and shout “Ukraine!” and “Go home!” at the occupying troops. The last protest, on April 2, was violently dispersed by Russian troops and outward signs of dissent quickly disappeared as Russia installed a collaborationist administration in the city and clamped down, residents say.
The Russian-installed head of the surrounding Zaporizhzhia region, Evgeny Balitsky, on Monday announced a coming referendum on whether the region should join Russia. Andriy, the local resident, said police are checking courtyards and building entrances for posters and leaflets against the referendum and searching for anyone who distributes them.
The woman in her 60s said fear is rising that battles raging in the area could cause damage that would leak radioactive chemicals.
“It’s scary to live near the plant,” she said. “Some fear that storage facilities have already been destroyed and are emitting radiation, and we just don’t know about it. People are afraid that if it explodes, we will all die here.”
She said most residents still hold out hope that Ukraine, which has announced a major counteroffensive on southern areas taken by Russia, will liberate Enerhodar too. But the occupation is becoming entrenched.
“It feels like most people are on Ukraine’s side,” she said. “But they are getting tired of waiting.”
A serviceman with a Russian flag on his uniform standing guard near the nuclear-power plant in early August.
U.S. auto-safety regulators have escalated their investigation into emergency-scene crashes involving
Tesla Inc.’s
TSLA 1.26%
Autopilot, a critical step for determining whether to order a safety recall.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a notice published Thursday that it was expanding a probe begun last August into a series of crashes in which Tesla vehicles using Autopilot struck first-responder vehicles stopped for roadway emergencies.
The agency said it was upgrading its earlier investigation to an engineering analysis after identifying new crashes involving Autopilot and emergency-response vehicles.
NHTSA also said it has expanded its examination of Autopilot to include a wider range of crashes, not only those at emergency scenes. The agency said it would further assess how drivers interact with Autopilot and the degree to which it might reduce motorists’ attentiveness.
Forensic data available for 11 of the crashes showed that drivers failed to take evasive action in the two to five seconds before the collision, the agency said.
The investigation covers an estimated 830,000 Tesla vehicles made from 2014 to 2021, including the Model 3, Model S, Model X and Model Y.
NHTSA said in its filing that it has identified 15 injuries and one fatality related to the crashes.
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The electric-car maker’s stock was up 2.5% in midday trading Thursday, following news of a strong bounceback in production at its plant in China.
Newsletter Sign-up
Technology
A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ’s Personal Tech gurus.
Autopilot, Tesla’s name for the advanced driver-assistance technology used in its vehicles, is designed to help drivers with tasks such as steering and keeping a safe distance from other vehicles. Tesla instructs drivers using the system to pay attention to the road and keep their hands on the wheel.
The electric-car maker has long maintained that driving with Autopilot engaged is safer than doing so without it. Tesla points to internal data showing that crashes were less common when drivers were using Autopilot. Some researchers have criticized Tesla’s methodology.
In opening its initial probe last year, NHTSA said that it had identified 11 crashes since early 2018 in which a Tesla vehicle using Autopilot struck one or more vehicles involved in an emergency-response situation. In its latest filing, the agency said it discovered six additional crashes involving Teslas and first-responder vehicles where Autopilot was in use.
U.S. safety regulators are probing crashes involving Teslas, suspecting the company’s Autopilot system might be involved. WSJ’s Robert Wall reports on how some motorists may mistakenly think Autopilot is a self-driving feature that doesn’t require their attention. (Video from 3/18/21)
The expanded probe of Autopilot is the latest sign that U.S. auto-safety regulators are getting more aggressive in scrutinizing advanced vehicle technologies that automate some or all of the driving tasks.
NHTSA is getting ready to release new crash data this month that will give the public its first detailed look at the frequency and severity of incidents involving what are known as automated driving or advanced driver-assistance features, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
More than 100 companies are subject to an agency order requiring them to report crashes in which such systems were in use. Among those included are operators of autonomous-car fleets, like
Alphabet Inc.’s
Waymo and
General Motors Co.
’s Cruise LLC.
The technology under scrutiny includes lane-keeping assistance and cruise-control systems that keep a fixed distance behind a leading car, as well as higher-tech systems such as features that can guide a car along highways with minimal driver input.
Autopilot has become a particular focus for U.S. regulators in recent years, prompted by incidents in which drivers have misused the technology, overriding safety functions to operate a vehicle without their hands on the wheel, for example. Some critics also said the term Autopilot risks giving drivers an inflated sense of the system’s capabilities.
