In brief: NATO supply trucks using Pakistan routes

Chaman, Pakistan – Trucks carrying NATO supplies rolled into Afghanistan for the first time in more than seven months Thursday, ending a painful chapter in U.S.-Pakistan relations that saw the border closed until Washington apologized for an airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Thousands of trucks have been waiting at ports in Karachi for the transit ban to be lifted as the diplomatic wrangling dragged on. Drivers are eager to get behind the wheel and start earning a lucrative salary again in what can be a deadly journey because of attacks from the Taliban.

“I risk my life for my family, and I risk my life because I get better pay for taking NATO supplies,” said Tajawal Khan, who has been driving the dangerous route for the past few years.

Pakistan closed the routes in retaliation for the U.S. airstrikes in November that killed the two dozen border troops. The decision to reopen them, after the U.S. apology, marked an easing of strains in the relationship between Washington and Islamabad in recent months.

Air France crash blamed on pilots, training

Le Bourget, France – The investigation of the 2009 crash of an Air France jet into the Atlantic Ocean concludes that the cockpit crew took the wrong steps to correct a high-altitude stall and blamed the errors on poor training of those piloting today’s highly automated aircraft.

In its final report issued Thursday, the French civil aviation authority’s Bureau of Surveys and Analysis said its review of flight data recorders recovered almost two years after the crash disclosed that the two junior pilots at the controls of AF 447 were “completely surprised” by the failure of cockpit instruments to guide them out of the disaster.

All 228 passengers and crew on board died in the June 1, 2009, crash of the jet en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The Airbus A330-203 suffered a rare cruising-altitude loss of power while the flight captain was outside the cockpit on a scheduled break, the French investigative agency reported.

It said the two co-pilots, both in their 30s, didn’t know what to do when ice accumulation caused the aircraft’s autopilot to disconnect, and that they took the opposite action from what was needed, which was nosing the plane down to recover lift.

Historians say they’ve found Caravaggios

Rome – Two Italian art historians claim to have discovered as many as 100 works, most of them drawings, by a very young Caravaggio in a collection long attributed to a master Milanese artist he studied under while a boy in the late 1500s.

It was not possible to immediately evaluate the claim Thursday by Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz and Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli on the eve of the publication of two e-books laying out their case.

But one expert familiar with the collection said it was unlikely that more than a few at most were actually done by Caravaggio and that none show the mature hand of the temperamental artist – who was famed for his dramatic chiaroscuro effect of dark space contrasting with light, vivid still life and the then-scandalous use of models from the lower walks of life for religious scenes.

The works were culled from the collection of Simone Peterzano, whose many pupils included Caravaggio from 1584 to 1588.