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Now you’re talking …

July 4th, 2009 | No Comments

Want to speak like a native but don’t fancy spending your entire trip in a classroom? These holidays combine lessons with activities and the chance to hang out with locals

French

Surfing: Biarritz

If only school could have been this relaxed. At a solar-powered surf camp in a 300-year-old farmhouse close to Les Casernes beach, near Biarritz, language lessons take the form of informal two-hour chats over beers in the afternoons. Mornings are spent riding the waves, and five days of surf lessons (for 1½ hours per day) are included. The camp has plenty of places for practising tenses in your free time – in the garden, hydro-pool, hammam, tree hut, canoe or hammock. Suitable for beginners and improvers.

• A week costs £606pp, including surfboard and wetsuit hire. 08445 020 445, golearnto.com.

Outdoor adventure: Verdon

Perhaps you’re more likely to remember new words if you learn them while scared out of your wits. A French immersion course in Moustiers, in the Parc Naturel Regional du Verdon, includes morning lessons (beginner to advanced available) in a converted hilltop monastery, plus afternoon exploration of the river Verdon by canoe, treks into the Garrigue with a forest guard, games of pétanque in the village square, dances at a bal populaire or viewings of French films, all accompanied by teachers to ensure French is spoken throughout. At the weekend, the adventuring ratchets up a gear with canyoning, rafting, kayaking and abseiling where no doubt you will learn the French for “Help!” and perfect your pronunciation of merde

• Course €1,670pp for 14 days, accommodation €458 per week, 0121 430 7660, experiencelanguage.co.uk.

Wine: Bordeaux

Many people’s language priority is being able to order food and drink. But imagine how impressive you’ll sound when you can not only stammer out “Un verre de vin, s’il vous plaît”, but are also capable of ordering a fine Bordeaux, commenting on its complexity of flavour and describing the time you visited the very vineyard where it was created. This seven-day French and Bordeaux wine course will set you well on the way to talking about terroir like a native, with four 45-minute sessions of French a day (there’s a test on day one to establish your level), three afternoon sessions on Bordeaux wines, including tastings at l’Ecole du Bordeaux, and excursions to Saint-Emilion and Médoc vineyards.

• Courses start 20 July, 17 August, 14 September, 12 October, £705pp. Homestay accommodation from £170 per week, flight from £115pp return. 0871 230 8512, statravel.co.uk.

Spanish

Walk the talk: Pyrenees

“When we visit my neighbour Hilaria’s vegetable garden, if you pick tomatoes, you’ll learn how to talk about them,” says Georgina Howard, who runs the Pyrenean Experience, a language course in the Baztan valley that teaches Spanish by living Spanish. Language tutors are always on hand to help guests in conversation practise while they ramble through the Pyrenean mountains, meet local farmers, visit bars and hamlets, have lunch with the neighbours or host parties at the seven-bedroom farmhouse, and generally live the Basque life. There are more formal morning lessons on a terrace, and weeks for beginners, intermediate and advanced speakers are run separately.

• Full board £850pp per week, 0121 711 3428, pyreneanexperience.com.

Surfing: Tenerife

Insted runs language courses in Austria, Spain and France that are combined with skiing or surfing. Its Tenerife course runs year-round from a central base in Puerto de la Cruz, a thriving town with busy bars and restaurants serving Latin American and African-influenced dishes. Minutes away from the classroom are the beaches, where the breaks have earned the Canaries the title “Hawaii of the Atlantic”. Accommodation is with a local family, or in an apartment sharing with other students from the course.

• Homestay with family from €165pp per week B&B in private room, €200 half board. Apartment from €165pp for private room. Two week minimum, €220 per week for the course. 00 33 450 530 366, insted.com.

Tango: Buenos Aires

“Bailamos?” is Spanish for “Shall we dance?” – as those returning from this trip will know. In the historic centre of Argentina’s capital, near the bohemian San Telmo district, pupils take a daily four-hour classroom lesson of Spanish, and Argentinian and Spanish culture, politics and history in groups of up to seven. Afterwards they don their dancing shoes to learn one of the world’s sexiest dances at a nearby milonga, or tango hall.

• Six nights including homestay with from £467pp, tango classes £4 per hour. Hotel accommodation available. Journey Latin America (020 8747 8315, journeylatinamerica.co.uk).

Portuguese

Capoeira: Brazil

Practise whirling your limbs to the moves of capoeira while learning to twirl your tongue around the Portuguese language on a two-week course combining the two in Salvador. Classes of eight study beginners’ Portuguese for 20 hours a week, then concentrate on the acrobatic Brazilian dance/martial art twice a week; both take place in a language centre. A samba lesson and cookery class are also included, and homestay accommodation is available so that you can practise over dinner (the language, not capoeira).

• Course £285 pp for 14 days, homestay accommodation from £89 per room per week. 08445 020 445, golearnto.com.

Italian

Food and cookery: Tuscany

For an indulgent foodie break with a side serving of language lessons, Sanctuary Villas puts up large groups of friends or two families in a luxurious converted farmhouse villa with an outdoor pool, sauna, steam room and Jacuzzi, near the medieval village of San Gimignano. The company can arrange extras including cookery classes with local chef Giuseppina and language lessons, taken in your villa, the garden which overlooks rolling, cypress-lined Chianti hills or wherever you prefer. Villa La Terme consists of two large houses, together sleeping 10 plus two children.

