More than 150 whales are stranded off the coast of Tasmania, Australia, according to local authorities.

The state’s Marine Conservation Program said Tuesday a total of 157 animals had become stranded near the town of Arthur River on the west coast of the island and that initial observations showed at least 90 of them were still alive.

“We are currently assessing the situation to plan an appropriate response,” the agency said.

The animals appear to be false killer whales, according to Tasmania’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment.

The Marine Conservation Program said it was working with Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service in response to the “mass whale stranding” and urged the public not to approach the animals.

“Stranding response in this remote area is complex. If it is determined there is a need for help from the general public, a request will be made through various avenues,” it said.

The government agency said all whales are protected species even when deceased and reminded the public that interfering with a carcass is an offense.

Animal behaviorists and marine scientists say that survival rates for beached whales is low, and the animals “can only survive for around six hours on land before they start to deteriorate.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

A Chinese military helicopter flew within 10 feet (3 meters) of a Philippine patrol plane over the South China Sea on Tuesday, in what observers said was the second incident of potentially catastrophic behavior by the People’s Liberation Army against foreign aircraft in a week.

Tuesday’s incident was witnessed by an Associated Press reporter aboard the single-engine Cessna Caravan plane operated by the Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources as it patrolled near Scarborough Shoal, an uninhabited rock about 140 miles (222 kilometers) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon.

Scarborough Shoal, which sits amid rich fishing grounds, has been effectively controlled by China since 2012 despite its location inside the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative.

The AP report said during the approximately 30-minute encounter, the pilot of the Philippine plane warned the Chinese helicopter, “You are flying too close, you are very dangerous and endangering the lives of our crew and passengers.”

The ambassador of the United States, a defense treaty ally of Manila, condemned the “dangerous” maneuvers of the Chinese helicopter.

In a post on X, Ambassador MaryKay Carlson also called on China “to refrain from coercive actions and settle its differences peacefully in accordance with international law.”

A statement from the PLA’s Southern Theater Command said the Chinese helicopter “expelled” the Philippine plane from “China’s territorial airspace,” while saying Manila “has seriously violated China’s sovereignty.”

Tuesday’s incident followed another last week over the South China Sea between an Australian military P-8 reconnaissance jet and PLA fighter planes, during which Australia said the Chinese jets fired flares within 100 feet (30 meters) of its aircraft.

If ingested into the P-8’s jet engines, the flares could have caused catastrophic damage, analysts said.

“They could have hit our P-8 and had that occurred it would have done significant damage to our aircraft and that obviously puts in danger the lives of our personnel,” Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said on Friday.

Like the latter incident with the Philippines, the Chinese military said it expelled a foreign aircraft that was intruding into Chinese airspace, in this case over the Xisha Islands, also called the Paracel Islands.

Beijing claims “indisputable sovereignty” over almost all of the 1.3-million-square-mile South China Sea, and most of the islands and sandbars within it, including many features that are hundreds of miles from mainland China. As well as the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and Taiwan also hold competing claims.

Potentially dangerous incidents between Chinese and foreign aircraft over the South China Sea are nothing new, with several reported over the past several years between not only Australian and Philippine craft but also those of the US and Canada, who all say they operate in international airspace.

But the two latest incidents in less than a week are raising fears Beijing may be becoming more assertive in enforcing its disputed claims while the attention of the US – a defense treaty ally of the Philippines, Australia and Canada – is focused on the war in Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East.

“China sees that the Trump administration is focused on other theaters and calculates that this is the time to turn the ratchet up in East Asia while America is distracted elsewhere,” said Ray Powell, director of SeaLight, a maritime transparency project at Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.

“Beijing is following a familiar pattern of gradual escalation,” Powell said.

“Its goal is to normalize its aggressions at ever-greater levels, so that over time they become accepted and discounted as the normal cost of doing business in contested areas.”

Adm. Samuel Paparo, the head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, told a forum in Hawaii last week that China is using similar “gray zone” tactics around the democratic island of Taiwan, which is claimed by Beijing, and which Chinese leader Xi Jinping has vowed to bring under the Communist Party’s control.

Numerous Chinese military aircraft and maritime vessels operate around Taiwan daily.

“Their aggressive maneuver around Taiwan right now are not exercises, as they call them. They are rehearsals. They are rehearsals for the forced unification of Taiwan to the mainland,” Paparo told the Honolulu Defense Forum last week.

In the 10th row of Delta Flight 4819, Pete Carlson rested in the window seat just before landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport on Monday afternoon, thinking about friends he would see at a paramedics conference where he was scheduled to speak.

John Nelson, another passenger in the 10th row of the CRJ900 twin-jet aircraft, remembered the flight and descent over Canada’s largest city as typical except for “super gusty” winds blowing snow over the runways.

The Delta flight, on a trip from Minneapolis, was cleared for Runway 23 under a westerly wind, with gusts up to 38 miles per hour. “Might be a slight bump in the glide path,” an air traffic controller said. “There will be an aircraft in front of you.”

