if you are joining us now, this is the latest on the crash of malaysia air 17. it went down 25 miles from the russian border earlier today. that plane was carrying 295 people, 280 passengers and 15 crew members traveling from amsterdam to kuala lumpur. ukrainian officials say the plane was shot down and president petro poroshenko called the crash an act of terrorism. an adviser to the interior minister says a soviet air launcher hit the plane. both the ukrainian government and pro-russian separatists are denying responsibility for the downed jet. wreckage from the plane has been found near a rebel-held town bolstering the theory that the fuselage broke apart before landing and scattered debris around a very wide area. before the crash he saw a white trail of smoke rising from the ground and seconds later he heard an explosion. today s crash is the second tragedy this year for malaysian airlines and follows the
flight and the crash itself, sabrina who reports for the new york times and was one of the first reporter on location at the crash reports for the times online, many of the bodies strewn about in the smolderring wreckage were largely intact indicating that the plane had made a somewhat controlled landing. does that sound correct to you? well, that could be because we don t know if it was hit by a surface-to-air missile, indeed, how catastrophic that hit would have been and to what extent the pilot may have been able to exercise a little control on the plane and keep it unable from crashing and might have been able to bring it in at some angle of descent where the bodies would appear that way. i remember there was one other case where a big passenger jet was accidentally shot down under close to wartime conditions, but the u.s. navy shot down an iranian airbus over
announced sanctions against russia. hi, alex. great to be here. i know it s a busy day. it is. let s get right to it. we know from the white house, the readout is that president putin mentioned the malaysian air flight crash on his call with the president. can you offer any more specifics on what the contents of that conversation was? reporter: i can t really offer additional content there. i can tell you this was happening very quickly this morning, as soon as news report emerged, we made the secretary aware, and i know the white house made the president aware and of course, we ve been doing everything possible to determine whether american citizens were on board that plane since then. jen, i know earlier today you couldn t give conversation as to whether there were americanses onboard. do you have any update on that? i don t have any update. we re working around the clock. every minute we have a team trying to determine whether there were american citizens on board. as
overseas. upon just hours after a five-hour humanitarian cease-fire between israel and hamas ended today, israel has officially begun a ground offensive in gaza. in the last hour israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu announced he had, in fact, instructed the military to begin a grounds offensive. israeli defense forces tweeted that a large ivf force has just launched a ground operation in the gaza strip, a new phase of operation protective edge has begun. meanwhile, on the other story of the day, the crash of malays lk flight 17. it was carrying 295 people, 280 passengers and 15 crew from amsterdam to kuala lumpur. the airliner was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. vice president joe biden said the plane was shot at an event vice president joe
kellker talki welker, that if russians were involved it would be depply distressing. i wonder what this does to the rhetoric around russia and the united states, if 23 american civilians have been killed in an act, whether purposeful or not of aggression and the russians are implicated in some way, one can can imagine that, indeed, a price will be extracted. it is unclear what more can be done diplomatically or without bloodshed. the rhetoric goes sky high, right? in practice, what s the next step in what do you do? how do you make russia pay hell if indeed russia or it was the russian-inspired and funded and directed rebels who shot down this plane? so there are there are, you know, what would amount to death penalty sanctions. there are really, really tougher sectoral sanctions that you can go to, but sanctions don t