EgyptAir Plane Crashes Off Island Of Nantucket NEWPORT, Rhode Island (CNN) ‹ Egyptian investigators, scores of family members of victims of Flight 990, and the president of EgyptAir are scheduled to arrive in the United States from Egypt on Tuesday, as the probe into the air disaster widens, according to Jim Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. The Cairo-bound Boeing 767-300ER, with 217 people aboard, crashed at 1:52 a.m. Sunday, less than an hour after takeoff from New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. Officials have abandoned hope of finding survivors, and instead are focusing recovery efforts on a 36-square-mile debris field about 60 miles south of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. A Navy salvage ship, the USS Grapple, which participated in the retrieval of wreckage from TWA Flight 800 in 1996 and Swissair Flight 111 last year, is expected to arrive at the crash site on Tuesday, joining other recovery ships. The Grapple's sensitive sonar will be used to scan the ocean floor for wreckage from Flight 990, which lies an estimated 250 feet below the surface, about twice the depth of TWA Flight 800, investigators said. Officials said dozens of relatives of the crash victims of Flight 990 were en route to the United States to identify and bring home the bodies of their loved ones. Officials involved in recovery efforts have said that locating remains could take some time. EgyptAir chairman Mohammed Fahim Rayan headed a team of 39 officials from the airline and from Egypt's Civil Aviation Authority who joined the relatives on the scheduled flight to New York. Among the passengers on the EgyptAir flight were a number of Egyptian military officers ­ as many as 33, according to the Pentagon ‹ in the United States for training in some cases and a variety of other reasons, including meetings with defense contractors.

NYC Ordered To Restore Art Funding NEW YORK (AP) ‹ A federal judge restored city funding Monday to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, ruling that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani violated the First Amendment in cutting off the money over an exhibit featuring a dung-encrusted portrait of the Virgin Mary. In issuing a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon said the city's action against the museum was "directly related, not just to the content of the exhibit, but to the particular viewpoints expressed.'' "There can be no greater showing of a First Amendment violation," she said. The decision does not end the legal fight. Abrams said the museum will try to end to the dispute once and for all by obtaining a permanent injunction protecting funding. And city officials said they will appeal. After the museum refused to cancel the show, the city withheld the roughly $500,000 October payment of its annual $7.2 million subsidy. The city also sued to evict the museum from the city-owned site it has leased for more than 100 years. The museum filed a lawsuit of its own, claiming its First Amendment rights had been violated by the freeze on its subsidy, which represents about a third of its annual budget. City attorneys argued the museum broke its lease, creating grounds for eviction. The museum's lease requires it to educate schoolchildren and the public. Giuliani said the art was not fit for children to see, and the city argued the issue was a legal and not a constitutional one. City officials, meanwhile, have alleged that the museum board of directors, the British art collector Charles Saatchi, and the exhibit's sponsor, Christie's auction house, are trying to cash in on artworks whose sole aim is to shock.

Home | News | Opinions | Features | Arts | Sports
Archives | Staff | Contact Us | Trincoll Journal