“Clear to land, Endeavor 4819,” the pilot responded, referring to Delta’s Endeavor Air, the subsidiary which operated the regional jet arriving about 2:15 p.m local time Monday on the snow-covered runway. The wind sent snow swirling into the air, limiting visibility to five miles.

Then everything changed.

The jet came down hard and fast. Flames erupted around the rear landing gear, followed by a growing fire ball shrouded by a rising trail of black smoke, according to video from the scene. The right wing was sheared off as the plane rolled on its back along a tundra-like landscape.

In seconds, the lives of the 80 people on board would be upended – literally – with passengers hanging upside down, their seatbelts preventing them from crashing down. Jet fuel cascaded like rain over the windows. Somehow, all those on board survived, though 21 people were taken to hospitals with injuries.

‘We were upside down, hanging like bats’

Pete Koukov, another passenger, said he “didn’t know anything was the matter” until the hard landing.

He took video showing some passengers, still strapped to their seats, on the overturned jet.

Nelson called it “mass chaos.”

“I was upside down. The lady next to me was upside down,” he said. “We kind of let ourselves go and fell to hit the ceiling – which was a surreal feeling. And then everybody was just like, ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ We could smell like jet fuel.”

The two flight attendants had never landed a plane upside down, according to Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. But they had trained for many scenarios, including evacuating passengers within 90 seconds – which they did during Monday’s emergency.

“They were heroic,” Nelson said.

A mix of black smoke and powdery snow rose over the tarmac.

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” said a person who took a video of the crash, watching from another plane near the runway.

“Airplane just crashed (runway) 2-3,” a pilot on another flight can be heard saying on recordings of air traffic control transmissions, which also picked up audio of a medevac helicopter that was already in the area.

“We got it in sight,” the helicopter pilot said of the downed jet.

“LifeFlight 1, medevac, just so you are aware there are people outside walking around the aircraft there,” an air traffic controller said.

“Yeah, we’ve got it. The aircraft is upside down and burning,” the medevac pilot responded.

Outside the plane, passengers shot video and photos with cellphone cameras as firefighters tried to douse the flames.

Carlson remembered the powerful sound created by the crash of tens of thousands of pounds of metal against snow-covered concrete.

“The absolute initial feeling is, ‘Just need to get out of this,’” he told CBC.

He unfastened his seatbelt and crashed down onto the plane’s ceiling, now the floor. He didn’t sense panic or fear around him. Instead, Carlson said, everyone on the plane “suddenly became very close” – helping and consoling each other.

“What now?” he remembered thinking. “Who’s leading?”

Row by row, passengers and crew members checked on one another. They made sure people would not fall on others once their seatbelts were unfastened. As a father and a paramedic, Carlson said, he instinctively focused on getting a young boy and his mother who were sitting on the ceiling safely off the plane. The smell of fuel grew stronger.

“You can listen to the preflight all you want but when you’re suddenly upside down, rolled over, everything kind of goes out the door,” he told CBC. Hours after the flight, he still reeked of plane fuel. He wasn’t sure how he got a gash on his head.

‘It’s amazing that we’re still here’

Carlson stepped outside the plane. He recalled marveling at the “amazing” response of police officers, firefighters and paramedics on the scene.

It felt like he was “stepping out onto the tundra,” Carlson told CBC, as he and others helped passengers onto the snow-swept tarmac. The injured were taken away by bus. A triage area was set up at a safe distance from the plane.

“There was a wing there before and when we went out that exit, there was no wing to be found,” he recalled.

In fact, the wing breaking free likely kept the fire out of the passenger cabin, said Joe Jacobsen, an aerospace engineer who has worked for Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration.

When a wing rips off entirely on impact, it ditches potentially explosive fuel, said Michael McCormick, an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, noting that fuel used to be stored in the belly of the aircraft.

Other design factors came into play as well. Most modern commercial aircraft are required to have 16G seats – meaning they can withstand 16 times the force of gravity, McCormick said. The seats, designed for durability rather than comfort, are less likely to come apart in an accident.

Carlson was thankful to walk away from the crash.

“I didn’t care how cold it was,” Carlson told CBC. “I didn’t care how far I had to walk, how long I had to stand. All of us wanted to just be out of the aircraft.”

At one point, Carlson removed his coat and put it over the shoulders of the mother with the young son. He snapped a photo of the overturned plane with his phone, and sent a copy to a paramedic friend, who was at the airport to pick him up.

“I simply sent it, saying this is my reality right now,” he said. “Down on the tarmac but alive, which, again, is really amazing.”

The friend and colleague, Renfrew County, Ontario, Paramedic Chief Mike Nolan, saw a huge plume of black smoke rise from the center of the runway and immediately texted Carlson, the keynote speaker at the conference in Toronto this week.

In the end, Carlson said, it was “just people – no countries, nothing … together helping each other.”

