Germanwings plane crash: Recovery operation to resume

A search and recovery operation is due to resume in the southern French Alps after Tuesday's crash of a Germanwings plane with 150 people on board.

Officials warn the operation could last for days in a remote mountain ravine between Digne and Barcelonnette.

The leaders of Germany and France are expected to visit the crash site.

The Airbus A320 - flight 4U 9525 - from Barcelona to Duesseldorf crashed after an eight-minute rapid descent, officials say. There were no survivors.

Officials believe 67 of those aboard the plane were German citizens, including 16 pupils returning from an exchange trip.

The officials say 45 of the passengers had Spanish names.

The flight was also carrying citizens of Australia, Turkey, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium. UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said it was "sadly likely" that some British nationals were on board.

Germanwings, a low-cost airline owned by Germany's main carrier Lufthansa, has an excellent safety record. French, Spanish and German leaders have expressed shock.

'Picture of horror'

Using helicopters, a recovery team reached the site on Tuesday and later found the "black box" flight recorder - a key step in establishing what caused the crash.

Key points

• Weather reportedly good when A320 Airbus came down

• Plane descended rapidly but sent out no distress signal

• White House says no suspicion of terrorism

What we know

Crash updates

German school's fears mount

In pictures: Germanwings crash

Helicopters ferried recovery teams to a crash site marked by smouldering debris

"Everything is pulverised," a local official at the crash site said

Rescuers also hoped to recover the cockpit voice recorder but their work had to be called off as the night fell.

French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy are expected to travel to the crash scene later on Wednesday.

Mr Rajoy has already declared three days of national mourning in Spain.

Footage shot from one of the helicopters on Tuesday showed small plane parts scattered on the rocky mountainside.

"The site is a picture of horror," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said after being flown over the ravine.

"Everything is pulverised. The largest pieces of debris are the size of a small car. No-one can access the site from the ground," Gilbert Sauvan, president of the general council Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, told the Associated Press.

The relatives of passengers aboard the flight received a police escort at Barcelona airport

News of the crash was also greeted with shock at Duesseldorf airport

Students at Germany's Joseph Koenig school mourn the deaths of their classmates

Sandrine Boisse, a tourism official from the ski resort of Pra Loup, told the BBC that she believed she had heard a strange noise in the mountains at around 11:00 (10:00 GMT).

"At first we thought it was on the ski slopes, an avalanche, but it wasn't the same noise," she said.

Analysis: Richard Westcott, BBC Transport correspondent

We know the aircraft went from a normal cruising height of 38,000 feet to crashing in the mountains in just eight minutes. One pilot told me that is twice the normal descent rate, but he also said that the aircraft is capable of coming down even more quickly and still being okay.

In an emergency, the pilots' first priority is to fly the plane, but as soon as they have some control they are trained to make an emergency call. That didn't appear to happen in this case, which suggests the pilots were coping with something so catastrophic they never had time to radio in a mayday, or turn to find the nearest runway.

It's still too early to know anything for certain, but that might point to both engines failing, a fuel problem or something critical breaking off the aircraft.

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Media captionHaltern mayor, Bodo Klimpel: 'Sixteen students... were due to fly home this morning'

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Media captionThomas Winklemann, Germanwings: "Descent lasted eight minutes"

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Media captionAngela Merkel: "This is a time and an hour of great sorrow and grief"

The plane began descending one minute after it reached its cruising height and continued to lose altitude for eight minutes, Germanwings managing director Thomas Winkelmann told reporters.

He said the aircraft lost contact with French air traffic controllers at 10:53 (09:53 GMT) at an altitude of about 6,000 feet.

The plane did not send out a distress signal, officials said.

The White House has said there is no evidence so far of a terror attack. A Lufthansa official said they were assuming for the time being that the crash had been caused by an accident.

The Airbus A320 is a single-aisle passenger jet popular for short- and medium-haul flights.

Rescue workers and gendarmes assembled at an airfield near the crash site

The Germanwings airliner, similar to this one, had been flying to Duesseldorf in Germany

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Net neutrality legal challenge launched

Pro-net neutrality campaigners said they were fighting against priority internet access for those able to pay

The industry body's president, Walter McCormick, said its members supported the enactment of "open internet" principles into law, but not using the new regulatory regime chosen by the FCC.

"We do not believe the Federal Communications Commission's move to utility-style regulation... is legally sustainable," he said.

USTelecom's case was brought in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which has rejected net neutrality regulations proposed by the FCC twice already.

Alamo challenged the new rules in the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, making a similar argument to that made by USTelecom.

Challenges

According to the Reuters news agency, industry sources have previously said USTelecom and two other trade groups - CTIA - The Wireless Association, which represents the wireless communications industry, and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, which acts for the US cable television industry - were expected to lead legal challenges.

Verizon Communications Inc, which won a 2010 case against the FCC, was unlikely to mount its own legal challenge this time around, an industry source familiar with Verizon's plan told the agency.

