Pakistan cargo crash families push for
int'l help to find black boxes
KARACHI, July 17: Relatives of the five crew members aboard a Boeing 737 cargo plane that crashed into the Arabian Sea off Pakistan last week are urging an international search effort to find the flight recorders to determine the cause. Debris from the K2 Airways freighter was recovered shortly after the July 7 crash, but the water in the area is about 3,000 m (9,800 feet) deep. Finding the "black boxes" would require a costly underwater search likely to need foreign assistance, according to aviation experts familiar with deepwater crashes such as Air France 447 in 2009. — Reuters
Japan relaxes royal succession rules - but
ban on female emperors remains
TOKYO, July 17: The Japanese parliament has approved a bill to relax imperial succession rules, amid concerns over the dwindling size of the imperial family. The bill, passed by the upper house on Friday, allows the imperial family to adopt distant male relatives over the age of 15 and lets women keep their royal status after marrying outside the family. But it does not change the law barring women from ascending the throne despite wide public support for a female emperor, meaning Princess Aiko, the only child of the current emperor, is still not eligible to succeed the throne. The bill cleared the lower house last week, and will move through the final legal procedures before the changes take effect. Japan has the world's oldest continuous hereditary monarchy, with a lineage that's believed to span more than 2,600 years. — BBC
German lawmaker faces criticism over use
of surrogate mother
BERLIN, July 17: A prominent member of Chancellor Friedrich Merz's centre-right party came under fire on Friday for having a child through a surrogate pregnancy in the United States, despite the practice being illegal in Germany. Jens Spahn, the chairman of the CDU's faction in the German parliament, and his husband recently became parents to a son born to a surrogate mother in the US. — AFP
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