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The victims of a crash between an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter included teen figure skaters returning from a national meet with their mothers and coaches, an Ohio college student coming from her grandfather’s funeral, two Chinese nationals, and a group of hunters headed back from a guided trip in Kansas.They were among 60 travelers and four crew members on board the commercial flight late Wednesday when it collided with the Black Hawk helicopter, which was carrying three soldiers. Officials say there were no survivors.As the search for remains continued Thursday, communities grieved. Faith leaders held a vigil Thursday in the city council chambers.“The only way we will get through this is together,” said the Rev. Pamela Hughes Mason of Wichita’s St. Paul AME Church.American Airlines set up a hotline as well as centers in Washington and Wichita for people searching for information about family members who may have been aboard the downed flight. The hotline can be reached at 1-800 679 8215.Here’s what we know about some of the people killed in Wednesday night’s crash: From the Skating Club of Boston Skaters Jinna Han and Spencer Lane were among those killed, according to Doug Zeghibe, CEO of the Skating Club of Boston. Their mothers, Jin Han and Christine Lane, as well as their coaches Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov also died.Han and Lane, who was about 16, were returning from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.“We watched Jinna just grow up here from just a tiny little tyke into this amazingly mature 13-year-old,” he said. “A great performer, a great competitor, and off the ice, a great kid.”Spencer Lane, who was from Barrington, Rhode Island, took part in his first professional show in December with Elin Schran’s company, Joy Skate Productions.“He started to discover this connection with the audience and that joy that he was giving to other people through his gift,” Schran said.In a statement, the Lane family recalled Christine Lane for both her singular talents and her dedication to parenting.“Christine exuded creativity throughout her life, using her formal graphic design training as a jumping-off point for seemingly endless creative pursuits across areas such as photography, quilting, knitting, and more. She brought even greater passion to her role as a mother to Spencer and his brother Milo,” the family said.Their coaches, Shishkova and Naumov, won the pairs title at the 1994 world championships in Chiba, Japan. The Russia-born pair also competed twice in the Olympics. More young athletes and coaches Skating organizations in Philadelphia and the Washington area also said some of their young athletes had been aboard the plane.Several athletes on the flight had attended a development camp held after the U.S. Figure Skating Championships ended Sunday in Wichita, Kansas.Wichita Skating Center manager Sean O’Reilly said the championships brought a “groundswell of positivity,” drawing enthusiastic parents and young athletes from across the U.S. He was “gutted” to learn some of those skaters had been killed.In Virginia’s Loudoun County, a coach at a skating club was also identified as among the passengers, Virginia Rep. Suhas Subramanyam confirmed. The club, Ashburn Ice House, said that its “figure skating community has been directly affected,” but did not give further details. Students and parents Cedarville University in Ohio said one of the passengers on the plane was Grace Maxwell, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering.Maxwell’s father, Dean Maxwell, said she was returning to campus from her home in Wichita, Kansas, after attending her grandfather’s funeral, The Wichita Eagle reported.Grace Maxwell had been working on project this semester to create a hand-stabilizing device to help a boy in the area feed himself instead of rely on others, the university said in a statement.“Grace was a quiet person with a keen interest in helping others through engineering,” said Tim Norman, who served as her secondary advisor.Three other students from schools in Fairfax County, Virginia, and six parents from the district were also on board the plane, superintendent Michelle Reid said in a letter to families. She did not identify them, but she said the students were from different schools and that two of the parents were current or former district staffers. Chinese citizens and a cop from the Philippines Philippine Police Col. Pergentino Malabed Jr., who headed the supply management division of the national police, was among the dead. He had traveled to the U.S. to inspect equipment the Philippines was planning to purchase for its 232,000-member force, according to the Philippine police.“His untimely passing is a profound loss to the Philippine National Police, where he served with honor, with integrity and dedication throughout his career,” police spokesperson Col. Randulf Tuao said in a statement.The Chinese Embassy in the U.S. said two Chinese nationals were also among the victims. It did not offer further details. The country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered its condolences for the crash victims and requested the U.S. to “promptly report any progress with the search and rescue, and find out the cause of the accident as soon as possible.” Hunters who were headed home from a trip Seven people returning from a guided hunting trip in Kansas were killed, according to a Facebook post by Fowl Plains, the guide service.The Fowl Plains team said they had grown close to the hunters on board the flight over the years and considered them to be family members. The post doesn’t identify the hunters by name, but it says they had spent the past week on a guided hunt, “laughing, talking about our families and sharing memories.”“Heartbroken is an understatement,” the company said. Members of a Maryland union Those killed also included four steamfitters, all members of a United Association union local in suburban Maryland, union leaders said in a social media post Thursday.“Our focus now is on providing support and care to the families of our Brothers as we continue to gather more information in the coming days,” said the post by UA General President Mark McManus and Chris Madello, the business manager of Local 602. From the military The victims also include three soldiers who were aboard the helicopter.Officials said their remains will be at Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. That office coordinates the dignified transfer of fallen service members.The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet announced. No identities of the crew have been released.But the wife of one of the helicopter pilots said onFacebook that her husband, Andrew Eaves of Noxubee County Mississippi, was killed. In a phone call, Carrie Eaves confirmed the post was hers.“We ask that you pray for our family and friends and for all the other families that are suffering today. We ask for peace while we grieve,” her post read.The three soldiers were doing an annual night proficiency training flight, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, adding they were a “fairly experienced crew.” Officials were notifying relatives, he said. John Hanna, Michael Casey, and Adam Geller, Associated Press
