Word: afa
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...airline security has not improved since Sept. 11, according to a flight attendants' group: defense training for flight crews. "Every day flight attendants go to work as unprepared for an attack as we were on Sept. 10, 2001," says Patricia Friend, head of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), which represents 50,000 at 26 airlines. Although Congress mandated last November that flight attendants receive cabin-defense training, the AFA claims the training has been inadequate: classes offered by most airlines have been brief (as short as 45 minutes) and have included little or no hands-on instruction. "If there...
...idea of lifting the carry-on load. The Association of Flight Attendants has for several years been advocating for restrictions on carry-ons. "The amount of stuff people haul around with them is overwhelming the new security system and slows the boarding process," says Pat Friend, head of the AFA. "It's time to put strict rules in and abide by them...
Each national branch of AFA sends at least one of its members to attend the large anticapitalist demonstrations. The disorder committed by the group at each respective protest is coordinated by local AFA members. That's why, two weeks before the Goteborg summit, a team of Swedish police began shadowing radical cells in Denmark that were mobilizing for Goteborg. "We made extensive effort to contact the AFA people who were the ringleaders," says an official. After a bus carrying a group of suspicious Danes entered Sweden, a single cop went undercover to monitor their moves. "He trailed behind them, watched...
...violence at anticapitalist demonstrations can't be attributed solely to radical groups like AFA. Sebastian Stein, 19, of Bad Munstereifel, Germany, says he went to Sweden on a fishing trip and thought the "Reclaim the City" rally in Goteborg would make for an exciting diversion. But when baton-wielding police moved in to break up the march, Stein shouted something and threw a rock at them; he was shot in the leg and arrested. He now faces up to three years in Swedish prison. "Nothing was prepared here," his lawyer, Claes Ostlund, says...
...reviewing stand with progressively more sophisticated arms. The climax came with China's pride, the big missiles. The contingent was led by two short, stubby rockets that Western observers recognized as CSS-NX-4s, still experimental but deployed for trials aboard one of China's two Afa-class ballistic-missile submarines. With a limited range probably similar to that of early U.S. sub-launched Polaris missiles (1,200 to 1,500 miles), the CSS-NX-4 nonetheless is a potent weapon: its existence ensures that part of China's nuclear deterrent can survive an enemy...