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Madushanka, Wellalage and Arachchige added to Sri Lanka’s WCQ squad as standby options

Dilshan Madushanaka, Dunith Wellalage and Sahan Arachchig are set to link up with the senior squad on June 23, after Sri Lanka Cricket announced that the trio would be flown in to Zimbabwe for the World Cup Qualifiers as “standby options”.
Foreign News
Seven rescued, 11 missing after boat capsizes off Indonesia’s Mentawai

Rescuers in Indonesia are searching for 11 people who went missing after a boat capsized in bad weather off the Mentawai Islands in West Sumatra province, according to a local search and rescue agency.
Dozens of rescuers and two boats were at the site of the disaster on Tuesday, and seven of the 18 people on board the boat have been rescued, the agency said in a statement.
The vessel capsized at about 11am on Monday (04:00 GMT) as it sailed around the Mentawai Islands.
It had departed Sikakap, a small town in the Mentawai Islands, and was heading to another small town, Tuapejat. Of 18 people on board, 10 were local government officials.
“Our focus is on combing the area around the estimated accident site to find all victims,” said Rudi, the head of the Mentawai search and rescue agency.
He did not give a cause for the boat capsizing, but marine accidents are a regular occurrence in the Southeast Asian archipelago of approximately 17,000 islands, in part due to lax safety standards or bad weather.
On July 3, a ferry carrying 65 people sank off the popular resort island of Bali, killing at least 18 people.
In March, a boat carrying 16 people capsized in rough waters off Bali, killing an Australian woman and injuring at least one other person.
In 2018, more than 150 people drowned when a ferry sank in one of the world’s deepest volcanic lakes on Sumatra island.
[Aljazeera]
Latest News
Jadeja’s defiance in vain as England seal dramatic win

Six years ago, Ben Stokes raised his hands in apology. Now he was clenching his fists in triumph. On the anniversary of the day when he made England world champions, he found them a route to victory again. It felt like he couldn’t rest without it.
He bowled seven overs with the second new ball on Saturday, and the coach Brendon McCullum dispatched a member of his staff down to the boundary line to remind him that he is still flesh and bone. On Monday, nobody dared to interfere. Stokes pushed through a 9.2-over spell, came back to deliver a 10-over spell and was essentially such a lord and master of proceedings that a member of the opposition felt the need to ask his permission for a bathroom break.
Ravindra Jadeja was the one who needed to sprint off. Apparently, nature doesn’t care if you’re the only thing standing between your team and defeat. It comes calling. Just as a whole line-up of Englishmen did, looking for his wicket, or even just a mistake. But nothing was forthcoming. India’s allrounder was every bit as heroic as his red-haired, red-faced, red-hot counterpart, scoring a fourth successive half-century and shepherding the tail towards something legendary. Only it wasn’t to be.
In the fifth over after tea, a man with a broken finger got the ball to spin off the middle of the No. 11’s bat and onto the stumps. Lord’s. On July 14. It is not a place for the faint-hearted. Mohammed Siraj did not belong on his feet. Sorrow engulfing him. Shoaib Basheer invaded the sky. Joy propelling him. He had just sealed the closest Test match victory this old place has ever seen.
India woke up in London looking for 135 runs. Instead, they ran into 21.5 overs of hell in the morning session. They’d dished it out four years ago. England felt compelled to return the favour. And they didn’t need to look as far back as the 2021 game to rouse themselves. There’s been plenty of needle over the past three days, starting with Shubman Gill’s irate response to their delay tactics and peaking with Siraj’s send-off to Ben Duckett.
Even the totally chill Jofra Archer couldn’t help but get in Rishabh Pant’s face after knocking back his off stump. It was the third over of the day. He had just been smashed back down the ground, one-handed, and it rubbed him just enough the wrong way that he began to pump his legs harder as he ran in. That extra effort meant the ball bit into the pitch that little bit extra and breezed past the outside edge to make friends with off stump, which couldn’t help but do cartwheels.
Archer usually celebrates the wickets that mean something to him by running off into the distance. The one he took in his first over of this, his first Test in four years, would’ve had him leaping into the crowd if not for Bashir’s intervention. Here, he was starting to do so but quickly changed direction and ran up towards the retreating batter to fire off a few words.
Stokes had demanded this. He wanted noise. He wanted belief. He wanted energy. He wanted India to feel trapped behind enemy lines. “Bang, bang,” he’d said just a few minutes before the Pant dismissal and turned it into prophecy when he got rid of KL Rahul, 18 balls later. He was on the floor appealing for lbw, every bit of him straining to convince umpire Sharfuddoula to lift the finger. He didn’t. Immediately, he poured all of himself into figuring out a reason to review. Really there was only one thing he needed to know. Was height an issue? No, said Joe Root from the slips. He’d seen Rahul was well back in his crease.
The review confirmed Stokes’ instincts. The ball was good. The movement down the slope was devilish. The impact was pad first. And HawkEye revealed three reds. Stokes pumped his fists. Many of the 24,281 people at the ground roared with him. Ten of them were right there beside him. His team-mates, who have seen him do impossible things and who believe they can do similar just because he says they can. That was the picture of this Test match. Stokes at the centre surrounded by the rest of England.
India lost three wickets for 11 runs in four overs. Jadeja and Nitish Kumar Reddy were thrown into the fire and for a while they coped. The ball got soft. The runs came at a trickle. Efforts to rouse the crowd landed on the wrong set of ears as chants of “Indiaaaaaa! Indiaaa!” rang out. The eighth-wicket stitched a partnership of 30 runs in 89 balls and through it they resisted not just good bowling but their own base impulses.
“Not in the IPL,” Harry Brook chirped at Reddy. “Jaddu’s got to score them all.” Stokes tried to engage him too, adding to his own workloads during that marathon spell by extending his followthrough, but the India allrounder just calmly shook his head. “Not saying anything.” It felt like the partnership had survived its biggest test and safety in the form of the lunch break was almost at hand.
That’s when Chris Woakes arrived and turned the game on its head. Although his pace had dropped, and England looked elsewhere when the day started, now they were grateful to their wizard for securing a crucial edge through to the keeper. Reddy, so solid when the ball was close to his body, flirting with a wider line and throwing his head back when the mistake led to his undoing. England walked off the field to resounding cheers.
Jadeja didn’t lift up the anchor even though he only had the bowlers for company and was nearly made to regret it. He was given out lbw to Woakes in the 48th over, with India still 68 runs away. But though the on-field umpire had thumbs-upped the appeal, DRS had other ideas. Jadeja realised how close he’d gotten to disaster and sent the next ball soaring into the stands behind midwicket. That, apparently, was nothing more than a little venting of the nerves. There would be no more boundaries for 11 overs as Jasprit Bumrah showed great resilience and Jadeja, trust in his plan. They were going to do it in singles, particularly off the fourth ball of every over. India’s ninth-wicket partnership held England off for 131 deliveries – 53 of those faced with no trouble by Bumrah but the 54th became a problem.
Stokes again, in the sixth over of another Iron Man spell, went short. He had refrained from doing so previously because the pitch had gone to sleep and digging it in didn’t seem to make sense. Now he was desperate enough to ignore the signs and just have a bit of faith. Bumrah invited the plan when he tried to hook a couple and missed, at which point Jadeja at the other end shook his head so disapprovingly, normal people would have just burst into tears. All this effort and you had to go and do that?
Bumrah didn’t learn his lesson though. He still went hooking and a top edge settled England’s nerves and left India on the brink.
Stokes closed out the over and finally allowed his aura to fade and show some signs of exhaustion. He straight up forgot to pick up his cap from the umpire. He still continued to bowl though. He was still embedded in the fight, exhorting Archer to attack the ball at long-on, cheering Jamie Smith when he prevented a slower ball from sneaking past him, surging towards Ollie Pope when he thought he’d taken the match-winning catch at short leg, slipping under the lid at bat-pad. When what he had worked for finally happened, he just watched the rest of his team take off. He was too tired to join them. So they all came to him instead.
Brief scores:
England 387 and 192 (Joe Root 40; Washington Sundar 4-22) beat India 387and170 (KL Rahul 39, Ravindra Jadeja 61*; Ben Stokes 3-48, Joffra Archer 3-55) by 22 runs
[Cricinfo]
Latest News
India orders airlines to check fuel switches on Boeing jets