The FCC said the legal challenges were "premature and subject to dismissal."

Officials added they had been prepared for legal action and the new rules were on much firmer legal ground than previous iterations.

The FCC's rules have yet to be published in the Federal Register and formally go into effect.

USTelecom, in its legal action, said it had filed the challenge on Monday in case the rules were construed to be final on the date of issue.

Priority access

In a blogpost, the Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology - a free-market group - said the FCC's net neutrality rules were ideological and removed from the "real internet... [where] congestion is commonplace and the interests of content owners are divergent".

It referred to a Wall Street Journal report that major streaming networks were already seeking to separate their services from the public internet in search of higher speeds.

In Europe, regulators have also proposed allowing services other than those used to access the public internet a fast lane if they require a higher quality connection to function.

However, they sought to avoid a detrimental effect on the quality of service to internet users.

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Bee behaviour mapped by tiny trackers

The tiny trackers measure have a range of up to 2.5m (8.2ft)

A tiny new tracker designed to monitor bee behaviour is being tested by ecologists at Kew Gardens in London.

It is made from off-the-shelf technology and is based on equipment used to track pallets in warehouses, said its creator Dr Mark O'Neill.

Readers, used to pick up a signal from the kit, are connected to Raspberry Pi computers, which log the readings.

The device has a reach of up to 2.5m (8.2ft). Previously used models were restricted to 1cm (0.4in).

The tracker consists of a standard RFID (radio frequency identification) chip and a specially designed aerial, which Dr O'Neill has created to be thinner and lighter than other models used to track small insects, allowing him to boost the range.

The engineer, who is technical director at the Newcastle-based tech firm Tumbling Dice, is currently trying to patent the invention.

"The first stage was to make very raw pre-production tags using components I could easily buy", he said.

"I want to make optimised aerial components which would be a lot smaller."

"I've made about 50 so far. I've soldered them all on my desk - it feels like surgery."

The average "forage time" for a worker bee is around 20 minutes, suggesting they have a forage range of around 1km (0.6 miles) , Dr O'Neill explained.

The idea is to have readers dotted around a hive and flower patch in order to track the signals as the bees move around freely in the wild.

Chilled bees

The tiny trackers, which are just 8mm (0.3in) high and 4.8mm (1.9in) wide, are stuck to the bees with superglue in a process which takes five to 10 minutes. The bees are chilled first to make them more docile.

"They make a hell of a noise," acknowledged Dr O'Neill.

He told the BBC he hoped that the trackers - which weigh less than a bee and are attached at their centre of gravity so as not to affect their flight - would remain attached for their three-month expected lifespan.

The bees are chilled before the trackers are attached.

They have only been fitted to worker bees, which do not mate.

"If an animal ate one, I guess it would have a tracker in its stomach," Dr O'Neill said.

"But the attrition rate for field worker bees is very low. Most die of old age - they are very competent, and good at getting out of the way."

Dr Sarah Barlow, a restoration ecologist from Kew Gardens, was involved in testing the as-yet unnamed trackers.

"These tags are a big step forward in radio technology and no one has a decent medium to long range tag yet that is suitable for flying on small insects," she said.

"This new technology will open up possibilities for scientists to track bees in the landscape.

"This piece of the puzzle, of bee behaviour, is absolutely vital if we are to understand better why our bees are struggling and how we can reverse their decline."

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Facebook data row reaches top Euro court

Max Schrems has long campaigned against Facebook's data practices

The future of how Europeans' data is shared with US companies such as Facebook and Google is set to be considered by the EU's highest court.

Lawyer and activist Max Schrems said revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden showed agreed privacy practices were being ignored by Facebook and others.

He called for the current Safe Harbour deal, which allows the transfer of data to US firms, to be scrapped.

Facebook has not commented on the case.

At a hearing in Luxembourg on Tuesday the European Court of Justice's (ECJ) Advocate General said he would give his final opinion on 24 June - the ECJ will make its final decision thereafter.

Privacy principles

The result of the proceedings could have wide implications for all US firms dealing with Europeans' data, including the likes of Twitter, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

It centres around the Safe Harbour agreement, in place since 2000, which allows US firms to collect data on their European users as long as certain principles around storage and security are upheld.

It means user data gathered in Europe can easily be stored legally in data centres within the US.

Those principles include giving adequate notice to users that their data is being collected, and suitable transparency over how it can be accessed and by whom.

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook said it only complies with requests for data when forced to by law

The ECJ is considering whether the Safe Harbour agreement is effective in the wake of the Snowden leaks.

Mr Snowden alleged that Facebook and others were complicit in Prism, a surveillance system launched in 2007 by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

Euro data

A complaint against Facebook - which bases its European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland - was filed by Mr Schrems last year.

He said the network should be investigated over the alleged co-operation with US intelligence agencies in handing over user data from Europeans.

