NEW YORK: An Eastern Airlines 727 jetliner trying to land in a thunderstorm crashed, exploded and ploughed across a busy boulevard yesterday [June 24] on the fringe of Kennedy International Airport, killing 109 of the 123 persons aboard. The impact tossed the bodies for blocks and sent a fireball as high as a 60-storey skyscraper into the sky.

The blue-and-white airliner left New Orleans in light rain and smashed to earth 1,200 miles ... later in ruins, again in the rain. `I saw this big flash of fire like the atomic bomb going off,` said Moe Friedman, an airport employee who was driving along Rockaway boulevard when the plane cruising 20 minutes behind schedule slammed into a marshy field, flashed across the roadway and scattered wreckage for 500 yards. Fourteen persons survived, including two girls with severe burns. News agencies [Meanwhile, as reported by news agencies from Mexico City,] a large number of delegates walked out of the International Women`s Year Conference hall as Mrs Yitzhak Rabin, wife of the Israeli Prime Minister, began a speech. ... ...[I]t was the biggest political demonstration so far at the Congress, attended by more than 2,000 delegates from about 30 countries.