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ironically could be the single biggest reason the (Federal Aviation Administration) isn't able to act proactively and ensure safety into the future," said Bill Voss, president of the industry-funded Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va., which promotes global airline safety. The past decade has been the airline industry's safest ever.
• Last year, the FAA revised rules on pilot work schedules and rest periods to address concern that tired pilots were making mistakes, sometimes with fatal results. But the agency dropped requirements that would have extended the new rules to cargo carriers. FAA officials said the rules changes would have cost the cargo industry as much as $300 million over 10 years.
• Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has urged cargo executives to voluntarily comply with the new rules, but so far he's had no takers.
• ___
Starved, brutalized, left to die: Austrian probe reveals gruesome fate of Nazi-era disabled
• HALL, Austria (AP) -- Forensic crews scraping away dirt from the remains of the Nazi-era psychiatric patients were puzzled: The skeletal fingers were entwined in rosary beads. Why, the experts wondered, would the Nazis -- who considered these people less than human -- respect them enough to let them take their religious symbols to their graves?
• It turns out they didn't.
• A year after the first of 221 sets of remains were exhumed at a former Austrian hospital cemetery, investigators now believe the beads were likely nothing more than a cynical smokescreen, placed to mislead relatives attending the burials into thinking that the last stage of their loved ones' lives was as dignified as their funerals.
• But skeletons don't lie. Forensic work shows that more than half of the victims had broken ribs and other bone fractures from blows likely dealt by hospital personnel. Many died from illnesses such as pneumonia, apparently caused by a combination of physical injuries, a lack of food and being immobilized for weeks at a time.
• Neither do medical records, which show that medical personnel cursed their patients as "imbeciles," ''idiots" and "useless eaters."
• ___
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