Mr Schrems said Facebook had acted against the Safe Harbour rules, and that local regulators should step in to protect Europeans' data.

The ECJ's decision could mean US firms are forced to open more data centres in Europe

The Irish Data Protection Commission (IDPC) said it would not investigate the claims, a decision that was challenged by Mr Schrems in the Irish High Court.

Judge Duncan Hogan then referred the wider matter of whether Safe Harbour was effective to the ECJ.

'Serious effects'

The ECJ's eventual decision could have a dramatic impact on the business practices of Facebook and other US firms.

Scrapping the Safe Harbour agreement would make it much more difficult to transfer data from Europe to the US to be stored in data centres.

While Facebook has not made a formal statement on the case, the BBC understands that the firm would be likely to welcome updating the Safe Harbour rules in light of the Snowden revelations.

Some companies, such as Twitter, have said they would need to build new data centres in Europe to handle information, needlessly duplicating resources they already have in the US.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a spokesman for the UK data regulator said in court that scrapping Safe Harbour would "have quite serious effects... risking disruption of trade that carries significant benefit for the EU and its citizens".

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LHC restart: Short circuit slows preparations

Teams on the collider's big experiments like Atlas (pictured) are using the time to make extra tweaks

The rebooted Large Hadron Collider is facing a delay of days or even weeks, after a short circuit was detected in one of its powerful electromagnets.

Following a two-year break, the LHC is getting ready to smash protons together once again - at new, higher energies.

Before the collisions begin, proton beams must travel safely around its 27km circumference in both directions.

Those full laps were expected to begin this week, but that plan will now be revised.

Cern, the European nuclear research organisation which runs the LHC, said the "intermittent short circuit" was discovered on Saturday.

It affected one of the magnets that will eventually send protons racing around the LHC - specifically a magnet in "sector 3-4".

Nearby, sector 4-5 of the machine - the area which triggered a more eventful false start when the LHC first commenced operations in 2008 - had already been lagging behind the other seven in the gradual "training" process that the magnets must go through.

But the short circuit is a more serious problem, in terms of the delay it could impose on the restart.

Cern said it was "a well understood issue", but because the magnets are supercooled to temperatures approaching absolute zero (-273C), the repair could be time-consuming.

If it requires the faulty magnet to be warmed up and re-cooled, the delay may stretch from a few days to "several weeks", the organisation announced on Tuesday.

"Any cryogenic machine is a time amplifier, so what would have taken hours in a warm machine could end up taking us weeks," said Cern's director for accelerators, Frederick Bordry.

'No time wasted'

Scientists at Cern emphasised that the restart timetable was always flexible and that Run Two of the world's largest machine is still on target.

Rolf Heuer, the organisation's director general, said: "All the signs are good for a great Run Two. In the grand scheme of things, a few weeks' delay in humankind's quest to understand our Universe is little more than the blink of an eye."

When it eventually comes to the science, there are many big items on the LHC team's wish list for Run Two - including detecting dark matter, making further observations of the Higgs boson, and ultimately, the search for a "new physics"outside of the Standard Model.

Two parallel pipes carry the beams in a 27km circle at fractionally less than the speed of light

Particle physicist Jonathan Butterworth, from University College London, works on Atlas - one of four major experiments spaced around the LHC's huge circle. He told BBC News that the experiment teams were ready to go, and waiting to hear more from the scientists and engineers who manage the beams.

"It's a very separate organisation, basically," Prof Butterworth said. "The accelerator guys are all within Cern - and we're sort of ready and waiting. We do what they tell us at this stage."

But he added that the time will not be wasted. The experiment teams can make extra improvements to their own systems while they wait - particularly to the computer code used to control the detectors and analyse data.

"Every day, we have people frantically coding stuff up to be even more ready," he said.

Muon practice

Dr Andre David, who works for Cern on the CMS experiment, also said the additional time would be valuable. He and his colleagues are "enjoying" the chance to make sub-millimetre adjustments to some of the detectors inside CMS.

"We are profiting from this time to collect more cosmic ray data, which is crucial to align the very tiny inner detectors," Dr David told the BBC.

Cosmic rays are particles from outer space that bombard the Earth, but few of them penetrate the atmosphere. High-energy muons, however, interact so infrequently with matter that some of them make it right into the LHC tunnels, 30 storeys underground.

The proton beams are steered by magnets which must be "trained" with gradually increasing current

"As they go through the experiment, we can detect them, just like any other muon produced in a collision," Dr David said. "These muons are extremely valuable, because we can figure out where the signals are that they leave behind - without any beams."

By making miniscule adjustments to the alignment of their detectors, the researchers can "smooth out" the way they will identify and measure these particles when they fall out as debris from proton collisions.

Those collisions were originally - tentatively - timetabled to kick off in May, but the short circuit now makes that estimate seem even less certain.

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