I am Rich (grin)

And I thought I was bad...

all@large rather than clog up the waves of these forum seas can we not html link to the story banks instead? my surf-scrolling skills underpin the board beneath my baggy eyes. i'm not a hawker but a eyesore. the story will out from struggle so why flog Churchill's black dog.

Congrats!

Lend us a tenner, Joe...

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, sweat, Cold River, Wind, Stone, & Church on the hill. This might fix your earthly dilemma ... My sister Margaret and one of the Cousins I cherrish tells me to remind you, W.E. (West - East) that “people cannot live without stories anymore than they can live without bread.”

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, sweat, Cold River, Wind, Stone, & Church on the hill. This might fix your earthly dilemma ... My sister Margaret and one of the Cousins I cherrish tells me to remind you, W.E. (West - East) that “people cannot live without stories anymore than they can live without bread.” Czech Out the once in a lifetime, exclusive, advanced, scoop excerpt from Kold River http://www.authorsden.com/jozefimrich (grin)

This story is not for fainthearted ... IRLINE SAFETY: El Al shows pilots art of the fightback Jonathon Carr-Brown and Maurice Chittenden Tightening up CAPTAIN Uri Bar-Lev was about to level out his passenger jet at 31,000ft when he was alerted by his crew that he had hijackers on board, armed with guns and grenades. One was holding a stewardess hostage, a pistol to her head, as the other demanded entry to the cockpit. Bar-Lev, a former Israeli air force pilot, reacted instinctively. After passing a coded message to his crew to secure themselves, he pushed the nose of his El Al 707 down into a steep, twisting dive - a manoeuvre he knew would cause weightlessness. Seconds later, he forced the nose back up, ensuring that anyone who was not strapped down would be slammed into the walls of the plane. By the time he had completed the "negative g-dive", one hijacker lay dead after being shot by El Al security guards. The other, Leila Khaled, a notorious PLO terrorist, lay unconscious, pinned down by two guards. None of the 200 passengers on the Amsterdam-New York flight in 1970 was injured. "I was aware they had a gun at the head of my stewardess and they had shot a steward up to five times, but I wasn't going to let them take control of the aircraft," Bar-Lev said this weekend. It is the only known example of a pilot single-handedly foiling a hijack attempt. However, even after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, his actions are considered excessive among British airlines. Last week British pilots said they would be unlikely to consider such a manoeuvre because of the risk of injuring, if not killing, passengers. For Bar-Lev, however, the events of September 11 require a fundamental change in attitude. "El Al's pilots are all ex-army pilots and our approach is that you don't give in to terror. You fight back. Knowing that people are being killed is not pleasant but we saw in America that the consequences of letting a hijacker take control are potentially horrendous. "Americans and Europeans don't share this mindset. They can't be expected to. They don't have the same history. But they have to take responsibility - think about what they would do, be prepared to act. "Remember, a man with a knife can be overpowered with a fire extinguisher from 10ft away. Cockpits have axes and passengers always outnumber the hijackers." In the US, such militancy is starting to emerge. New guidelines from the American Air Line Pilots Association say its members should prepare passengers for the possibility that they might have to fight for their survival. Some pilots have already told boarding passengers they should throw anything they can lay their hands on at any hijacker. Armed guards are to be placed on almost all flights and £500m is to be spent on hardening cockpit doors and fitting CCTV to enable pilots to monitor the cabin. The Federal Aviation Administration has been told to look into a system that would allow air controllers to take the controls of a hijacked plane, or a warning system that automatically switches on an autopilot if a plane is pointed at the ground, a hillside or a building. Two middle-ranking US air force officers have been given authority by President George W Bush to order the shooting- down of civilian aircraft if they pose a threat. In Britain, where only Tony Blair has the authority to order the shooting down of planes, the mood is more cautious. Although Stephen Byers, the transport secretary, has said all options are being considered, including sky marshals, few obvious measures have been implemented. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has advised pilots to lock cockpit doors, but this was prompted not by the US terrorist attacks but by an air rage incident when a Kenyan man had to be wrestled to the ground by the captain on a flight from London to Nairobi. So far, the only airline to propose emulating the Americans is Virgin Atlantic. Tomorrow it is to ask the CAA if it can build a "cordon sanitaire" secure area between the flightdecks and the passenger cabins. A bulletproof door and a reinforced bulkhead would be built into each plane. If a hijacker did get into the 3Åft-long secure area - entry to which would be controlled by swipe cards - the captain or first officer could release nitrous oxide from hidden gas bottles to knock him out. Virgin has also contacted US firms that train sky marshals with a view to putting them on flights to and from America immediately. British pilots and cabin crew are, however, wary about some of the changes being mooted. Most think that locking cabin doors would prevent them from dealing effectively with normal emergencies such as problems with hydraulics at the back of the plane, while unarmed hijackers could overpower sky marshals, take their guns and become an even greater threat. A senior British 747 pilot said: "If a stewardess is under threat, few pilots would want to be held responsible for her death. El Al pilots are ruthless about this, but they are the exception. Even a trained guard can be overpowered. What you have to understand is that all security has positive and negative effects." With airlines facing a severe drop in passengers and income, it is not only the cost of security measures that is delaying action. A British Airways stewardess said: "Many of us have been asking to be issued with CS gas or pepper spray for some time, but BA won't hear of it. They're too worried about claims for compensation from passengers. Maybe that will change." Others believe the key responsibility lies with airports. "The airports must ensure that passengers and their baggage are screened. Unstable passengers must not be allowed on aircraft," said a senior BA Airbus captain. British airports have introduced screening of passengers to identify known criminals and second checks on hand baggage. It does not yet compare to El Al's forensic questioning of travellers, which can range from details of their itinerary to their personal background." "In 1986 El Al stopped an Irish woman carrying a bomb from getting on to a plane at Heathrow because she answered our questions about why her boyfriend wanted her to travel alone naively," said Isaac Yeffet, head of security at El Al for six years. "The following year we intercepted a German at Zurich airport carrying explosives because we couldn't understand why he had travelled to Switzerland to get on a plane to Israel. On both occasions the airport's x-ray machines failed to spot the explosive, and had it got on the plane any sky marshal would have been useless." Neither Yeffet nor Bar-Lev believes the worlds' airlines will adopt El Al's aggressive style of security, partly because of cost, but they believe this is a mistake. "Airlines have lost a fortune as a result of the attacks on September 11," said Bar-Lev. "If they had spent a fraction of that on increasing security when hijackings first began the tragedy may have been averted."

