SIx In The Morning

On Sunday

Seconds before crash, passengers knew they were too low


By Holly Yan and Greg Botelho, CNN July 7, 2013 -- Updated 0822 GMT
Asiana Airlines Flight 214 was seconds away from landing when the passengers sensed something horribly amiss. The plane was approaching San Francisco International Airport under a beautifully clear sky, but it was flying low. Dangerously low. Benjamin Levy looked out the window from seat 30K and could see the water of the San Francisco Bay about 10 feet below. "I don't see any runway, I just see water," Levy recalled. Further back in the Boeing 777, Xu Das had the same realization. The Boeing 777-200LR has been in service since March 2006 The airline was voted Airline of the Year by Global Traveler in 2011 In 1993, Asiana Airlines Boeing 737 crashed killing 68 people "Looking through window, it looked on level of the (sea)wall along the runway," he posted on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter.

Canada train blast: Lac-Megantic death toll set to rise
7 July 2013 Last updated at 07:49 GMT

The BBC
Police have said they expect more people to be found dead after a runaway train carrying light crude oil exploded in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic. The blast sent a fireball and black smoke into the air, killing one and forcing the evacuation of 1,000 people. Dozens of buildings were destroyed in the town, about 250km (155 miles) east of Montreal. They include a bar full of customers. Police are trying to account for dozens of missing people.

Young Spaniards flock to Germany to escape economic misery back home
With youth jobless rates at 50% back home, graduates are heading for Berlin – but still grumble about the weather

Kate Connolly The Observer, Sunday 7 July 2013
When Dacil Granados turned up in Berlin a year ago and walked into her first German class, she was amazed to find almost all her classmates were fellow Spaniards. "They were all engineers, apart from an architect and myself," says the art historian. "All here, most rather reluctantly, for the same reason – to work." Granados, 36, has just begun a job as an art history guide at one of Berlin's top tourist sites, the Pergamon Museum, ending a lengthy period of joblessness that started when she was made redundant from her job as a curator at a gallery of Catalan art in Madrid in December 2011. The Gran Canaria native is one of the estimated 80,000 young southern Europeans who are now arriving in Germany every year and who have been turning up in increasing numbers ever since the economic crisis began.

Separate and unequal: Apartheid's legacy lives on
South Africa has certainly changed since the ANC came to power, but the party's failure to tackle economic inequality is glaringly evident

DANIEL HOWDEN Sunday 7 July 2013
South Africa's system of apartheid was built on the simple, if false, assertion of "separate but equal". It was something that even its most complacent supporters knew to be a lie. The reality was an economy of exclusion and such an effective concentration of land, wealth and economic power in the hands of the few that it has proven remarkably resistant to change. A short drive through the country nearly 20 years after the system was formally dismantled reveals that the architecture of separate but unequal remains. South Africa's first-world roads deliver you quickly from the prosperous town and city centres through high-walled suburbs into the satellite townships that surround them.

Ethnic tensions escalating in Xinjiang


CHINA
The latest incidents of deadly violence in China's northwestern region of Xinjiang indicate that Beijing's policies towards ethnic minorities have reached a dead end. China's Autonomous Region of Xinjiang is more than four times larger than Germany, yet it has only 22 million inhabitants. Muslim Uighurs make up around 45 percent of the region's population. But they may soon lose their majority status as Han Chinese pour into Xinjiang in ever-increasing numbers. When the People's Liberation Army marched into the territory 64 years ago, Han Chinese accounted for just 6 percent of its population. This development is tied to Beijing's ongoing policy of promoting large-scale migration into the remote and under-developed Western regions of Xinjiang and Tibet.

Take this dance? Cuba's danzon dies at home but endures in Mexico
Danzon was developed in Cuba in the mid-1800s and has roots in English and French dance.

By Tim Johnson, McClatchy
MEXICO CITY Every Saturday of the year, hundreds of couples converge on a shady park in this capital to embrace one another in the slow-moving, genteel dance known as the danzon. Many of the men appear transported from the 1930s and 1940s – in zoot suits with loose-fitting jackets and high-waist tapered pants. Fedoras, graced with a lone feather, top off the retro look. The women balance on high heels, waving fans to shoo away the heat. Danzon lives on in corners of Mexico even though it has virtually died out in Cuba, where it evolved in the 19th century from dances and rhythms originating in Europe and Africa centuries earlier.