Jetliner makes tense landing in Spain
MADRID -- Passengers on an Air Canada Boeing 767 that made a safe emergency landing in Madrid on Monday evening have described how they spent hours flying in circles to burn fuel in a tense calm.
Toronto-bound flight AC837, carrying 128 passengers, departed from the Spanish capital in the early afternoon but had to request an emergency return almost immediately after one of its two engines was damaged and a tire ruptured during takeoff.
Brock Mierzejewski of Vancouver, who was on the plane with his parents, told The Associated Press: "Obviously a lot of nervous tension while we were in the air, but the pilots did a terrific job landing the plane."
The plane spent close to four hours flying in circles near Madrid, burning off fuel before it was light enough to land.
There was no immediate information on what had caused the malfunction, though a spokesman for Enaire, Spain's air navigation authority, said the plane's landing gear did not fold up properly on taking off and that a piece of it may have damaged part of one of the engines. The spokesman was not authorized to be named in media reports.
U.N. evacuates 8 patients from Yemen
SANAA, Yemen -- A United Nations medical relief flight carrying patients from Yemen's rebel-held capital took off Monday, the first such aid flight in more than three years.
Saudi Arabia controls Yemen's airspace and has prevented any flights from leaving the capital, Sanaa, since August 2016.
Eight patients and their families were flown to Egypt and Jordan to receive "life-saving specialized care not available in Yemen," according to the U.N. heath organization. Most were women and children with advanced cancer and brain tumors, while others needed organ transplants or reconstructive surgeries, the U.N. said.
Yemen's capital has been controlled by the Iran-backed Houthi rebel group since 2014. A coalition of Gulf Arab countries, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, began a military campaign the following year in support of Yemen's internationally recognized government.
The Houthis criticized the U.N. for the small number of patients airlifted out of Sanaa. The Houthi health ministry said Sunday that 32,000 people are in need of urgent medical and surgical interventions, including kidney transplants and heart operations.
More than 100,000 people have been killed in Yemen's conflict since 2015, according to data published in October by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Project.
Holocaust memorial regrets mistakes
JERUSALEM -- Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, issued an apology Monday for videos presented during a ceremony attended by world leaders last month, saying they included "a number of inaccuracies."
Dan Michman, head of Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research, said in a statement that several short films aired at the World Holocaust Forum that were meant to give a summary of World War II "included a number of inaccuracies that resulted in a partial and unbalanced presentation of the historical facts."
Yad Vashem said the videos at the Jan. 23 event in Jerusalem neglected to mention Poland's division between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 or Nazi Germany's conquest of Western Europe in 1940. The videos also showed incorrect borders of Poland and labeled concentration camps as extermination camps.
January's memorial event, which marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, was beset by conflict over competing national narratives.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who attended the memorial, has tried to shift responsibility for World War II's outbreak to Poland, which was invaded by Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union in 1939 as part of a prewar pact to divide the country.
The president of Poland, which has tried to downplay its own complicity in the Holocaust, did not attend the event in Jerusalem in protest of Putin's central role in the event and his own exclusion from the podium.
Erdogan pledges to stand by Ukraine
KYIV, Ukraine -- Turkey's president on Monday denounced the Russian annexation of Crimea and pledged to support the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan also said on a visit to Ukraine that Turkey will help build housing for 500 families of Crimean Tatars who have relocated to other parts of Ukraine after Crimea's annexation.
Crimean Tatars are a Turkic ethnic group indigenous to Crimea. Many have opposed Russia's annexation of the Black Sea peninsula.
Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea in 2014 in a move that hasn't been recognized by most of the world's nations and that triggered Western sanctions against Moscow.
Speaking at a news conference after talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Erdogan emphasized that "Turkey doesn't recognize the illegitimate annexation of Crimea."
"Turkey supports Ukraine's territorial integrity," he said.
Zelenskiy said he and Erdogan also discussed possible natural gas supplies to Ukraine via Turkey.
-- Compiled by Democrat-Gazette staff from wire reports
A Section on 02/04/2020