• From £5,824 per week (£69 pp per night) accommodation only, language lessons from £41 pp per hour with Sanctuary Villas (01242 547 902, sanctuary-villas.com).

Photography and cycling: Umbria

Northern Umbria is a very untouristy part of Italy, a bonus for language learners as locals are unlikely to revert to English when you chat, and because they have more time to do so. Guests at the Labbazia school in the Upper Tiber Valley will meet plenty of them on trips to local markets and bars in the nearby medieval villages, where they’ll put into practise all they learned that day in class (three levels available). There’s usually some sort of local pageant, dance or festival to attend, and many other activities are arranged on demand, from photography classes to tai chi, cycling or horse-riding.

• From €1,050pp per week, full-board at the agriturismo where lessons are held, including 20 x 45min lessons, transfers from Perugia and guided trips. 00 39 075 857 3004, labbaziaschool.com.

Greek

Beach and culture: Syros

On this two-week course at the OMILO centre on the Cycladic island of Syros, there are classes at the Pension Echo in Azolimnos (which is also one of the self-catering accommodation options) from 9.30am to 1.30pm each day. Then it’s time to hit the beaches right by the centre for swimming and sunbathing, before moving a short distance to the village’s lively tavernas. Excursions such as Greek dance lessons, museum visits, guided walks and local concerts are included and everyone goes along to a sociable first night meal. The island’s capital, Ermoupolis, an affluent harbour of neo-classical buildings, mansions, marble-paved streets and white houses, is 4km away.

• Catch a ferry from Athens. Next dates September, €590 for two weeks. Rooms from €35 per night. 00 30 210 612 2896, omilo.com.

German

Watersports: Bavaria

Lindau is a beautiful town on its own island in the eastern side of Lake Constance, with a historic medieval centre and pretty harbour. It’s a great base for learning German – after classes, pupils cool off by sailing and waterskiing on the lake, cycle around it or go on excursions to Meersburg, Salem Castle and Liechtenstein.

The Dialoge language school provides 20-25 lessons per week, and has a sports hall for basketball, volleyball and football games. Social evenings with barbecues, wine tastings and the cinema are arranged too.

• From €490 per week including accommodation with a host family or the school’s apartments, €330 without. 0808 234 8578, studytravel.com.

Arabic

Interaction: Cairo

Pupils of the Bridge Abroad programme will learn the Egyptian dialect (one of the easiest to pick up) as well as classical Arabic on a week’s beginners’ course in Cairo. The focus is on learning through interaction with some of the city’s 14.5million residents, after daily lessons in a school 15 minutes from the centre. Afternoons are spent among the throng, picking up more vocabulary in the souks, cafes and squares, and at lectures, concerts, cinemas and the famous sites.

• Three weeks (minimum) including accommodation costs from $878pp, $399 without accommodation, or from $711 per week private tuition, from $855 with accommodation. 0808 120 7613, bridgeabroad.com.

Japanese

Cooking and karaoke: Tokyo

Nowhere gives a culture shock like Japan, so throwing yourself into the local way of life is as important as learning the lingo if you are to have a hope of ever fitting in. Alongside a beginners’ course that also covers Japanese culture in a centrally-located school, pupils can take workshops on calligraphy, tea ceremonies, noodle cooking, judo and karate, and interact with native Japanese speakers on nights out bowling, to quizzes and, of course, singing karaoke.

• From $2900 for two weeks including accommodation with a host family, in student dorms or apartments with World Link Education (0046 5580 3720, wle-japan.com).

Mandarin

Live-in learning: Beijing

Moving in with your teacher would have been an abhorrent notion when you were a teenager, but now it could be the best way to develop your language skills. Instead of trawling through a textbook twice a day, you can chat to your tutors from breakfast to bedtime while staying in their home on Go Learn To’s “home language courses”. These suit all levels and give the option of staying with your teachers, couples and families around Beijing as well as informal tuition. Guests get a set of keys and are free to come and go as they please, but are usually invited to join in with their teacher’s life, to meet relatives and friends, go shopping and explore the nightlife.

• Seven days from £864pp per week full board, 08445 020 445, golearnto.com.

Russian

Culture: St Petersburg

Russia is one place where you’re unlikely to pick up much of the language without some serious tuition. A course that includes 20 lessons per week in St Petersburg is a good place to start. After class, it’s time to absorb the city’s rich culture at its many sites.

Bi-weekly group activities include visits to the theatre and ballet and to other places such as the riverside city of Novgorod. Go in the summer and you can join in many vercherinkas – small parties with caviar, vodka and Russian folk songs. Beginners’ and advanced courses are available, but everyone is asked to learn the Cyrillic alphabet before arriving.

• Two weeks from $2,170pp all inclusive, but excluding flights, languagesabroad.com.

• Don’t miss our free phrasebooks every day next week, plus Italian the week after

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Yemenia crash survivor reunited with father

July 2nd, 2009 | No Comments

A teenager believed to be the only survivor of an aeroplane crash in the Indian Ocean flew back to France today to be reunited with her father, who embraced her and made jokes to lift her spirits.

Bahia Bakari, 14, returned from the Comoros islands on an aircraft carrying a government minister and other French officials, which arrived at Le Bourget airport just north of Paris.