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Denmark said on Friday it meant seriously that Greenland is not for sale, after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said U.S. President Donald Trump’s interest in acquiring the island was “not a joke”. Trump says he will make the autonomous territory of Denmark a part of the United States, and has not ruled out using military or economic power to persuade Denmark to hand it over. Rubio told Sirius XM’s The Megyn Kelly Show on Thursday that acquiring Greenland was in the U.S. national interest. Trump had not ruled out military coercion to acquire it so as not to take leverage off the table, he said. “This is not a joke,” Rubio said. “This is not about acquiring land for the purpose of acquiring land. This is in our national interest and it needs to be solved.” Responding to Rubio’s interview, Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said: “I would be more surprised if he had said it was a joke.” “We seriously meanand this is also true in Greenlandthat Greenland is not for sale.” The island has around 57,000 residents who govern their own domestic affairs. Denmark is responsible for Greenland’s defence and security, and says only Greenlanders can decide their future. The United States operates an airbase there under treaty. Opinion polls show most residents of Greenland favour a looser relationship with Denmark but also oppose the territory becoming part of the United States. Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede, who has stepped up a push for independence from Denmark, has also repeatedly said the island is not for sale and its people must decide their own fate. Rubio in the interview said the Arctic was going to become critical for shipping lanes and the United States needs to be able to defend this. He said U.S. rival China may seek to develop its presence. Asked if the U.S. would own Greenland in four years, Rubio said: “Obviously that’s the president’s priority and he has made that point . . . We’re not in a position yet to discuss exactly how we’ll proceed tactically. What I think you can rest assured of is that four years from now, our interest in the Arctic will be more secure.” Rasmussen said that the U.S. interests outlined by Rubio in the interview match those of the Kingdom of Denmark. “If we can have a substantive discussion about this, then we will also find a solution,” he said. Referring to Rubio’s comments, Rasmussen said: “It is summed up in this ambition that if the United States just owned the whole world, then everything would be under control. But that is not going to happen, so we have to find another form where we jointly accomplish these tasks.” Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen, Reuters
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Apple on Thursday disclosed its iPhone sales dipped slightly during the holiday-season quarter, signaling a sluggish start to the trendsetting company’s effort to catch up to the rest of Big Tech in the race to bring artificial intelligence to the masses.The iPhone’s roughly 1% drop in revenue from the previous year’s October-December period wasn’t entirely unexpected, given the first software update enabling the device’s AI features didn’t arrive until just before Halloween, and the technology still isn’t available in many markets outside the U.S.The countries still awaiting Apple’s AI suite include China, a key market where the company continued to lose ground. Although he didn’t mention China, Apple CEO Tim Cook told investors on a conference call that a software upgrade enabling the AI features in more European markets, as well as Japan and Korea will be rolling out in April.But in the past quarter Apple also was only able to eke out a modest revenue gain across its entire business, although the results came in ahead of the analyst projections that guide investors. The Cupertino, California, company earned $36.3 billion, or $2.40 per share, a 7% increase from the previous year. Revenue edged up from the previous year by 4% to $124.3 billion.Those numbers included iPhone revenue of $69.1 billion. In China, Apple’s total revenue registered $18.5 billion, an 11% decrease from the previous year.Part of that erosion in China reflected the iPhone’s shrinking market share in that country, where homegrown companies have been making more headway. Apple’s iPhone year-over-year shipments in China declined nearly 10% in the most recent quarter, while native companies Huawei and Xiaomi posted year-over-year increases of more than 20%, according to the research firm International Data Corp.“While China is a potential risk, we think the appeal of Apple products as a luxury product and the potential of AI innovations will keep demand steady in the country,” Edward Jones analyst Logan Purk wrote in a research note assessing the company’s quarterly report.The holiday-season results served to confirm bringing AI to the iPhone and Apple’s other products may not boost the company’s recently lackluster growth as much as investors initially thought it might after Cook unveiled the technology before a rapt crowd last June.The anticipation that an AI-infused iPhone would prod hordes of consumers to ditch their current devices and splurge on an upgrade is the main reason Apple’s stock price surged by 30% last year. But the sinking realization that an uptick in demand may take longer than expected has caused Apple’s shares to backtrack by 5% during the first month of the new year. The stock initially slipped slightly in extended trading after the numbers came out, but later reversed course and rose by more than 3% after Cook said Apple is seeing a record number of people upgrading their iPhones.“I could not feel more optimistic about our product pipeline,” Cook said during the conference call. “So I think there’s a lot of a lot of innovation left on the smartphone.”A management forecast calling for revenue that will at least match or exceed analyst projections for the January-March quarter also seemed to bolster investor confidence in the company.The concerns hovering around Apple’s weakening iPhone sales come against broader worries about whether AI will be as lucrative for U.S. tech companies as once envisioned after Chinese startup DeepSeek released a version of the technology that was built at a far lower cost than had been previously thought possible.Unlike tech peers such as Microsoft, Google corporate parent Alphabet Inc., and Facebook corporate parent Meta Platforms, Apple hasn’t been investing as heavily in AIone of the reasons it has been seen as an industry laggard. But that restraint could work to its advantage if DeepSeek’s early breakthroughs in driving down AI costs gains momentum.Apple’s services division remained the company’s biggest moneymaker outside the iPhone, with revenue of $26.3 billion in the past quarter, a 14% increase from the previous year. Although the services division has been thriving for years, it generates more than $20 billion annually by locking in Google as the automatic search engine on the iPhone and other products. That deal is now under threat of being banned as part of the proposed punishment for Google’s search engine being declared an illegal monopoly. Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writer
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