China plane crash: ‘Grim’ search as rescue teams comb hillside

Firefighters and paramilitary police deployed to steeply-forested slopes of China’s first air crash in a decade.

Paramilitary police officers work on a hillside where a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 plane flying from Kunming to Guangzhou crashed on Monday afternoon

Rescuers in China are scouring heavily forested slopes in southern China where a China Eastern Airlines crashed and exploded in flames, as the airline expressed “deep condolences” for those on board.

Some 132 people, including nine crew, were on flight MU5735 when it crashed in the mountains of southern Guangxi on a flight from Kunming to Guangzhou.

The Boeing 737-800 crash is the first involving a commercial aircraft in China since 2010.

Debris was strewn across mountain slopes with state media reporting that the burned remains of identity cards, purses, and wallets had been seen.

“The company expresses its deep condolences for the passengers and crew members who died in the plane crash,” China Eastern said in a statement, without providing more information.

The plane was flying at a cruising altitude when it suddenly plunged from the sky.

Flight tracking website FlightRadar24 showed the aircraft dropped from an altitude of 29,100 feet (8,870 metres) to 7,850 feet (2,393 metres) in just over a minute.

After a brief upswing, it then plunged to 3,225 feet (982 metres), the tracker said.

Ukraine's Zelensky calls for fresh talks, Russia says entered besieged Mariupol centre

• Ukraine's leader Volodymyr Zelensky made a fresh appeal for meaningful talks with Moscow on Saturday to stop the invasion, as Russia said its soldiers had entered the centre of besieged city Mariupol, "tightening the noose" around the key port.

President Volodymyr Zelensky

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky made a fresh appeal for talks with Moscow in a video posted to Facebook, saying it "this is te time to meet, to talk, time for renewing territorial integrity and fairness for Ukraine," adding that "otherwise, Russia's losses will be such, that several generations will not recover."

• But Russia's defence ministry said Friday that the army and its separatist allies had made a breakthrough in Mariupol, which has been under Russian shelling for days, and were now inside the city, with "units of the Donetsk People's Republic, with the support of the Russian armed forces" also "squeezing the encirclement" the ministry said. The mayor of the city confirmed to the BBC that gun battles had reached the heart of Mariupol.

• Ukrainian human rights ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova on Friday said 130 people had been rescued so far from the rubble of a theatre in the besieged city of Mariupol, after Ukraine said a powerful Russian air strike hit the building where hundreds of people had been sheltering from the war on Thursday. On Friday evening, rescuers were still searching for hundreds of people trapped.

• Russian missiles hit an aircraft maintenance plant Friday near the airport in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, said the mayor.

• Russian bombardments have expanded in eastern Ukraine with deadly attacks on Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, and shelling in Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region.

• Kyiv city authorities on Friday said 222 people had been killed in the capital since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began.

• The UNHCR said Friday that more than 3.25 million Ukrainians had fled across the border since the war began on February 24, with more than 2 million crossing the Polish border. The UN children’s agency says around half of those who have fled are children

Fears grow over possible removal of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard from US terror list

EDDAH: Concerns grew on Friday that the US planned to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from its blacklist of terrorist organizations as part of a revived nuclear deal with Iran.

The Revolutionary Guards control a business empire in Iran, as well as military and intelligence forces responsible for terrorist attacks throughout the world.

The IRGC has been subject to US sanctions since 2007 as part of the US Specially Designated Global Terrorist list, and in 2017 it became the first national military to be designated by the US as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” President Donald Trump said at the time.

The Revolutionary Guards control a business empire in Iran, as well as military and intelligence forces responsible for terrorist attacks throughout the world.

Analysts now believe the US plans to remove the terrorist designation in return for Iranian assurances about reining in the IRGC. It is thought to be the last and most troublesome issue in wider indirect talks on reviving the 2015 nuclear deal.

Such a move would be fiercely opposed by the Gulf states, and Israel made its concern known in a joint statement on Friday by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid. “The attempt to delist the IRGC as a terrorist organization is an insult to their victims and would ignore documented reality supported by unequivocal evidence,” they said.

“We find it hard to believe that the IRGC’s designation as a terrorist organization will be removed in exchange for a promise not to harm Americans. The US will not abandon its closest allies in exchange for empty promises from terrorists.”