Yemenia Flight 626 crashed on Tuesday morning off Comoros in heavy winds, and Bakari, who was described by her father as a “fragile girl” that could barely swim, spent more than 13 hours in the water clinging to wreckage before she was rescued. She was found suffering from hypothermia, a fractured collarbone and bruising to her face, elbow and foot.

The other 152 people on the Airbus A310-300 jet, including her mother, are presumed dead.

In the Comoros, French and US officials directed the search for survivors yesterday. Alain Baulin, a commander with the French Foreign Legion, said military aircraft spotted what appear to be life jackets and divers were sent to investigate.

The television station France 2 carried a brief interview with Bahia Bakari on the aeroplane back to Le Bourget. She appeared dazed and gave mostly one-word answers. Asked how she felt, the teenager, who was unable to open one of her eyes fully, replied faintly: “Well”.

When asked if she was worried, she said: “A little bit, a little bit.”

Her father, Kassim, met her as she arrived in France, saying he was relieved and overjoyed to see his daughter even as he mourned his wife.

“It was very powerful,” he said of the reunion. He said he asked her: “‘How are you? Was the return trip OK?’ We joked a little, the two of us.”

He added later: “I took her in my arms and I embraced her but not too strongly because her collarbone is injured.”

Several other family members joined the airport reunion before an ambulance took the teenager to the Armand-Trousseau children’s hospital in east Paris.

“In the middle of the mourning, there is Bahia. It is a miracle, it is an absolutely extraordinary battle for survival,” Alain Joyandet, France’s minister for international co-operation, said at a news conference at the airport. “It’s an enormous message that she sends to the world … almost nothing is impossible.”

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Air France plane came down intact

July 2nd, 2009 | No Comments

• Investigators: Jet hit the sea belly first at high speed
• Without black box exact cause may never be found

The Air France plane that vanished in the middle of the Atlantic with 228 people on board did not disintegrate in mid-air but plunged into the water intact and belly first, investigators said today.

Alain Bouillard, leading the preliminary inquiry on behalf of France’s BEA accident agency, said examination of wreckage indicated the A330 Airbus was still in one piece when it crashed, at high speed, into the ocean.

“The plane was not destroyed while it was in flight,” he told a press conference near Paris. “It seems to have hit the surface of the water in the direction of flight and with a strong vertical acceleration.” Appearing to rule out any question ofterrorism, Bouillard added that “neither traces of fire nor traces of explosives” had been found.

Just over a month since Flight AF447 went down during a flightbetween Rio de Janeiro and Paris,, killing all passengers and crew, investigators said they were facing one of the most challenging and baffling cases in the history of air travel.

The pilots apparently sent no distress calls before the plane went missing, and a rescue team has been unable to find the flight recorders, or black boxes, in one of the remotest parts of the Atlantic, 930 miles off Brazil’s mainland. Investigators have warned that, without such crucial information, a full explanation into why the Airbus ran into difficulties will be hard to come by.

“Today we are very far from establishing the causes of the accident,” admitted Bouillard, adding that the blame for the crash could not be pinned entirely on a problem with the plane’s speed sensors, or pitot tubes. “[It] is one of the factors but not the only one,” he said. “It is an element but it is not the cause.”

The BEA said it was trying to piece together what went wrong from the automated messages, or Acars, sent in the final minutes before the plane hit the water, and from the debris in the Atlantic in the past month.

Around 640 items of furniture, machinery and other material has been examined for clues. Analysis of food trays and shelving in the galley indicated that they had crashed in a way that would suggest a strong vertical acceleration, he said. Part of the plane’s floor had been found misshapen to suggest a similar fate.

No inflated life jackets had been discovered, which “obviously shows the passengers were not prepared for a crash landing,” said Bouillard. But experts expressed doubt as to where the investigation, still in its early days, could lead without the recovery of the black boxes. Bouillard announced the search for the recorders had been extended for another 10 days in the hope that the equipment would continue to emit signals.

Airbus said it was exploring ways to “reinforce” flight data recovery, either by increasing the data sent from planes, or by developing technology such as black boxes that float or whose signals last longer.

“Without finding the black boxes it’s going to be phenomenally difficult, maybe impossible, to determine what happened,” Kieran Daly, editor of Air Transport Intelligence, told the Associated Press, adding there was a “horrendous lack of evidence”.

Initial rumours surrounding the plane’s airspeed sensors was partially corroborated by investigators yesterday, who confirmed that one of the messages transmitted minutes before the crash showed the pilots were trying to fly through a storm zone with faulty speed information.

Speculation that the monitoring instruments, located outside the plane, could have iced over led Air France to replace the monitors on all its Airbus 330s and A340s this month. But, though a symptom of something wrong, investigators stressed they were at a loss to explain the root cause of the crash. “Between the surface of the water and 35,000 feet, we don’t know what happened,” Bouillard said. “In the absence of the flight recorders, it is extremely difficult to draw conclusions.”

Aside from problems with the speed sensors, investigators are also focusing on why air traffic controllers in Brazil failed to pass over control of the flight to their colleagues in Senegal.

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Air France plane came down intact

July 2nd, 2009 | No Comments

• Investigators: Jet hit the sea belly first at high speed
• Without black box exact cause may never be found

The Air France plane that vanished in the middle of the Atlantic with 228 people on board did not disintegrate in mid-air but plunged into the water intact and belly first, investigators said today.

