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The airline industry will have to put together a new set of procedures to cover the event of a pilot getting stuck in the toilet. A Delta Airlines flight from Asheville, North Caroline to New York City was the scene of a security alert yesterday. While the pilot was in the lavatory, the door latch became stuck. Unable to alert a flight attendant, the pilot asked a passenger to go to the cockpit and use a secret code to alert the co-pilot. The co-pilot did not believe what he heard and called ground control.
“The captain has disappeared in the back and, uh, I have someone with a thick foreign accent trying to access the cockpit right now…,” the co-pilot reported.
“What I’m being told is he’s stuck in the lav,” the co-pilot continued. “Someone with a thick foreign accent is giving me a password to access the cockpit, and I’m not about to let him in.”
Not willing to take any chances themselves, air controllers on the ground ordered the plane, operated by regional carrier Chautauqua Airlines, to make an emergency landing.
Before the co-pilot was forced to make that emergency landing, however, the pilot was able to open the bathroom door, and calm his anxious colleagues.
The plane landed safely and no one was charged in the incident. Link -via The Daily What
How should we teach the events of 9/11 to small children? Wayne Bell, the publisher of Really Big Coloring Books Inc. has an answer:
A "graphic coloring novel" called We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids' Book of Freedom. The 36-page coloring book depicts the Twin Towers smoldering, survivors mourning the tragedy's victims, and a Navy SEAL shooting Osama bin Laden, who is (inaccurately) cowering behind a woman in a Muslim hijab. (See the image below.) Bell nevertheless claims it's "a very clean, honest read that does not shy away from the facts" about 9/11.
What do you think? Is it appropriate? Should 9/11 be memorialized in crayons? Link
Remember our post about boy scouts trained in anti-terrorism? In one high school in Maryland, you can even take courses in domestic security – but before you cry foul, consider this: it may simply be a good career move for the kids.
Meade High School, where Edler teaches, made its own history this year. The long-troubled public high school become one of the first in the nation to offer a four-year course in domestic security. The goal: to help graduates build careers in one of America’s few growth industries.
"This course will help me get a top-secret security clearance," said Darryl Bagley, an eager 15-year-old. "That way I can always get a job."
Meade offers its 2,150 students a standard high school curriculum, including electives like advanced calculus and carpentry. But the 90 ninth-graders who chose the new homeland security program this last school year focused on topics torn from the headlines: Islamic jihadism, nuclear arms, cyber-crime, domestic militias and the like.
New themes even were added to their science, social studies and English classes.
"There’s a lot of homeland security issues in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ " said Bill Sheppard, the program coordinator. "Like, how do you deal with infiltration in your own family?"
Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times has the story of agents in the making: Link (Photo: Chris Usher / LA Times)
Photo: Todd Krainin/NY Times
Boy Scouts’s motto "Be Prepared" apparently extends all the way to modern day’s terrorism. In this post 9/11 world, you can’t be too careful, so the Border Patrol in Imperial County, California, has a – shall we say, unique – program for the Scouts:
The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.
“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”
The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out “active shooters,” like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.
Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times has more: Link