India’s aviation regulator has ordered the country’s airlines to inspect fuel control switches in Boeing aeroplanes, after their reported involvement in a fatal Air India crash that killed 260 people in June.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said the order follows Indian and international airlines already starting to carry out their own checks.
It comes after the US Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] said on Monday that the fuel control switches in Boeing aeroplanes are safe.
The safety of the switches has become a key point of concern after a preliminary report on the disaster found fuel to the engines of the plane involved cut off moments after take-off.
The disaster involving London-bound Flight 171, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, was one of the worst aviation incidents globally in almost a decade.
Since the publication of the preliminary report on Saturday a number of different stakeholders, both in India and internationally have taken action and issued statements in response to it.
In its order, India’s aviation regulator has asked for checks to be carried out by 21 July, noting that “strict adherence to the timeline is essential to ensure continued airworthiness and safety of operations”.
The checks being requested are in line with a 2018 advisory by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the US’s aviation authority, which was referenced in the preliminary report.
The 2018 advisory urged – but did not mandate – operators of Boeing models to inspect the locking feature of the fuel cut-off switches to ensure they could not be moved by accident.
Air India had not carried out those inspections because they were not mandatory, the AAIB said in its preliminary investigation.
The DGCA has now ordered airlines to carry out the checks and report back.
In its response to the report, the FAA said the 2018 advisory was “was based on reports that the fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged” – but added that it does not believe this makes the planes unsafe.
Separately on Monday, a group representing Indian airline pilots defended the flight’s crew.
The Indian Commercial Pilots’ Association said staff on board had “acted in line with their training and responsibilities under challenging conditions and the pilots shouldn’t be vilified based on conjecture”.
The preliminary report, published by the India Aircraft Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) on Saturday, said the switches on Flight 171 controlling fuel flow to the jet’s engines had been moved from “run” to the “cut-off” position, hampering the thrust of the plane.
In recovered cockpit voice recordings, the report said one of the pilots can be heard asking “why did you cut off?” – to which the other pilot replied he “did not do so”.
The preliminary report states its role is “not to apportion blame or liability”.
Also on Monday, the Reuters news agency reported that South Korea was waiting to order all airlines in the country which operate Boeing jets to examine fuel switches.

[BBC]
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