Alain Bouillard, leading the preliminary inquiry on behalf of France’s BEA accident agency, said examination of wreckage indicated the A330 Airbus was still in one piece when it crashed, at high speed, into the ocean.

“The plane was not destroyed while it was in flight,” he told a press conference near Paris. “It seems to have hit the surface of the water in the direction of flight and with a strong vertical acceleration.” Appearing to rule out any question ofterrorism, Bouillard added that “neither traces of fire nor traces of explosives” had been found.

Just over a month since Flight AF447 went down during a flightbetween Rio de Janeiro and Paris,, killing all passengers and crew, investigators said they were facing one of the most challenging and baffling cases in the history of air travel.

The pilots apparently sent no distress calls before the plane went missing, and a rescue team has been unable to find the flight recorders, or black boxes, in one of the remotest parts of the Atlantic, 930 miles off Brazil’s mainland. Investigators have warned that, without such crucial information, a full explanation into why the Airbus ran into difficulties will be hard to come by.

“Today we are very far from establishing the causes of the accident,” admitted Bouillard, adding that the blame for the crash could not be pinned entirely on a problem with the plane’s speed sensors, or pitot tubes. “[It] is one of the factors but not the only one,” he said. “It is an element but it is not the cause.”

The BEA said it was trying to piece together what went wrong from the automated messages, or Acars, sent in the final minutes before the plane hit the water, and from the debris in the Atlantic in the past month.

Around 640 items of furniture, machinery and other material has been examined for clues. Analysis of food trays and shelving in the galley indicated that they had crashed in a way that would suggest a strong vertical acceleration, he said. Part of the plane’s floor had been found misshapen to suggest a similar fate.

No inflated life jackets had been discovered, which “obviously shows the passengers were not prepared for a crash landing,” said Bouillard. But experts expressed doubt as to where the investigation, still in its early days, could lead without the recovery of the black boxes. Bouillard announced the search for the recorders had been extended for another 10 days in the hope that the equipment would continue to emit signals.

Airbus said it was exploring ways to “reinforce” flight data recovery, either by increasing the data sent from planes, or by developing technology such as black boxes that float or whose signals last longer.

“Without finding the black boxes it’s going to be phenomenally difficult, maybe impossible, to determine what happened,” Kieran Daly, editor of Air Transport Intelligence, told the Associated Press, adding there was a “horrendous lack of evidence”.

Initial rumours surrounding the plane’s airspeed sensors was partially corroborated by investigators yesterday, who confirmed that one of the messages transmitted minutes before the crash showed the pilots were trying to fly through a storm zone with faulty speed information.

Speculation that the monitoring instruments, located outside the plane, could have iced over led Air France to replace the monitors on all its Airbus 330s and A340s this month. But, though a symptom of something wrong, investigators stressed they were at a loss to explain the root cause of the crash. “Between the surface of the water and 35,000 feet, we don’t know what happened,” Bouillard said. “In the absence of the flight recorders, it is extremely difficult to draw conclusions.”

Aside from problems with the speed sensors, investigators are also focusing on why air traffic controllers in Brazil failed to pass over control of the flight to their colleagues in Senegal.

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Air France plane crashed vertically

July 2nd, 2009 | No Comments

Flight 447 went down so quickly that passengers had no time to react, says French head investigator

Air France flight 447 did not break up in the air but plunged vertically into the Atlantic Ocean, according to the French head investigator of last month’s crash, which killed all 228 people on board.

Alain Bouillard said life vests found among the wreckage were not inflated, indicating the accident happened so quickly that the passengers had no time to react.

Speed sensors on the Airbus A330 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris were not to blame, he said, though “we are far from understanding the cause of the crash”.

“The plane seems to have hit the surface of the water on its flight trajectory with a strong vertical acceleration,” he said, adding that investigators have found “neither traces of fire nor traces of explosives.”

One of the automatic messages emitted by the plane indicates it was receiving incorrect speed information from the external monitoring instruments, which could destabilise the control systems. Experts have suggested those external instruments might have iced over.

No information was being given out from autopsies of the bodies found, Bouillard told a news conference at the headquarters of the French air accident agency BEA in Le Bourget, outside Paris.

The chances of finding the flight recorders are falling as the signals they emit fade. Without them, the full causes of the accident may never be known. The automated messages sent by the plane before it fell gave rescuers only a vague location to begin their search. Bouillard said the search for the plane’s black boxes has been extended by 10 days and would continue untill 10 July.

Families of the victims had been briefed before the media on the findings so far of the BEA investigation.

Earlier, Christophe Guillot-Noel, head of an association for the crash victims’ families said they wanted all the facts, “above all to be able to avoid this eventually happening again”.

“We have just one demand: transparency. We have just one expectation: the truth,” he said.

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Yemeni plane crash girl flies home to France

July 2nd, 2009 | No Comments

Teenager Bahia Bakari reunited with father after Indian Ocean ordeal

A young girl believed to be the only survivor of a plane crash in the Indian Ocean flew back to France today to be reunited with her father, who embraced her and made jokes to lift her spirits.

Bahia Bakari, 14, returned to France from the Comoros islands on a plane carrying a government minister and other French officials, which arrived at Le Bourget airport just north of Paris.

Yemenia Flight 626 crashed on Tuesday morning off Comoros in heavy winds, and Bahia, described by her father as a fragile girl who could barely swim, spent more than 13 hours in the water clinging to wreckage before she was rescued. She was found suffering from hypothermia, a fractured collarbone and bruises to her face, her elbow and her foot.

