LOSS AND BLAME: A 16-year-old ice skater who had landed a triple axel on Tuesday morning in Wichita was killed in Tuesday night’s air crash in Washington. Cory Haynos from Northern Virginia was one of several up and coming skaters who died with family and coaches.

  The accident recalls the 1961 crash in which the entire 18-member US skating team was killed when their plane went down on approach to Brussels. As many as 14 people associated with US skating died on Tuesday. 

  Also among the dead are pair of teenage skaters from Boston, their mothers, and two Russian coaches on board the American Airlines jet that that collided with an Army helicopter over the Potomac River. The six have been identified as Spencer Lane, 16, and Jinna Hahn, 13, their mothers Christine Lane and Jin Hahn, and their Russian coaches Yevgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, former world-champion pairs skaters.

  In all, 64 people died on the jet and three in the helicopter. Forty bodies were recovered by the end of yesterday. 

  The last major commercial airplane crash in the US was in 2009.

  Early word from the FAA is that the Army Black Hawk helicopter was flying higher that it was supposed to. The jet was on approach for landing when the two aircraft collided at what appears to have been roughly a right angle.

  The FAA also says that a controller handling the American flight was doing the job of two people that night. The FAA has been short of controllers

  President Trump called a press conference in which he expressed regrets and condolences but it wasn’t long before he veered into blaming the Obama and Biden administrations for lowered standards of air traffic safety because of their diversity hiring practices. 

  “I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary,” he claimed then, “Biden took over and he changed them back to lower than ever before.”

  Trump ranted that FAA hiring policy that included people with “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism … all qualify for a position of controller of airplanes pouring into our country.”

  The President was reading from a general hiring guidance and none of the people with those disabilities would qualify to be air traffic controllers.

CONFIRMATION CONVERSION: Answering questions from both Republican and Democratic senators, Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, refused to say that the infamous Edward Snowden is a traitor. Snowden is the former national security contractorwho released reams of security data — not all of it flattering to the US — on Wikileaks.

  Gabbard is a former Democrat turned Trump die-hard. She said the programs that Snowden exposed were “egregious, illegal and unconstitutional.”

  Gabbard also defended her support for the murderous Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who she said had been the best bulwark against terrorist groups taking over the area. She said, “Syria is now controlled by an Al Qaeda offshoot, led by an Islamist jihadist who danced in the streets on 9/11, and who is responsible for the killing of many American service members.”

  Assad killed and imprisoned tens of thousands of perceived opponents. Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of the Syrian rebel group, was named head of an interim government.

THE OBIT PAGE: Singer and actress Marianne Faithfull, part of the “British Invasion” of US pop charts whose big hit was the 1964 “As Tears Go By,” has died at age 78 following a variety of illnesses. 

  Faithfull was the doe-eyed blonde with bangs down to her eyebrows in the style popular in the early 1960s. “Tears” was the first song written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, along with their manager Andrew Loog Oldham. 

  Faithful and Jagger were a couple back then and she’s believed to have been the inspiration for the songs “Wild Horses” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” 

She sank into heroin addiction and for a while was homeless, but got clean, made a comeback, and ultimately recorded 21 albums, the last in 2021.

THE SPIN RACK: Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta agreed to pay Donald Trump $25 million for kicking him off Facebook and Instagram after the January 6^th insurrection. — An increasing number of people pardoned by Trump for their part in the January 6^th insurrection are being revealed to have sketchy and criminal histories. Emily Hernandez, 24, of Sullivan, Missouri, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for causing a fatal drunk driving crash in 2022. — Efforts to rescue a  74-year-old truck driver from a giant sinkhole that opened in the road outside Tokyo have gone into their fourth day.

BELOW THE FOLD: Here’s a repetition of one of the 100 news stories in the universe. Researchers now believe that an artwork sold for $50 at a Minnesota garage sale in 2016 is a long lost Van Gogh painting called Elimar depicting a man smoking a pipe at a beach. 

  The Netherlands’ Van Gogh Museum previously determined that the painting was not a Van Gogh because of stylistic differences. But the New York LMI Group International, an art research firm, produced a 450-page report arguing that the painting is in fact a Van Gogh. If true, the painting would be worth $15 million plus $50 for garage sale expenses.

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