Koukov said he felt lucky and happy. He gave a big hug to the person who had been sitting next to him on the flight – as he did when greeted by friends who picked him up at the airport.

Said Nelson, “It’s amazing that we’re still here.”

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Donald Trump of repeating disinformation, a day after the US president falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war with Russia.

Zelensky’s comments were part of what is shaping up to be far the most public exchange of accusations between Kyiv and Washington since the full-scale war started nearly three years ago.

Speaking to reporters in Kyiv, Zelensky pushed back on several unfounded claims the US president made on Tuesday, while reinforcing Ukraine’s position that no deal on ending the war could be done without it.

“Unfortunately, President Trump – I have great respect for him as a leader of a nation that we have great respect for, the American people who always support us – unfortunately lives in this disinformation space,” Zelensky said.

US and Russian officials held high-level talks on ending the war in Ukraine in the Saudi capital of Riyadh on Tuesday, a meeting from which Kyiv was excluded.

The two sides agreed to appoint high-level teams to negotiate the end of the war and said they were working to reestablish diplomatic channels.

Zelensky said that while any country has the right to discuss bilateral issues with Saudi Arabia, the fact that the US held direct talks with Russia “helped Putin out of his long isolation.” Russia has been banished from the global stage since the war began.

It was Kyiv’s complaint about being shut out of the talks that sparked Trump’s tirade of falsehoods on Tuesday.

Speaking late on Tuesday, Trump said: “Today I heard, ‘Oh well, we weren’t invited. Well, you been there for three years. You should’ve ended it after three years. You should’ve never started it. You could’ve made a deal.”

The incorrect claim that Ukraine somehow started the war has long been repeated by the Kremlin and its supporters. The conflict began in 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea, the southern Ukrainian peninsula, and began sponsoring pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Moscow then launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, attacking its smaller neighbor at night, sending tanks across the border, bombing Ukrainian cities and sending special forces into Kyiv to assassinate Zelensky.

Zelensky hits back

But Trump did not stop at questioning who started the war in Ukraine. Repeating another line often pushed by the Kremlin, Trump appeared to question Zelensky’s legitimacy.

“We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort, incorrectly claiming that Zelensky’s approval rating was “at 4%.”

Zelensky won more than 73% of the vote in the second round of the 2019 presidential election. While his mandate was meant to end last May, a new election was not held because Ukraine has been under martial law since Russia launched its unprovoked invasion of the country. The martial law prohibits elections.

Speaking on Wednesday, Zelensky specifically said the claim that his approval rating was at 4% comes from Russia, and that Kyiv has some evidence that the numbers were discussed between the US and Russia.

He pointed to a poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) earlier this month which showed that while his popularity dropped significantly since the early days of the war, his approval rate has never dropped below 50% and currently stands at 57%.

Romania’s foreign minister said he had not come under pressure from US President Donald Trump’s envoy to lift restrictions on social media influencer Andrew Tate, who faces human trafficking charges, despite them discussing the case.

The Financial Times reported on Monday, citing sources, that US officials had brought up the case of Tate and his brother Tristan, both former kickboxers with dual US and British citizenship, in a phone call to the Romanian government.

It said Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell followed up with Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu at the Munich Security Conference. A source told the FT a request was made to return the brothers’ passports and allow them to travel while they wait for court proceedings to conclude.

The brothers are banned from leaving Romania pending a criminal investigation on accusations of forming an organized criminal group, human trafficking, trafficking of minors, sexual intercourse with a minor and money laundering. They have denied all wrongdoing.

Tate, the highest profile suspect facing trial for human trafficking in Romania, was banned from almost all social media platforms before Trump’s now adviser Elon Musk took over X and reinstated his account.

Hurezeanu told Euronews late on Tuesday he had had an informal chat with Grenell in a hallway during the Munich conference. Hurezeanu cited Grenell as saying he remained interested in the fate of the Tate brothers.

“I did not perceive this statement as pressure, just a repeat of a known stance,” Hurezeanu said.

“I don’t know what pressures of another nature were made before or after but what I discussed with Mr. Grenell was cordial, informal, brief, non-binding and I certainly did not detect any form of pressure.”

A first criminal case against Tate and his brother failed in December when a Bucharest court decided not to start the trial, citing flaws in the indictment.

A Romanian court lifted a house arrest order against Tate in January, replacing it with a lighter preventative measure. In October, a court ruled he should get back luxury cars worth about 4 million euros ($4.43 million) that were seized by prosecutors, pending the investigations.

In Munich last week US Vice President JD Vance took a swipe at European governments for what he described as their censorship of free speech and their political opponents and specifically mentioned the cancellation of Romania’s presidential election based on what he said was flimsy evidence.

Romania’s top court ordered a rerun of the vote following suspicion of Russian interference in favor of the unexpected first round winner, the pro-Russian far-right Calin Georgescu. Russia denied any interference in Romania’s election campaigns.