The other 152 people on the plane, including her mother, are presumed dead.

The television station France 2 carried a brief interview with Bahia on the plane. She appeared dazed and gave mostly one-word answers. Asked how she felt, the teenager, who was unable to open one of her eyes fully, replied faintly: “Well.”

When asked if she is worried, she said: “A little bit, a little bit.”

Bahia’s father, Kassim, met her as she arrived, saying he was relieved and overjoyed to see his daughter even as he mourned his wife.

“It was very powerful,” he said of his reunion with Bahia. He said he asked her: “‘How are you? Was the return trip OK?’ … We joked a little, the two of us.”

“I took her in my arms and I embraced her but not too strongly because her collarbone is injured,” he said later.

Several other family members joined the airport reunion before an ambulance took the girl to the Armand-Trousseau children’s hospital in eastern Paris.

“In the midst of the mourning, there is Bahia. It is a miracle, it is an absolutely extraordinary battle for survival,” France’s co-operation minister, Alain Joyandet, said at a news conference at the airport. “It’s an enormous message that she sends to the world … almost nothing is impossible.”

He said she “was informed that her mother is missing. She is facing up to this event in a very brave way.”

Bahia, the eldest of four children, had boarded a plane in Paris with her mother, Aziza, on Monday morning for a long journey via Marseille and San’a, Yemen, to Comoros where they planned to spend part of the summer with relatives. Her three siblings had stayed behind with her father.

Joyandet said the girl recounted her ordeal a bit to him.

“She says instructions were given to passengers and that then she felt something like electricity … as if she had been a bit electrocuted,” Joyandet said. “And suddenly there was this big sound. She found herself in the water.”

“She said she was afraid when she couldn’t see her mama,” her father said. “She was a bit panicked.”

At one point, he said, Bahia fell asleep, clinging to a piece of debris.

With so many others still missing, Joyandet vowed “the Comoros and France are arm-in-arm to find out everything that happened”.

The French air accident investigation agency BEA sent a team of investigators and Airbus experts to Comoros, an archipelago of three main islands 1,800 miles south of Yemen.

France’s transport minister, Dominique Bussereau, said today that “worrying anomalies” in the crashed Airbus A310 jet included broken seats for crew and passengers, out-of-date operation manuals, insufficient pressure on emergency exit doors and unrestrained equipment in the baggage hold. French aviation authorities flagged the problems with the plane during a 2007 inspection.

Yemenia’s lawyer in France said it was too early to say that the plane’s condition was the cause of the accident.

Off the coast of the Comoros islands, French and US ships directed the search for survivors, bodies and wreckage, even as hope of finding anyone alive in the choppy seas faded.

“Up to this moment, there have been no bodies, nor any other survivor,” said Jean Youssouf, director-general of El Maarouf Hospital in Moroni. “Do we continue to hope to find survivors? Yes, we will continue to hope.”

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‘Narcissism is important’

July 2nd, 2009 | No Comments

Stuart Jeffries speaks to the French performance artist Orlan


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Yemeni plane crash teenager ‘doing well’

July 1st, 2009 | No Comments

• Girl, 13, escapes with cuts and fractured collarbone
• Black box located in ocean near Comoros islands

The teenage girl who survived the Comoros plane crash by clinging to a piece of debris is recovering well in hospital. Bahia Bakari, a 13-year-old Franco-Comoran who lives in Paris, escaped with only a fractured collarbone and cuts to her face after the Yemenia Airbus A310-300 carrying 153 people plunged into the Indian Ocean at 2amyesterday .

Bahia’s father, Kassim Bakari, told France’s RTL radio in Paris that he had spoken to his daughter, who can barely swim, about the moments after the crash.

“She couldn’t feel anything and found herself in the water. She heard people speaking around her but she couldn’t see anyone in the darkness,” he said. “She’s a very timid girl, I never thought she would escape like that.

“I asked her what happened and she said, ‘We saw the plane fall into the water. I found myself in the water. I was hearing people talking but I couldn’t see anyone. I was in the dark. I couldn’t see anything. Daddy, I couldn’t swim very well. I grabbed on to something but I don’t know what,’” said Bakari, whose wife was on the plane and is presumed dead. Bakari said that his daughter asked what had happened to her mother but that she had not yet been told the truth.

At the hospital in the Comoran capital, Moroni, today Alain Joyandet, France’s minister for international co-operation, decribed Bahia’s survival as “a true miracle. She is a courageous young girl”.

He said France wanted to send Bahia home. Her mother, who was also on board, is presumed dead along with the rest of the passengers and crew.

One of the rescuers told Europe 1 radio that he spotted Bahia in the sea at about 4am and dived in to help after she was unable to cling to the lifebuoy tossed towards her. On board the rescue boat she was wrapped in blankets and given warm sugar water.

The ageing Yemenia Airbus was on the last leg of a journey from France to the Comoros, a former French colony off Africa’s south-eastern coast. With winds howling, the plane twice tried to land at the airport in Moroni before crashing in deep waters about nine miles from the island of Grand Comore.

Among the 142 passengers were 66 from France, many of them with dual nationality. Most of the other passengers were Comoran.

