And the federal officials disclosed Wednesday that after the Air France cancellations, they reached an agreement this week with a French delegation to impose tougher security on flights that American officials suspect may be at risk.
The airline agreed to return the plane to Mexico and rescreen the passengers, and the American authorities allowed the flight to complete its scheduled route, the official said. Officials refused to disclose the city of origin or the itinerary for the flight, citing both diplomatic and national security concerns.
mr ed - explain me these things. a) in reality, how can the reason be both a diplomatic and a nationanl security concern? b) if its a national security concern, how are they gonna keep every passenger quiet? 100 passengers? 200? surely these passengers know that they had to go back to mexico. the passengers had to explain to their families why they arent where they expected to be. and business associates. if the flite information is a national securtiy issue, then every passenger should be in gitmo. have they banned all the local press from saying 'hey, that flite that was turned back, that was from here'? or how bout the psa that warns travellers about security risks at the particular airport? or by the airline? how bout letting passengers know that there mite be extra delays flying a particular airline which has apparently inadequate screening in case they have an important meeting, or a wedding to go to?

reading all these holiday air stories, i first thought it was the requisite ramping of tension *and* heavyhandedness. but this odd line about diplomatic/security concerns sounds very suspicious. heres a hypothesis - the mexican plane didnt even exist. i wonder if we'll see more details about the story.

"At Dulles airport, the police surrounded a British Airways flight from London that landed at 7:05 p.m. Wednesday and directed it to a remote site, a security official involved in the operation said.
Intelligence developed by American officials indicated that the route of the flight might be a target of terrorists, and at least one name on the passenger list appeared to match a name on a terror watch list, the security official said"
mr ed - heres another flite - with a name appearing to match a name. fukking hell.

"In another instance several days ago, a flight headed for the United States from Latin America was grounded on the runway for several hours after United States officials told the air carrier they were not satisfied that passengers had been adequately screened."
mred - and this 'air carrier' - it makes it impossible to disprove/deny it. praps they learnt from the stupid specifity of the BA/gulfstream lies.
this whole stupid airline thing has been turned up to eleven recently - firstly there was the demand of *all* passenger details, then the stupid marshall thing, and now this recent spate of bollox. it seems more orchestrated than simply the requisite fear thingy. it almost seems as if its a part of an orchestrated campaign to really bring down the curtain - we are seeing the same thing in the trade arena. steel or cows or whatever.

and again, the target is a nafta country, mexico this time. ive ranted previously (in continued amazement) that 'even' canada seems to be a target. and of course the madcow 'came from canada'. of course it did. and when it was proved that the apparent source was the wrong age, and therefore couldnt be the source, they suddenly found new documents that proved that the cow was in fact 6 years old, not four years old. fancy that. can u imagine that happening in practice? what steps do u think that *specifically* entails? do you realise that u misread the birthcertificate? "oh - i thought that read '2000', but on closer inspection, its actually '1998' - but u can kinda see how the 'one' looks like a bit like a 'two'". mind u, they still claim to have the same cow - just that they muddled the birthdate - they havent switched to another cow from the same herd or farm or anything. they somehow realised that a cow that they dont have any of is 2 years older than first thought. how do u learn such information? as far as i can tell, all they know is that one cow had MCD, and they reckon its gone to 8 states, and curiously, "guam", and they reckon its from canada. id love to see the investigative horsepower that could determine/change the age of the cow retrospectively - in a day or two once the orignal story proved impossible. perhaps the armed forces should employ the food detectives and see if we cant catch the evil osama, or the plame leaker. of course, i know nothing about the process - they may have a very good explanation for it all.
not surprisingly, the US is canadas largest beef mkt.
there is also the apparently deliberate confusion of the cow having multiple tags - no wonder its so hard to work out whats going on. none of these issues prove anything on a standalone basis - but like everything suspicious these people do, the questions quickly start to mount on closer investigation. and when u can see things happening in advance, and they play out according to the script, it really starts getting creepy. this whole NYT article is very creepy. my plane experience at xmas was spooky.

in a curious coincidence - just to prove that im completely bonkers - i just noticed that the acronym for MadCowDisease is MCD. macca's ticker. another curiosity is that the maccas share price is about where it was 2 weeks ago - despite the scary media screaming of the 'plummeting' shareprice. at its worse i think it was off 5.4% or something - which seemed oddly mild. given the whipsaw action in the mkt these days, a 5% swing is hardly newsworthy, let alone calamitous. and its now 8% above its lows. and another curiousity, mcd's major shareholder is the increasingly spooky buffet.

of course, this whole sniffing exercise is in the context of my earlier, unrelated intuition that maccas was apparently being specifically vilified on fauxnews.