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The sky is falling at least on Boeing.

A second whistleblower has died under mysterious circumstances, just two months after another one allegedly shot himself in the head and the attorneys for both men hope their deaths don’t scare away the at least 10 other whistleblowers who want the company to clean up its act.

Joshua Dean, 45, a former quality auditor at Spirit AeroSystems which assembles fuselage sections for Boeing, died Tuesday morning from a fast-growing mystery infection.

Deans death comes less than two months after Boeing whistleblower John Barnett, 62, died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound on March 9.

Barnett, who had worked for Boeing for 32 years, was found dead in his Dodge Ram truck holding a silver pistol in his hand in the parking lot of his South Carolina hotel after he failed to show up for the second part of his testimony for a bombshell lawsuit against the company.

At the same time, Boeing said last month that it lost $355 million on falling revenue in the first quarter, another sign of the crisis gripping the aircraft manufacturer as it faces increasing scrutiny over the safety of its planes and accusations of shoddy work from a growing number of surviving whistleblowers.

It was announced abruptly in March that Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun would step down by the end of the year in a move widely seen as a reaction to the ongoing safety crises.

Brian Knowles, a Charleston, South Carolina, attorney who represented both Barnett and Dean hope their deaths were not in vain.

“These men were heroes. So are all the whistleblowers. They loved the company and wanted to help the company do better,” Knowles told The Post.

“They didn’t speak out to be aggravating or for fame. They’re raising concerns because people’s lives are at stake.”

Knowles and others inside the Boeing scandals are hesitant to speculate about conspiracy theories swirling around the two whistleblower deaths.

“I knew John Barnett for seven years and never saw anything that would indicate he would take his own life,” Knowles told The Post.

“Then again, I’ve never dealt with someone who did (commit suicide.) So maybe you don’t see the signs. I don’t know.”

Knowles pointed out that the Charleston, SC police are still wrapping up their investigation of Barnett’s death and that it may take some weeks for tests to reveal more about Dean’s passing.

“It’s a stunning loss,” Spirit AeroSystems spokesman Joe Buccino said of Dean. (The company is not to be confused with Spirit Airlines.) “Our focus here has been on his loved ones.”

Buccino insisted that Spirit “encourages” employees to come forth with their concerns and that they are then “cloaked under protection.”

A Boeing spokeswoman declined to answer questions on Barnett but in a statement, said that OSHA had determined Barnett was not retaliated against, and that the company’s own analysis found that the issues he raised “did not affect airplane safety.”

“We are saddened by Mr. Barnetts passing and our thoughts continue to be with his family and friends,” the statement said.

“We encourage all employees to speak up when issues arise. Retaliation is strictly prohibited at Boeing.”

It’s news to other Boeing whistleblowers that Boeing and Spirit “encourage” workers to speak out.

Instead, they say, they’ve either been retaliated against or ignored.

Ed Pierson, 61, a former senior manager at Boeing’s 737 factory in Renton, Washington, left Boeing six years ago and created the Foundation for Aviation Safety.

He had tried in vain to get Boeing executives to shut down production of the plane before the two Boeing 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people and led to the planes being grounded.

“It’s an unstable company right now from the top to the bottom,” Pierson told The Post. “Senior corporate leadership is so fixated on not admitting the truth that they can’t admit anything.”

Pierson did not mince words when he testified before Congress last month about what he called the “criminal cover-up” he believes Boeing bosses have led.

“Boeing is an American icon,” Pierson said. “This company is incredibly important to our country, both economically and in terms of national security with its commercial aviation side and it military defense work. But it doesn’t work when you have the wrong people driving the bus.”

Barnett was a quality control engineer who worked for Boeing for more than three decades before he retired in 2017.

He broke his silence two years later to warn that Boeing cut corners to speed its 787 Dreamliners into service and in numerous interviews described how he had complained internally to the company about what he claimed were serious safety flaws.

After his apparent suicide in March, Boeing employees told The Post that Barnett had made “powerful enemies” and one said workers were skeptical that Barnett’s death was suicide.

Dean had raised the alarm in 2022, while working at Spirit AeroSystems, a Wichita, Kansas-based company which manufactures major aircraft parts for Boeing.

He was a quality auditor when he raised concerns about improperly drilled bulkhead holes on parts for the 737 Max.

But, he alleged, flagging the issue with his management had no effect.

Less than a year later he was fired.

I think they were sending out a message to anybody else, Dean later told NPR of his firing. If you are too loud, we will silence you.

Boeing has been dogged by whistleblower testimony and Congressional investigations.

A scathing House report issued in Sept. 2020 found that the two 737 Max crashes were the horrific culmination of repeated and serious failures by the company and air safety regulators.