French and US aircraft are assisting with the search for survivors, along with numerous boats and navy divers. One of the plane’s black boxes appeared to have been located, according to the French government. It could be crucial in helping determine the cause of the crash, amid much speculation over the condition of the 19-year-old aircraft. Passengers who started the journey in France were transferred from a more modern Airbus A330 to the A310 during a stopover in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital.

The doomed plane had been banned from operating in France following an inspection in 2007 that identified numerous faults. The EU was also closely monitoring Yemenia over safety concerns, although it is not on a blacklist of airlines barred from Europe.

The crash has caused widespread anger among the 200,000 immigrant Comorans living in France, some of whom have complained of overcrowding and a lack of seatbelts on Yemenia flights, particularly on the legs outside European airspace.

A protest by Comoran youths at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport today delayed the departure of a Yemenia flight to Sana’a, with only 60 of the scheduled 160 passengers making it on board.

Yemenia, which is jointly owned by the governments of Yemen and Saudi Arabia, said the plane had passed a safety inspection in May. Poor weather may have been to blame for the accident, it said. The crash was the second involving an Airbus plane in a month. On 1 June, an Air France A330 crashed into the Atlantic shortly after leaving Brazil for Paris. All 228 people on board died, including 72 French nationals.

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Yemeni girl ‘is sole jet crash survivor’

June 30th, 2009 | No Comments

• Flight 626 crashes on the way to Comoros
• Airline criticised over ‘flying cattle trucks’

A 14-year-old girl may be the sole survivor from an Airbus A310-300 jet from Yemen carrying 153 people that crashed into the Indian Ocean off the Comoros islands early yesterday.

Local officials said last night that the girl had been plucked from the sea after the plane went down in bad weather following a second aborted landing attempt at the international airport in Moroni, the capital of the archipelago. Three other bodies were reported to have been recovered.

The plane, operated by Yemenia, the state operator, was on the final leg of a journey that began in Paris on Monday morning. In the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, the passengers changed planes, boarding an older aircraft that had been banned from French airspace after faults were found during tests in 2007.

The Paris airports authority said 66 of the passengers were French, with most of the others from the Comoros, a former French colony.

The aircraft was the second Airbus plane to crash into the sea in a month. On 1 June an Air France A330-200 heading from Brazil to Paris plunged into the Atlantic Ocean during a thunderstorm, killing all 228 people on board, including 72 French nationals.

A French navy ship and two military aircraft were dispatched from the islands of Réunion and Mayotte to search for survivors of yesterday’s crash, which occurred in deep waters about nine miles north of the Comoros coast. Local speedboats also rushed to the area.

There was initial confusion over the identity of the only survivor, according to reports. “A doctor from the military hospital aboard one of the rescue boats called the Mitsamiouli hospital to tell them a child had been rescued alive,” Halidi Ahmed Abdou, a doctor at a medical centre opened for survivors, told Reuters.

Comoros communications minister Abdourahim Said Bakar said last night that earlier reports that the rescued child was a five-year-old boy were incorrect, and there was little likelihood of finding other survivors. An official at a local crisis centre set up after the crash said the 14-year-old girl was from a village in the centre of the archipelago.

Witnesses at the airport in Moroni on Grande Comore – the largest of the three Comoros islands, which are off Africa’s south-east coast between Mozambique and Madagascar – said they saw the plane approach twice before disappearing at 1.51am yesterday morning.

Mohammad al-Sumairi, Yemenia’s deputy general manager for operations, said there was no firm information about the reasons for the crash. The black box recorders have yet to be located. “The weather conditions were rough – strong wind and high seas. The wind speed recorded on land at the airport was 61kph [38mph]. There could be other factors,” he said.

But in France there were immediate questions about the safety record of the plane and the airline. Dominique Bussereau, the French transport minister, told parliament that the plane had been banned from France in 2007 because an inspection revealed it to have “a number of irregularities”. “The question we are asking … is whether you can collect people in a normal way on French territory and then put them in a plane that does not ensure their security. We do not want this to happen again,” he said.

A European commission report last year noted deficiencies on Yemenia planes during inspections in France, Italy and Germany, and ordered the company to address safety concerns. In February, Yemenia was suspended from servicing EU-registered planes after failing audit inspections, according the European Aviation Safety Agency.

In France, relatives of the missing passengers railed against the airline, which is jointly owned by Yemen and Saudi Arabia, describing the Sanaa-Moroni leg of the journey from France as chaotic and uncomfortable. Stephane Salord, the Comoros’ honorary consul in Marseille, described Yemenia’s planes as “flying cattle trucks”. “This A310 is a plane that has posed problems for a long time,” he said.

Other Comorans said conditions were appalling, with some claiming that passengers even had to stand on some flights.

Thoue Djoumbe, a 28-year-old woman who lives in the French town of Fontainebleau, told Reuters that she and others had complained about the airline for years.

“It’s a lottery when you travel to Comoros,” she said. “We’ve organised boycotts, we’ve told the Comoran community not to fly on Yemenia airways because they make a lot of money off of us and meanwhile the conditions on the planes are disastrous.”

But Yemen’s government rejected speculation about the plane’s safety standard. Transport minister Khaled Ibrahim al-Wazeer said Airbus experts had been involved in a thorough check of the plane as recently as May. “It was in line with international standards,” he said.

An Airbus statement said the aircraft had been in service for 19 years and had accumulated 51,900 flight hours. It has been operated by Yemenia since 1999.