NHTSA said in its latest filing that driver use or misuse of Autopilot doesn’t necessarily preclude the agency from determining whether the technology is defective.
“This is particularly the case if the driver behavior in question is foreseeable in light of the system’s design or operation,” NHTSA said. Auto makers are legally required to initiate a recall if a safety defect is discovered in their vehicles.
Separately, NHTSA has opened a broader investigation into several dozen crashes where advanced driver-assistance features are suspected to have played a role. While the probe covers vehicles made by any car company, incidents involving Teslas represent most of the cases under examination, including several with fatalities.
The remnants of the severe winter storm that overwhelmed New England with heavy snow and hurricane-force gusts lingered Sunday in Canada, leaving a trail of power outages in the coastal areas of Massachusetts.
Damage didn’t appear to be extensive for a storm of such magnitude because people were mostly off the roads during the height of the storm on Saturday. The snow was light and fluffy, which limited damage to power lines and trees.
Tens of thousands of people were still without power in coastal Massachusetts areas including Cape Cod, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, where heavy snow, hurricane-force wind gusts and flooding caused the most damage. There were 31,300 power outages in the state on Sunday afternoon, down from a peak of 120,000 on Saturday, according to poweroutage.us. The restoration of power was slowed by high winds.
Newsletter Sign-up
The 10-Point.
A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal.
“It may be that a lot of the [power] restoration timelines won’t start until the wind dies down, which could be tomorrow morning,” said
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker.
There were nearly 7,800 outages in Florida early afternoon on Sunday, where during the weekend the central part of the state experienced some of the coldest weather in years. Florida outages were down to about 2,500 by late afternoon.
The winter storm that left large parts of Massachusetts without power was similar to a snowstorm in February 2015, said a National Weather Service meteorologist. In 2015, 31 inches of snow were recorded in Rockland, Mass., south of Boston, and this year, the same amount was recorded in Stoughton, Mass., about 12 miles away. Boston had a snowfall record of 23.6 inches, which tied with a record in February 2003, he said.
“This will be one that people will remember,” he added. “It is not unprecedented but people will remember this one.”
The timing of the storm—during a weekend—helped avert a worse outcome, said Jim Cantore, a meteorologist for the Weather Channel, who covered the storm in Boston.
“This is not the worst I’ve ever seen, but it is close,” Mr. Cantore said. “Timing on this storm avoided the crippling of a city.”
A snow-covered street in Boston on Sunday.
Photo:
Allison Dinner/Bloomberg News
Elsewhere in New England, moderate winds were expected to persist in Maine until Sunday afternoon, with some light snow expected in the morning, according to the National Weather Service.
On Sunday morning, some Amtrak service was still suspended, including routes between Boston and New York, and stretching north to Maine and south to Charlotte, N.C.
On Saturday, snow fell at a rate of 1 to 3 inches an hour along much of the East Coast, according to the National Weather Service, with accumulations of 21 inches seen near the Jersey Shore and 24 inches near Boston. A gust of 82 miles an hour was registered on Cape Cod.
The snow dropped by the storm blew easily in high wind and reduced visibility, creating problems for motorists. On Cape Cod, the temperature was a little warmer, so the snow is heavier there, said Marc Chenard, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service.
“Lighter snow means less impact on trees; less impact on trees means less impact on utilities,” said Connecticut Gov.
Ned Lamont,
who called the storm a “wicked New England” one.
The town of Yorktown, N.Y., 30 miles north of New York City, postponed distribution of 1,000 at-home Covid-19 tests and drive-through testing that had been planned at a local park, after about 7 inches of snow fell Saturday.
Workers plowed snow in New York City on Sunday.
Photo:
Jeenah Moon/Getty Images
Write to Steven Rosenbush at steven.rosenbush@wsj.com, Ann-Marie Alcántara at ann-marie.alcantara@wsj.com and Kim S. Nash at kim.nash@wsj.com
rebuffed a request from federal transportation officials to delay the launch of new 5G wireless services but offered a counterproposal that would allow limited deployments to move forward this week.
The cellphone carriers said Sunday in a letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that they could further dim the power of their new 5G service for six months to match limits imposed by regulators in France, giving U.S. authorities more time to study more powerful signals’ effect on air traffic. The plan from the companies, which have said they plan to start service Wednesday, could prolong a standoff between the telecom and aviation industries over how to proceed.
