Indonesian police have arrested and charged the former chief of Garuda as an accessory to the murder of a human rights activist on one of airline's aircraft in 2004. The charge against former President-Director Indra Setiawan follows last year's successful appeal by the Garuda pilot convicted of the arsenic poisoning of activist Munir Saib Thalib, who had exposed human rights abuses by the Indonesian military. Rohainil Aini, secretary to Garuda's chief pilot, also was arrested and charged with assisting premeditated murder.

Skills in Chinese aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul are rising rapidly, leading to companies completing jobs with fewer worker hours. The shift means that operators in China can avoid at least some of the loss of competitiveness they should be suffering from rocketing wages, though they still must face a relentlessly appreciating currency.

The world's airline industry may have only one way to escape the surge of enthusiasm to punish its carbon dioxide emissions with taxes or even regulatory limits on air travel, and that's a global emissions trading arrangement that is probably years away from implementation. Industry leaders feel carriers are faced with shouldering the unwelcome cost of such a plan to avoid suffering worse impositions devised by politicians who want to be seen doing something about global warming and find that airlines offer a suitably headline-grabbing target.