Dreaming of Simplicity

A Spanair plane carrying 172 people has crashed soon after take off at the Madrid airport Barajas. Reports suggest that the plane's left engine caught fire during or immediately after take-off. Flight JK 5022, bound for the Canary Islands, was a McDonnell Douglas MD-82 with 175 on board, including 6 crew and two children.

Spanair is a subsidiary of Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS). SAS attempted to sell its shares in Spanair in 2007 but cancelled the sale two months ago when bids failed to match expectations. McDonnell Douglas was the junior partner in the 1997 merger with Beoing to create the Boeing Company.

Currently, the death toll is believed to be over 140 with 26 survivors.

CORRECTION: Article incorrectly stated there were 175 passengers, there were actually 172 passengers on board the plane.

Barack Obama gave the only speech of his foreign relations tour in front of over 100,000 people. He talked about terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as climate change and human rights. Polls showed that between 70-80% of Germans support Barack Obama. A full transcript of the speech is available here and the video of the full speech is above.

UPDATE: ABC News reports that over 200,000 people turned out to watch the speech.

The anticipation of Barack Obama's speech in Germany is so high that the candidate has tried to lower expectations about the number of attendees. The estimated number of people who will turn-out to see his speech range from 10,000 to 1million.

Anyone, who has been watching the Presidential race over the last few days will notice that John McCain is not handling the extra attention that Obama is getting very well. In an interview on ABC World News yesterday evening, he said that he believes that Obama's position on the war is a campaign tactic and not what he genuinely feels is in the best interests of the country. Also, McCain's campaign have launched a vicious ad campaign claiming that Fidel Castro supports Obama.

Obama, however, does not seem to wish to fight fire with fire. It has been revealed that his campaign has spent $5million on advertising blocks during NBC's Beijing 2008 Olympics coverage. It's nice to see a candidate supporting something positive like the Olympics rather than endlessly mud slinging.

Obama has been discussing foreign policy issues with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he is also meeting German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit. Some three-quarters of Germans support Obama although his support is consistent all across Europe, he is the prefered candidate of Britaim amd France along with many other members of the EU.

Obama's speech in Germany is expected at around 6pm British time. I would think that it would be covered live on the BBC News channel, but then again they may feel it is more important to have the News at Six on two channels at the same time. If it is covered on the News channel, you can watch it here live: Obama speech live here at 6.30pm British Time (BBC)