It's Wednesday, January 8, 2025. I'm Albert Mueller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Back on Christmas Day, there was another airline crash. In this case, it was an Azerbaijan Airlines plane, and it went down in

Kazakhstan. It went down with a loss. Eventually, it is believed, a 62 dead and many injured. It was

an Embraer 190 airliner, a modern jet airliner that was considered to have a very strong

safety record, and the crash coming on Christmas Day

required some explanation. For one thing, the crash took place in Kazakhstan, but the plane was

flying from Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan, to Grozny in Russia. It had entered Russian

airspace only to turn around and then eventually to crash in Kazakhstan.

Why did the plane crash?

Almost immediately there were claims that the plane had gone down after hitting birds.

But bird strikes at that particular altitude under this particular set of conditions did not seem to answer the question.

Furthermore, when a good bit of the plane was

intact in terms of the fuselage in the tail section, it was discovered that there was a pattern

consistent with, that's the way military intelligence in the West put it, consistent with

anti-aircraft weaponry, which is to say it was very, very clear from the beginning,

just hours after the crash, that Russian air defenses had taken down the airliter.

Furthermore, it was clear that Russian air traffic control had basically told the plane to turn

around, had jammed its electronics, and furthermore even jammed its GPS system.

A reminder of just how open much of this reporting is and why so many of these issues cannot

stay silent or even denied for long, the truth is that the photographic images of the

fuselage were enough for military observers around the world and even

some hobbyists to say that this looked like shrapnel from a missile hit or from a missile

...