tyb
Cuban Cardinal Ortega dies
Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino, a sugar worker’s son who oversaw the first papal visit to Cuba, helped lower barriers to believers in the communist country and played a role in mediating improved U.S.-Cuba ties, died Friday at age 82.
Ortega helped open a dialogue between Havana and the U.S. that led the two countries to resume relations in 2014, after presidents Raul Castro and Barack Obama secretly turned to Pope Francis for help. He served as a messenger for both sides, carrying secret letters and responses that helped thaw relations.
He also helped drive a gradual but significant thaw in relations with a government that was officially atheist and long barred religious believers from Communist Party ranks.
http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0005901977
>>7223597 Russi Taylor, voice of Minnie Mouse for more than 3 decades, dies at age 75
> The cause was not immediately clear.
>>7223613 Cuban Cardinal Ortega dies
>Ortega helped open a dialogue between Havana and the U.S. that led the two countries to resume relations in 2014, after presidents Raul Castro and Barack Obama secretly turned to Pope Francis for help. He served as a messenger for both sides, carrying secret letters and responses that helped thaw relations.
notable
one mine. the other a stronger one for nomming.
pick'em
FAA Let Boeing Sign Its Own Safety Certifications On The 737 Max
Thanks to a 'broken regulatory process,' the Federal Aviation Administration has been passing off routine oversight tasks to manufacturers for years. In the case of the beleagured 737 Max, however, the plane was so advanced that the regulator "handed nearly complete control to Boeing," which was able to sign off on its own safety certificates, according to the New York Times.
The lack of regulatory oversight meant that the FAA had no clue how Boeing's automated anti-stall system, known as MCAS, worked. In fact, "regulators had never independently assessed the risks of the dangerous software" when they issued a 2017 approval for the plane.
The company performed its own assessments of the system, which were not stress-tested by the regulator. Turnover at the agency left two relatively inexperienced engineers overseeing Boeing’s early work on the system.
The F.A.A. eventually handed over responsibility for approval of MCAS to the manufacturer. After that, Boeing didn’t have to share the details of the system with the two agency engineers. They weren’t aware of its intricacies, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. -New York Times
During the late stages of the Max's development, Boeing engineers decided to increase the plane's reliance on MCAS to fly smoothly. Unfortunately, a new version of the system relied on a single sensor which could malfunction and push the plane into a nosedive.
Boeing never submitted a formal assessment of the MCAS system following its upgrade - which wasn't required by FAA rules. An agency official claims that an engineering test pilot was familiar with the changes, however his job was to evaluate its effect on how the plane flew - not on its safety.
The jet was eventually certified as safe to fly, and the FAA required very little pilot training until the second Max crashed less than five months after the first.
The plane remains grounded as regulators await a fix from Boeing. If the ban persists much longer, Boeing said this past week that it could be forced to halt production.
The F.A.A. and Boeing have defended the plane’s certification, saying they followed proper procedures and adhered to the highest standards. -New York Times
"The agency’s certification processes are well-established and have consistently produced safe aircraft designs," said the FAA in a Friday statement undoubtedly written by lawyers. "The 737 Max certification program involved 110,000 hours of work on the part of F.A.A. personnel, including flying or supporting 297 test flights."
Boeing, meanwhile, said that "the F.A.A.’s rigor and regulatory leadership has driven ever-increasing levels of safety over the decades," adding that "the 737 Max met the F.A.A.’s stringent standards and requirements as it was certified through the F.A.A.’s processes."
Chris Hart, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board is trying to get to the bottom of these regulatory shortcuts.
"Did MCAS get the attention it needed? That’s one of the things we’re looking at," said Hart, who now leads a multiagency task force investigating the Max's approval. "As it evolved from a less robust system to a more powerful system, were the certifiers aware of the changes?"
Rushed Orders
In an effort to compete with its rival Airbus, Boeing was "racing to finish" the 737, according to the report. And when it came to cutting through red tape to speed that process along, the FAA handing the regulatory reigns over to Boeing was crucial.
At crucial moments in the Max’s development, the agency operated in the background, mainly monitoring Boeing’s progress and checking paperwork. The nation’s largest aerospace manufacturer, Boeing was treated as a client, with F.A.A. officials making decisions based on the company’s deadlines and budget.
It has long been a cozy relationship. Top agency officials have shuffled between the government and the industry.
The FAA, meanwhile, was 'surprised' to learn after last October's Lion Air crash that they didn't have a complete analysis of the MCAS system - including the fact that the system could "aggressively push down the nose of the plane and trigger repeatedly, making it difficult to regain control of the aircraft, as it did on the doomed Lion Air flight."