“If U.S. airlines are permitted to operate flights every day in France, then the same operating conditions should allow them to do so in the United States,” the chief executives wrote in the letter.
Telecom-industry officials have pointed to dozens of countries, including France, that have already allowed cellular service over the frequencies in question, known as C-band. France is among the countries that have imposed wireless limits near airports while regulators study their effect on aircraft.
The message from AT&T CEO
John Stankey
and Verizon CEO
Hans Vestberg
was in response to a letter Transportation Secretary
Pete Buttigieg
and Federal Aviation Administration chief
Steve Dickson
sent late Friday. The New Year’s Eve missive asked the carriers to postpone their planned 5G launch by “no more than two weeks” while officials worked to address the wireless services’ effect on specific airports on a rolling basis over the coming weeks.
The FAA said it was reviewing the wireless companies’ letter. “U.S. aviation safety standards will guide our next actions,” the FAA said. Representatives from the Transportation Department, the FAA’s parent agency, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday.
Air-safety regulators have said the new cellular services could confuse key cockpit safety systems and have been preparing to impose potentially disruptive flight restrictions.
AT&T and Verizon disputed claims of any air-safety risk, though the companies already postponed a planned December debut of the new signals to provide more time for telecom and aviation regulators to share information about the wireless infrastructure and aircraft equipment in question.
Newsletter Sign-up
The 10-Point.
A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal.
The Sunday letter from telecom CEOs said transportation regulators’ latest delay request would be to “the detriment of millions of our consumer, business and government customers,” noting that carriers spent more than $80 billion to acquire the licenses in a Federal Communications Commission auction that closed in January 2021.
FCC authorities padded the spectrum they auctioned with a swath of buffer frequencies to prevent interference with cockpit systems. But air-safety regulators have expressed concern that more sensitive altimeters that pick up signals well beyond their defined range could mistake cellular transmissions for terrain. The devices feed data to commonly used cockpit systems that help planes automatically land in bad weather, prevent crashes and avoid midair collisions.
AT&T and Verizon have spent the past year preparing to turn on new signals to provide new fifth-generation wireless technology, a faster and more capable mobile service. Wireless companies in other countries already use similar frequencies, but the spectrum wasn’t available to U.S. providers until recently because of existing satellite users that had to be moved into a narrower band of spectrum before 5G service could begin.
Without a resolution to the aviation-telecom dispute, Messrs. Buttigieg and Dickson warned the FAA’s flight limits would bring severe economic consequences.
“Failure to reach a solution by Jan. 5 will force the U.S. aviation sector to take steps to protect the safety of the traveling public, particularly during periods of low visibility or inclement weather,” they wrote in their Dec. 31 letter.
Airlines have been bracing for significant flight cancellations and diversions due to potential FAA flight restrictions because of the regulator’s aviation-safety concerns. Pilots and airlines had been awaiting details of potential FAA flight restrictions that limit the use of systems that rely on radar altimeters. Aviation industry officials have most recently expected the agency to detail flight limits as soon as Monday.
Over the past week, U.S. air travel has been snarled by a mix of winter storms and staffing challenges because of increasing ranks of airline crews calling in sick with Covid-19 as the U.S. deals with a surge by the Omicron variant. Thousands of flights have been canceled and delayed.
5G and Air Traffic
More WSJ coverage on the debate over wireless frequencies and aviation, selected by the editors.
Write to Drew FitzGerald at andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com and Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com
TOKYO—A fire at a factory of one of the world’s leading auto chip makers has added to the troubles of car makers that already have slashed production because of a semiconductor shortage.
The fire Friday left a swath of charred equipment in the factory owned by a subsidiary of Renesas Electronics Corp. in Hitachinaka, northeast of Tokyo. The company said it would take at least a month to restart the damaged operations.
Shares of Japan’s three leading car makers— Toyota Motor Corp. , Nissan Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co. —all fell by more than 3% on Monday, worse than the overall market, while Renesas shares were down 4.9%.
Renesas said heat from an electrical problem inside a single piece of equipment caused the fire and contaminated clean rooms needed to make semiconductors. It said two-thirds of the chips made at the fire-affected factory were automotive chips.
Renesas’s chief executive, Hidetoshi Shibata, said Sunday the impact on global chip supplies would be significant. Mariko Semetko, a credit analyst at Moody’s Japan, said the fire was likely to damp the recovery of global auto production this year, while auto makers said they were still assessing the impact.
