Bomb threats on Delta and Southwest flights from Portland turn out to be hoax

#bombscare #atlanta #southwestairlines #deltaairlines As reported by Atlanta airport spokesman, threats were received against Delta and Southwest flights that were coming from Portland and Milwaukee respectively. The threats had been made online - reportedly on Twitter.
Accordingly, the flights were escorted by two US fighter jets into the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Subsequently, the police searched both the planes at Atlanta's airport and could not find any bombs. The planes had landed safely and had been evacuated.
It seems a bomb squad and sniffer dogs were used to carry out the police search after the planes landed. There were 86 passengers on board the Southwest flight, and that they were being re-screened.
Incidentally, the busy Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is home to Delta and is serving nearly 100 million passengers.
Already, in this week, there was a bomb scare in the JFK airport of New York – here also, no bomb was found. In view of the terrorist activities taking place all over the world, no place is safe and any mention of a possible threat cannot be taken lightly and ignored and, it sets off the panic button and starts a chain reaction.

Eric Garner chokehold death – another case of black-white divide in the US

The black-white divide is becoming more and more pronounced in the US. It has come to the surface yet again in the Eric Garner case in New York – it is similar to the Ferguson case where an 18-year-old black teenager Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer or the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. In the demonstrations in Ferguson, there were over 100 arrests and destruction of 12 commercial buildings by fire.
In the Eric Garner case, a white New York City police officer was cleared in the chokehold death of an unarmed black man who had been stopped on suspicion of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes. The reason was that Eric had bad heath that caused his death. Chokehold is banned under NYPD policy.
It seems Eric Garner was choked to death by Officer Daniel Pantaleo and the grand jury of Staten Island did not indict him in the death of Eric on July 17.
Anyway, the NYPD has stripped Pantaleo of his gun and badge and placed him on desk duty while the case was under investigation. He would be suspended while the NYPD conducts an internal probe that could finally result in administrative charges.,br>

Fury of Nature seen in New York and Brisbane – snowfall and storms cripple lives

Lady Nature is unhappy at the way our environment is being destroyed and the ecological balance is getting disturbed and she is expressing it in her own unique way – by unleashing storms and snowfall in different parts of the world.
Over a four-day period, New York received nearly seven feet of snow – as per reports, the total snowfall in western New York was staggering. Wales Center and Hamburg witnessed an incredible 85 inches (seven feet) of snow. According to records maintained by the National Weather Service, the largest snow event on record in Buffalo, N.Y, was 81.6 inches in 2001 and that had accumulated over a period of five days.
After the large scale snowfall that crippled the life of New York, she has now moved on to Australia and crippled Brisbane, the third largest city. It was lashed by its worst storm in decades, with roofs flying off and wind, rain and hailstorm resulting in cutting power lines, flooding streets and injuring a dozen people.
As reported by the state-owned electricity supplier Energex, up to 90,000 homes had been without power, with trees and hundreds of power lines brought down by winds gusting at 87 mph and, as it gained in intensity, 68,000 homes remained blacked out.
The storm struck and caught commuters unawares – they remained stuck for hours in the stalled electric trains due to the power cuts. The electronic media went to town with the news and showed the devastation caused in the form of smashed high-rise windows and light planes flipped upside down on an airfield while cars were nearly submerged in flooded streets.
Queensland State Premier Campbell Newman has described the storm as the worst to hit the city of 2.2 million people since 1985.

America’s 9/11 and India’s 26/11 – how to tackle terrorism

Terrorists struck the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 – it was on 9/11, or 9th of September 2001. In India it was also on another ‘11’ – only, this 11 was for the month of November. And the year was 2008. Six years back, terrorists attacked Mumbai, the financial hub of India and killed 164 and left another nearly 300 wounded.
The terrorists had entered the city from the sea and had taken up positions inside posh hotels – they had made adequate preparations and had even stocked arms and ammunition in the hotel premises. The law enforcing agencies had no idea about what was happening till the attack came.
In the course of the retaliation by the Mumbai police and the NSG, several lives were lost and one terrorist was caught alive – he was, subsequently, hanged.
As a follow up of this act of terrorism, several suggestions were put forth to transform the Mumbai police force to an elite one with capabilities to handle threats following 26/11 – however, very little appears to have been done even though eight years have passed by.
In the Indian tradition, red-tapism and corruption rule supreme - and, it seems, the state had ordered 29 high-tech "bulletproof" speedboats to tackle possibility of terrorists entering from the sea. Unfortunately, the boats were not bulletproof after all. This is just one example.
Agreed – CCTV cameras have been installed at many places and metal detectors and other devices have also been positioned but when the need arises, the CCTV cameras are found to be unserviceable and there is no one to man the metal detectors. In any case, the very purpose of metal detectors at railway stations is defeated when there are yawning gaps on the boundary walls and fences – these have been made by locals who can get easy entry onto the platforms.
Incidentally, in February 2010, two years after the Mumbai 26/11 attack, there was a bomb blast in the German Bakery in Pune in which 9 people were killed and 60 injured.
And, more recently, West Bengal has been put to embarrassment by the disclosure that terrorists from across the Bangladesh border had set up bases in different parts of the state to train terrorists and carry out terrorist activities. These had been happening for quite a while and the police were apparently in the dark.
The bottom line is that tackling terrorism is everybody’s business because, when the terrorists strike, the bomb splinters do not kill selectively – the splinters cannot differentiate between the good and the bad.