Passengers Subdue FlyDubai Co-Pilot Who Stabbed the Pilot Mid-Flight

A FlyDubai co-pilot stabbed the pilot of a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, and the passengers were the ones who stopped him. The New York Times reports the jet dropped 17,000 feet in two minutes while they subdued the attacker, and passengers describe panic in the cabin as it fell. The aircraft then diverted to Saudi Arabia.

Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has since said a crash may have been intended. He also credited the stabbed Indian pilot and the passengers with averting catastrophe, according to the South China Morning Post. That is a head of government's reading of events. The reporting in hand carries no finding from investigators on motive, and the word 'may' in his sentence is doing the work of the whole sentence.

The rest of the morning's filings come from the desks. Kai Tanner's Cyber desk has the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager zero-day, a login bypass attackers were using before Cisco shipped a fix, and the second Cisco authentication bypass in a fortnight. Aya Nakamura's AI desk explains why AMD has bought Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, and why she reads it as a software deal more than a model deal. Mei Chen reports from the Geopolitical desk on a new PLA logistics base at an airport in Laos, and Vincent Lai's ledger sets out the eight Trump-Xi goals and the military safeguards still without finished text. Magnus Honeyfield has the fusion company buying 6,200 miles of magnet tape, and Dev Chatterjee has Alec Bohm's two-out home run that sends the Phillies and Braves to a Game 3.

Back to the cockpit. What is established is narrow and, for once, reassuring about ordinary people: a pilot was stabbed at altitude, the aircraft lost height fast, and passengers restrained the attacker until it landed. Why the co-pilot did it is not established. Until investigators say, the prime minister's account of intent is a claim, and the record supports only the rescue.