Comoros achieved independence from France in 1975, but the two countries retain close links. There are 200,000 immigrants from Comoros living in France, with the biggest community in the southern port city of Marseille. At the start of each summer thousands return to the islands to see their extended families.

The A310 is still in widespread use globally, with 214 planes flown by 41 airlines. Airbus, a subsidiary of the European aerospace company EADS, set up a crisis cell immediately after the crash yesterday and sent investigators to the Comoros. France also dispatched an investigating team.

EU transport commissioner Antonio Tajani said he wanted to see the creation of a global airline blacklist. “The European blacklist works pretty well in Europe,” he told journalists in Brussels.

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Girl survives Yemeni plane crash

June 30th, 2009 | No Comments

Search teams recover three bodies after Airbus comes down with more than 150 people on board near Comoros islands

Rescuers have found a lone survivor from a Yemenia Air plane that crashed in the Indian Ocean near the Comoros islands with more than 150 people on board.

Initial reports mentioned a five-year old boy, but later ones identified the survivor as a 14-year-old girl.

Search teams had also recovered three bodies and debris from the plane, but no other survivors had so far been found, Rachida Abdullah, an immigration officer, said.

The Airbus 310 plane was carrying 142 passengers, including at least three babies, and a crew of 11 Yemenis.

The Paris airports authority said 66 French nationals and a large number of Comoros nationals were aboard the aircraft, which was on the final leg of a flight from Paris and Marseille to via Yemen.

Many of the passengers began their journey in Paris or Marseille aboard a different Yemenia plane, an A330. They switched to the A310 in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, before resuming their flight to Comoros capital, Moroni, on the main island of the archipelago.

Stéphane Salord, the consul general of the Comoros in the Provence-Alps-Côte d’Azur region of France, said: “There is considerable dismay.

“These are families that, each year on the eve of summer, leave Marseille and the region to rejoin their families in the Comoros and spend their holidays.”

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, expressed his “deep emotion” at the crash as the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said French planes and ships were going to help in search operations at the Comoros government’s request.

Ibrahim Kassim, a representative of Asenca, the regional air security body, said the plane was believed to have come down between three and six miles from the coast.

“We think the crash is somewhere along its landing approach,” he said. “The weather is really not very favourable. The sea is very rough.”

The French transport minister, Dominique Bussereau, said French aviation inspectors had found a number of faults during a 2007 inspection of the plane that crashed.

Speaking on the French i-Tele television channel, Bussereau said the Airbus was inspected by France’s civil aviation agency in 2007 and “a certain number of faults” were noticed.

He said the plane ‑ which had not returned to French airspace since ‑ was not on any European blacklists but was also “subject to stricter surveillance on our part” and was scheduled for a review by EU safety officials.

An Airbus statement said the plane went into service in 1990 and had accumulated 51,900 flight hours.

It had been operated by Yemenia Air since 1999.

Airbus identified the plane’s serial number as 535, and said it was sending a team of specialists to the Comoros.

The A310-300 is a twin-engine wide-body jet that can seat up to 220 passengers. There are 214 A310s in service worldwide, used by 41 operators.

Comoros covers three small volcanic islands – Grande Comore, Anjouan and Mohéli – in the Mozambique channel, about 1,800 miles south of Yemen between Africa’s south-eastern coast and Madagascar.

The Yemenia plane is the second Airbus to crash into the sea in a month.

An Air France Airbus A330-200 flying to France from Brazil went down in the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 people on board, on 31 May.

In 1996, a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 767 also crashed into the sea off the Comoros islands, killing 125 of the 175 passengers and crew.

Yemenia is 51% owned by the Yemeni government and 49% by the Saudi Arabian government. Its fleet includes two Airbus 330-200s, four Airbus 310-300s and four Boeing 737-800s.

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Nuclear industry accused over Irena

June 29th, 2009 | No Comments

Critics say France is using debate about where to base new Irena global renewables body to co-opt organisation

The nuclear power industry has been accused of trying to muscle in on plans to establish a global body to represent the renewable energy industry at a key meeting in Egypt tomorrow.

France – a major user and exporter of nuclear technologies – is accused by critics of trying to win the top job inside the renewable organisation so it can move the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) towards being a promoter of “low-carbon” technologies – including atomic power.

The talks in Sharm el-Sheikh are already threatening to become a major standoff between Germany and the United Arab Emirates over which country should win the right to have the headquarters of Irena based in its country.

France, which recently signed a nuclear co-operation agreement with the UAE, is supporting Abu Dhabi. It also wants one of its own civil servants, Hélène Peloss, to be given the top role.

Britain, which only signed up for membership on Friday, has given no indication whether it plans to cast its vote in favour of Bonn or Abu Dhabi, while the US is expected to join Irena in Egypt and then lend its support to Germany.

Karsten Sach, an official in the German environment ministry with responsibility for Irena, said he was “very optimistic” that his country would be chosen but he refused to be drawn on the competition with Abu Dhabi or the role of France.

“I think we have an excellent offer in terms of experience, policy frameworks and vibrant research but we are not campaigning against any other offer,” he argued.

Bonn is considered by many to be the more obvious location because the renewables agency was the brainchild of the Germans, who have led the way in the clean technology sector through its determined championing of solar power. The promoters of Bonn are also suggesting that the Danish renewables policy expert Hans Jørgen Koch should be chosen as director general.