And what did the agency do after the October incident? Instead of grounding the plane, they issued a notice reminding pilots of existing emergency procedures (which made no mention of how the MCAS system works - after an FAA manager told agency engineers to remove the only mention of the system).
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-27/faa-let-boeing-sign-its-own-safety-certifications-737-max
George Webb…really nigga?!
Deal-maker Armand Hammer Moscow's capitalist comrade
This office is the last place a person would expect to find a picture of Lenin, personally autographed. "To Comrade Armand Hammer from V. I. Ulyanov [Lenin], 10.XI.21 [Nov 10, 1981] ," it reads. Dr. Armand Hammer is 100 percent, unadulterated, prime-cut capitalist, a free- enterprise man if ever there was one, light-years away from Lenin's ideology.
The comradeship with Lenin is genuine becausem of Dr. Hammer's capitalism, not in spite of it. Young Hammer, just out of medical school, arrived in the new Soviet state in 1921 full og idealism and savvy. With Lenin's official blessing and encouragement, he injected the beleaguered Russian economy with a touch of free enterprise. He brought some much- needed vigor to that economy and gained the admiration and support of Lenin in the process.
Yet the framed black and white photograph of the father of Soviet Russia hangs near another memento in Dr. hammer's office, one closer to the substance of his grit. It is a scale model of a drilling rig, the one that brough in Lathrop field, the second largest natural gas well in California, and propelled Dr. Hammer into a position as one of the most powerful captains of American industry.
No, Armand Hammer is not the "baking soda king" – people constantly ask him and those associated with him if he is – even though his name matches that of Arm and Hammer Baking Soda. In fact, he is said to have considered buying the company just to put the issue to rest. He claims that his mother named him Armand for the youthful lover in Dumas's "Camille," but another account claims his father, a stalwart socialist, named him for the arm and hammer insignia that was the symbol of socialist revolution at the time.
Dr. Hammer is or has been an oilman a coal man, a chemical man, an art collector and dealer, a cattle breeder, a liquor distiller, and – neither last nor least – perhaps the greatest marketing genius since P. T. Barnum. His competitors probably wish he were the baking soda king, since when he takes up an endeavor he is apt to leave a trail of second- place finishers behind him.
For instance, the people at Texaco ara, no doubt, none too happy about the Lathrop gas field. Acting on the advice of a young geologist, Dr. Hammer had his company drill a gas well only a few hundred feet from – but a thousand feet deeper than – a well Texaco had abandoned as dry. Dr. Hammer's well brought in and gas industry.
They are not thrilled about him at Mobil, either. He sank a well in a lease tract in Libya that Mobil had given up on and came away with the largest oil strike in one of the Middle East's oil-richest countries.
As for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, "I think they get very nervous when I walk in there," Dr. Hammer says with a chuckle.He made off with two paintings – Rembrandts – for his private art collection that the Met had on loan and had counted on keeping indefinitely. And when he bought "Juno" and "Man Holding a Black Hat," on separate occasions, for $3 million and $2 million, respectively, Dr. Hammer pulled the rug out from two meseums which thought they had the masterpieces as good as signed, sealed, and delivered. Mentioning the name "Hammer" at those three museums does not evoke gushes of warm feeling.
His present title is chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the Occidental Petroleum Company, or "Oxy," as it is universally known. In a sense, Oxy started out as a retirement project for Dr. Hammer. In 1956 he had left the East Coast to retire to California with his millions. In Los Angeles, a friend pointed him in the direction of Occidental Oil, a company teetering on the abyss of bankruptcy. The friend suggested that Dr. Hammer lend the company $50,000 to drill two new wells – its last two if they came up dry – as a tax write-off. According to the company's balance sheet, which now hangs on Dr. Hammer's office wall, Oxy itself was worth $16,000 less than that.
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Dr. Hammer who had never seen an oil well, bit, and so did the wells. The company's stock jumped from 18 cents a a share to $1 a share, and Dr. Hammer bought large amounts of it. (He is stll the biggest stockholder.) More oil strikes followed, and Dr. Hammer was elected president in 1957. In 1961 Oxy hit Lathrop field and then in 1966 struck oil in Libya, putting this little $34,000 brat of a company in a league with the majors – so much so that Standard Oil of Indiana tried to force a takeover of Oxy in 1974. Dr. Hammer fought the raid at every turn, and Standard Oil eventually dropped it.
rest at link
https://www.csmonitor.com/1980/0703/070362.html