“Boeing was a Seattle company. Back in the day a typical Boeing CEO was a hyper-midwestern farm boy who saw airplanes as a kid and went off to Seattle to conquer the world,” Craig Jenks, who runs the Airline/Aircraft Projects Inc. consultancy, told The Post.

“Then the finance people started taking over in the 1980s and they moved the corporate headquarters to Chicago and then to DC. It means senior management is never around the factory floor.”

The most headline-grabbing safety lapse was in January, when a fuselage panel blew off a new Alaskan Airlines 737 although late last month, a safety slide fell off a Delta 767 and washed up, with perfect irony, in front of the home of an attorney suing Boeing over safety issues.

In the Alaskan airlines case, a whistleblower told the Seattle Times that the fault lay with Boeing, whose records showed that after the fuselage was delivered by Spirit, a panel had been removed at Boeing’s Renton factory and re-installed minus four crucial bolts.

In the air, the panel flew off fortunately, at a low enough altitude that the plane did not depressurize.

It is …very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business,” the whistleblower told the Seattle Times.

A number of Boeing employees have alleged to the New York Times that the manufacturer has allowed mechanics to sign off on their own work, cutting out a layer of safety assurance.

“Profit has overtaken the historically famous pride of Boeing,” Peter Lake, an aviation expert who has investigated a number of plane crashes over the years, told The Post.

“It’s all corporate greed now. It’s become a standing joke that when there’s any malfunction in an airplane people say it’s Boeing.

“Soutwest Airlines had an engine failure recently and people ignorantly blamed Boeing. That shows what a cloud the company is under.

“Who knows if they’ll be able to pull themselves out of this disaster?”

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Sir Jim Ratcliffe scolds Tories over handling of economy and immigration after Brexit

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Sir Jim Ratcliffe scolds Tories over handling of economy and immigration after Brexit

Billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe has told Sky News that Britain is ready for a change of government after scolding the Conservatives over their handling of the economy and immigration after Brexit.

While insisting his petrochemicals conglomerate INEOS is apolitical, Sir Jim backed Brexit and spent last weekend with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer at Manchester United – the football club he now runs as minority owner.

“I’m sure Keir will do a very good job at running the country – I have no questions about that,” Sir Jim said in an exclusive interview.

“There’s no question that the Conservatives have had a good run,” he added. “I think most of the country probably feels it’s time for a change. And I sort of get that, really.”

Read more: Sir Jim’s mission to succeed at ‘the one challenge the UK has never brought home’

Sir Jim was a prominent backer of leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum but now has issues with how Brexit was delivered by Tory prime ministers.

“Brexit sort of unfortunately didn’t turn out as people anticipated because… Brexit was largely about immigration,” Sir Jim said.

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“That was the biggest component of that vote. People were getting fed up with the influx of the city of Southampton coming in every year. I think last year it was two times Southampton.

“I mean, no small island like the UK could cope with vast numbers of people coming into the UK.

“I mean, it just overburdens the National Health Service, the traffic service, the police, everybody.

“The country was designed for 55 or 60 million people and we’ve got 70 million people and all the services break down as a consequence.

“That’s what Brexit was all about and nobody’s implemented that. They just keep talking about it. But nothing’s been done, which is why I think we’ll finish up with the change of government.”

Watch Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s full interview on the Trevor Phillips on Sunday morning programme on Sky News from 8.30am

UK needs to get ‘sharper on the business front’

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has indicated an election is due this year but Monaco-based Sir Jim is unimpressed by the Conservatives’ handling of the economy.

“The UK does need to get a bit sharper on the business front,” he said. “I think the biggest objective for the government is to create growth in the economy.

“There’s two parts of the economy, there’s the services side of the economy and there’s the manufacturing side. And the manufacturing, unfortunately, has been sliding away now for the last 25 years.

“We were very similar in scale to Germany probably 25 years ago.

“But today we’re just a fraction of where Germany is and I think that isn’t healthy for the British economy… particularly when you think the north of England is very manufacturing based, and that talks to things like energy competitiveness, it talks to things like, why do you put an immensely high tax on the North Sea?

“That just disincentivises people from finding hydrocarbons in the North Sea, in energy.

“And what we need is competitive energy. So I mean, in America, in the energy world, in the oil and gas world, they just apply a corporation tax to the oil and gas companies, which is about 30%. And in the UK we’ve got this tax of 75% because we want to kill off the oil and gas companies.

“But if we don’t have competitive energy, we’re not going to have a healthy manufacturing industry. And that just makes no sense to me at all. No.”

‘We’re apolitical’

Asked about INEOS donating to Labour, Sir Jim replied: “We’re apolitical, INEOS.

“We just want a successful manufacturing sector in the UK and we’ve talked to the government about that. It’s pretty clear about our views.”

Sir Jim was keener to talk about the economy and politics than his role at struggling Manchester United, which he bought a 27.7% stake in from the American Glazer family in February – giving him an even higher business profile.

