No one has been held responsible for the Department of International Development’s decision to build a GBP286m airport on the island of St Helena that is unusable because wind conditions mean planes cannot land safely. The airport was funded from the UK’s overseas aid budget and has provided ammunition to critics who argue that money would be better spent at home. MPs on the public accounts committee said it was “staggering” that the airport had been commissioned and completed before the department had ascertained how changeable winds would affect commercial aircraft safety. St Helena, a British overseas territory located in the south Atlantic, can currently be reached only by ship from Cape Town. A commercial flight did travel to the island in April but managed to land only on its third attempt, leading to the opening ceremony being scrapped. In a report published on Wednesday, the MPs said Dfid had been “evasive” on who bore responsibility and was yet to hold anyone to account “internally or externally”.“We asked the department how, if Charles Darwin could have experienced and described the problem of wind shear on St Helena in 1836, it commissioned a £285.5m airport, paid for by the British taxpayer, without properly appreciating the danger of this effect,” the report noted.<br/>
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Discrimination complaints filed against airlines continue to rise, according to the latest monthly report issued by the US DoT. The Air Travel Consumer Report says there were eight complaints alleging discrimination in October. Two were in regard to national origin, two involving religion, and four in regard to race. That was up from six that had been filed in September and five complaints filed in October 2015, the agency said. In comparison, the total number of complaints filed against domestic airlines in October fell to 79 complaints compared with 100 a year earlier. (But those were also up from 61 complaints received in September 2016.) The agency recently began highlighting the number of complaints alleging discrimination based on religion, race and national origin. But that's about it. In recent months, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has urged the Transportation Department and airlines to do more to combat bias incidents of "flying while Muslim." CAIR staff attorneys have said that little or nothing is done to prevent airlines from unfairly removing passengers or preventing them from flying on the basis that they pose a security risk even when the evidence is flimsy and suggests anti-Muslim bias.<br/>
Singapore and Malaysia signed a final agreement to build a high-speed rail that will link the city-state to Kuala Lumpur by December 2026. The accord was signed on Tuesday in the presence of Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his counterpart Najib Razak in Putrajaya, paving the way for the development and execution of the 300-km line connecting the two cities. The long-envisioned plan, six years behind an earlier target, is aimed at trimming the land journey between the two Southeast Asian cities to 90 minutes, from about five hours now, with trains plying at a top speed of more than 300 kilometers an hour, the two governments have said. The link, when commissioned, is set to challenge budget carriers such as AirAsia and Singapore Airlines’s Tiger Airways, which fly passengers from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur in about an hour. <br/>