Word: marshals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...stay-seated zone, I was tapped on the shoulder and brightly invited to walk the length of the plane, unescorted, with my pack of poop. Which is exactly what I did, much to the wide-eyed horror of my fellow passengers, who clearly envisioned some burly air marshal tackling me in the aisle and diverting our flight to god know what airport for a six-hour FBI interrogation...
Tragically, what appeared to the air marshals to be a threat to passengers turned out to be the irrational behavior of a man with bipolar disorder who had stopped taking his medication. It was the first use of lethal force by an air marshal since 9/11, and just as happened after last summer's shooting of a man police thought was acting suspiciously on a London subway, questions quickly arose about why the deadly shooting had happened and how others can be avoided...
...major controversy centered on whether Alpizar said he had a bomb as he rushed off the plane. Dave Adams, a spokesman for the Federal Air Marshal Service, said Alpizar "was carrying the backpack and walking down the aisle yelling 'I've got a bomb in the backpack.'" But several passengers recall events differently. "I never heard the word bomb on the plane," says McAlhany, a construction worker from Sebastian, Fla., who notes, "I don't think they needed to use deadly force with the guy. He was getting off the plane." Jorge Borrelli, an Orlando architect who was also...
Critics of the air-marshal program cite the shooting as evidence that the agents should not be armed in the first place. "The idea that putting a gun on an airplane makes the public safer--that simply isn't true," says Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center, a nonprofit gun-control group. An investigation is being conducted by the Miami-Dade police. But right now, the one person taking blame is Alpizar's wife. "He didn't want to get on the plane," passengers heard Buechner say after the shots were fired. "My husband is dead...
...Willow Creek is not the only church that won't open. Across the country, hundreds of congregations like Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Tex., Discovery Church in Orlando, Fla., and Granger Community Church in Granger, Ind., have decided that it's not worth it to marshal the resources to hold services on Christmas Sunday. Sunday School teachers get a break, as do ushers, the choir, the musicians and, of course, the pastors...