Old Trafford stadium in Manchester. Pic: AP
Image:
Old Trafford stadium in Manchester. Pic: AP

Push for stadium of the North

He is continuing to push for public funds to regenerate Old Trafford and the surrounding areas despite no apparent political support being forthcoming. Sir Keir was hosted at the stadium for a Premier League match last weekend just as heavy rain exposed the fragility of the ageing venue.

“There’s a very good case, in my view, for having a stadium of the North, which would serve the northern part of the country in that arena of football,” Sir Jim said. “If you look at the number of Champions League the North West has won, it’s 10. London has won two.

“And yet everybody from the North has to get down to London to watch a big football match. And there should be one [a large stadium] in the North, in my view.

“But it’s also important for the southern side of Manchester, you know, to regenerate.

“It’s the sort of second capital of the country where the Industrial Revolution began.

“But if you have a regeneration project, you need a nucleus or a regeneration project and having that world-class stadium there, I think would provide the impetus to regenerate that region.”

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World

Oleksandr Usyk defeats Tyson Fury to become heavyweight champion of the world

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Oleksandr Usyk defeats Tyson Fury to become heavyweight champion of the world

Oleksandr Usyk has become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world after defeating British boxing star Tyson Fury.

The Ukrainian won on a split decision following the match in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Usyk had 115-112 and 114-113 on two cards, while Fury took the other 114-113.

Follow the match as it happened

Fury disputed his loss after the match, saying: “I believe I won that fight. I think he won a few rounds but I won the majority of them.

“His country is at war, so people are siding with the country at war. Make no mistake, I won that fight in my opinion.

In response Usyk said he was “ready for rematch,” but later added: “I don’t think about rematch now, I want to rest.”

Pic: PA
Image:
Pic: PA

Fury came under early pressure, with Usyk taking the centre of the ring with an aggressive offensive from the start.

At one point Fury was pushed against the ropes and started laughing as Usyk applied pressure.

The “Gypsy King” looked relaxed as he moved around the ring in the early rounds and picked his shots.

Tyson Fury lunges at Oleksandr Usyk. Pic: PA
Image:
Fury lunges at Usyk. Pic: PA

But after Usyk landed a right hook in the ninth round it looked as if Fury was in serious trouble.

The Ukrainian followed up by unloading freely but somehow the bookmakers’ favourite stayed on his feet and was given a standing 10-second count saved by the bell.

It left Fury struggling through the final three rounds as Usyk chased him around the ring.

Tyson Fury v Oleksandr Usyk. Pic: Action Images via Reuters
Image:
Pic: Action Images via Reuters

The 37-year-old Ukrainian became the first boxer to hold all four major heavyweight belts at the same time and the first undisputed champion in 24 years.

Oleksandr Usyk celebrates with the undisputed heavyweight title belt after his victory
Image:
Oleksandr Usyk celebrates with the undisputed heavyweight title belt. Pic: PA

He’s the best fighter of a generation, there’s nothing left



Jacquie Beltrao

Sports presenter

There’s something very special about Oleksandr Usyk and it’s something all brilliant sports people have: the ability to find that extra bit of grit, to dig a bit deeper, when the battle is slipping away.

It’s exactly the character he showed, coming back at Fury in the 7th and 8th rounds, with some impressive shots, to take the sting out of any Fury resurgence and to swing momentum back his way. And enabling him to go for the kill in that brilliant 9th round. Fury looked stung, he looked confused and he was lucky the referee didn’t stop the fight there and then.

It was amazing that Fury made it to the end. That took courage. But it’s hard to see how he’s going to recover from this. It’s going to hurt. He says he wants to invoke the rematch clause and go again, but will he really want to?

Will Usyk want to? He’s the best fighter of a generation, there’s nothing left to prove. No fighter has ever won the undisputed cruiserweight championship of the world and followed that with the undisputed heavyweight crown. He can take four belts back to Kyiv safe in the knowledge that it’s unlikely anyone will be able to match that achievement anytime soon.

Last night, Fury weighed in at 262lbs (18st 10lbs) – nearly three stone heavier than Usyk, who clocked in at a career heaviest of 223lbs (15st 13lbs).

Fury refused to look at his opponent during a news conference on Thursday, but did not back down at the weigh-in last night, where the pair almost came to blows before being separated by their entourages.

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Enter the Cossack warrior and ‘Gypsy King’

Usyk arrived into the ring first, dressed as a Cossack warrior.

Fury entered to songs by Barry White and Bonnie Tyler, with the “Gypsy King” spending several minutes dancing on stage before the song changed to Holding Out For A Hero.

Anthony Joshua watched from the ringside, knowing he could meet the winner early next year.

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Fury v Usyk: The fight of the century – as it happened

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