But Abu Dhabi, in the UAE, is pushing its claims to host Irena by emphasising its new commitment to clean technology through the construction of the hugely ambitious, low-carbon Masdar City project. It is also arguing that a developing country rather than the west is better placed to pursue the vital north-south dialogue needed to beat global warming.

At previous planning meetings for Irena, the French have talked about “low-carbon” technologies, encouraging speculation about its ultimate motives.

Eric Martinot, a senior research director with the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies in Tokyo, and a former environment specialist at the World Bank, told the Huffington Post, an online newspaper, that the French manoeuvres should be resisted.

“An Irena located in Abu Dhabi under such circumstances would be ‘nuclear tainted’ because the negotiating process used to select a host country would be based on support for nuclear power,” said Martinot.

“Are the original goals of Irena being co-opted so that renewables become a mere appendage to a nuclear agenda? ‘Sprinkling some renewables on top of our nuclear power’?” he asked.

More than 100 countries have signed up to the new organisation, although the US and China have yet to do so. Sach said he was hopeful that the US might join in Egypt and that China would eventually come on board.

The renewable agency will have a mandate to disseminate knowledge, develop regulatory framework and to actively promote the widespread adoption of renewable energy technologies around the world.

It comes ahead of vital new talks in Copenhagen at the end of this year about how to tackle global warming and amid excitement that the US and China are finally starting to play more constructive roles compared with the past.

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The digital age of rights

May 26th, 2009 | No Comments

World map

The digitally deprived have rights too, says regular columnist Bill Thompson

"President Sarkozy of France recently managed to get his Création et Internet law passed by the National Assembly, and if all goes well in the Senate then French internet users will soon find their activities being supervised by HADOPI, the grandly named ‘Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet.’

The rights it is concerned with are not those of ordinary net users but of copyright owners, and especially the large entertainment companies that have lobbied so hard and so successfully for the power to force internet service providers to terminate the accounts of those accused of downloading unlicensed copies of music, films and software.

Once HADOPI is up and running rights holders will be able to go to it with evidence of illegal downloading, and it will issue banning orders to ISPs without any need for tiresome court proceedings.

The agency is deeply controversial, and may in fact be illegal under European law as proposed changes to EU telecommunications regulations seem likely to require the involvement of the courts in any disconnection.

But even if it is legal, it is still a bad idea and must be one of the most foolish, regressive and potentially damaging moves by a government that claims to want to capitalise on the internet’s potential to transform society.

"It’s not that computers matter more than water, food, shelter and healthcare, but that the network and PCs can be used to ensure that those other things are available"
Bill Thompson

Bill Thompson

The new law treats the internet as if it was simply a conduit for delivering the sort of mindless entertainment provided by most films, TV programmes and popular music and proposes to cut people off because their actions might damage the business model of one tiny sector of the economy.

But the net is far more than television with added e-mail. As digital rights campaigner Cory Doctorow put it in an impassioned article on this issue in The Guardian last year:

"The internet is only that wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press in a single connection. It’s only vital to the livelihood, social lives, health, civic engagement, education and leisure of hundreds of millions of people (and growing every day)."

Cory is not alone in believing that net access is too important to be regulated solely in the interests of the entertainment industry.

Earlier this month Vivian Reding, the European Commissioner responsible for Information Society and Media, spoke of "a right to Internet access" and pointed out that the EU’s new telecommunications rules "recognise explicitly that Internet access is a fundamental right such as the freedom of expression and the freedom to access information".

BILL’S LINKS

HADOPI on Wikipedia

Cory Doctorow on net access

Cnet: Is net access a human right

But if the argument against extra-judicial disconnection is so strong then surely a policy that lets network service providers keep millions of people from having a usable, fast and reliable connection to the internet must also be morally indefensible

If it is unacceptable to cut people off from the network because their actions are commercially damaging to the record companies, why is it acceptable to offer them poor or no access to broadband and mobile internet just because providing the service is commercially unattractive to ISPs or network operators

BROADBAND WORLD

MAP: BBC reporters talk broadband

World map

And if we are to be encouraged to think of access to the internet as a fundamental human right, a prerequisite of having freedom of expression, should we not be prosecuting ISPs over the ‘notspots’ in their mobile or wi-fi coverage, the communities with no access to ADSL because of the telephone network was repaired with aluminium instead of copper, or the areas bypassed by the cable providers

As a long-time contributor to Digital Planet, the BBC World Service programme about the impact of digital technology on people’s lives, I’ve seen the growing awareness within the developing world that computers and connectivity matter and can be useful. It’s not that computers matter more than water, food, shelter and healthcare, but that the network and PCs can be used to ensure that those other things are available.

Satellite imagery sent to a local computer can help villages find fresh water, mobile phones can tell farmers the prices at market so they know when to harvest.

The same arguments apply in the UK, but those of use who have easy, affordable and fast connectivity tend not to think of the plight of those who can’t get online, just as we so often fail to notice the homeless people in our towns or let our eyes glide over deprived housing estates as we sit on the train.

Of course once the kids on the local council estate start using their new-found power to create mash-ups of their favourite bands or add soundtracks to the videos they upload onto the web we’re sure to hear calls for their net access to be restricted in some way.

But at least they’ll be able to organise a Facebook campaign for themselves, and get some attention from the rest of us. At the moment the offline masses lack a voice as well as an internet connection.

"

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.</p

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

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