Vladimir Bukovsky has written a richly detailed, heavily documented account of how the Soviet Union aided Palestinian militants, Latin American revolutionaries, and even America's Black Panther movement. Based on materials unearthed in Russian archives, "Judgment in Moscow" also discloses Moscow's clandestine efforts to manipulate public opinion throughout the West. The book has been published in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Bulgaria. Leading historians of communism call it "fascinating," "stunning," and "a massive and major contribution." But, six years after the first French edition appeared, you still can't buy an English translation. Random House sought the rights in 1995, but dropped the project a few months later. A small British publishing house, John Murray, secured the rights, but never printed the book. To Bukovsky, it's nothing short of "political censorship." Bukovsky has a good deal of experience with repression. Born in Moscow in 1942, he spent most of his 20s and early 30s in Soviet prisons and mental hospitals, charged with possessing forbidden literature, organizing demonstrations, and other political crimes. In 1976, when he was halfway through a 12-year sentence, the Soviet Union released him in exchange for a communist jailed in Chile. Bukovsky completed his education, earning degrees from Cambridge University in England and Stanford University in California, and wrote "To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter" (1978) and other books. He now lives in Cambridge. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, Bukovsky got invited back to Moscow. Russian communists had sued President Boris Yeltsin for banning their party, and the government wanted Bukovsky to testify about the party's sordid past. The dissident said he would come only if the secret Soviet archives would be unsealed for purposes of the case. The government agreed. So Bukovsky spent some six months of 1992 poring over secret Politburo and Communist Party Central Committee documents. Using a laptop with a handheld scanner, he copied thousands of pages. Nobody tried to stop him, though many of the papers are festooned with such prohibitions as this: "Photocopying or making notes from minutes ... (or) making any reference to them in oral or written form, in the open press or other publicly accessible documents, is categorically forbidden." These secret papers, dating from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, form the core of Bukovsky's book. The manuscript (Bukovsky gave UPI the first chapter) demonstrates that communist, socialist and anti-Western movements around the world, some peaceable and some violent, weren't as home-grown as they seemed. If, to borrow the phrase of another communist leader, a thousand flowers bloomed, Moscow was surreptitiously providing the fertilizer. Documents show, for instance, that the Soviet Union was arming one of the most notorious militant leaders of the time, Wadia Haddad. One of the leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (a radical Palestine Liberation Organization faction), Haddad reportedly originated the idea of hijacking airliners to win attention for the cause. His troops included Carlos the Jackal. In 1974, Haddad told Moscow about his "prospective program of sabotage and terrorism." Besides attacks in Israel, he envisioned "actions against American and Israeli representatives" in Greece, Iran, Ethiopia and Kenya, but he needed KGB help to procure the necessary "special technology." A memo from KGB head Yuri Andropov to President Leonid Brezhnev recommends giving Haddad "a generally favorable response," notwithstanding the Soviet Union's "opposition to terrorism in principle." Brezhnev concurred. A year later, Andropov reported that the Soviets had shipped 50 submachine guns, 50 handguns (10 with silencers), and 34,000 rounds of ammunition to Haddad. "The covert delivery of arms was carried out in the neutral waters of the Gulf of Aden at night, with no direct contact, and with full observance of secrecy by an intelligence-gathering vessel of the Navy of the USSR," the memo reports. "W. Haddad is the only foreigner who knows that the arms were supplied by us." Another 1975 arms shipment to the Middle East, this one to Lebanon, included 600 submachine guns, 50 machine guns, 30 anti-tank weapons, 3,000 hand grenades, 2,000 landmines and 2 tons of explosives. "By the mid-1980s," writes Bukovsky, "the Soviet Union was training at least 200 Lebanese thugs per annum." Moscow trained and armed Latin American Marxists even as it denounced the United States for aiding those who opposed them. In 1976, according to Bukovsky's documents, the Soviets agreed to bring 19 "comrades" from Argentina, El Salvador, Paraguay and Panama to Moscow for special training in "party security, intelligence, and counterintelligence." In 1980, El Salvador sought Moscow training for "30 of our young communists," some of them assigned to be "commanders of sabotage units." The same year, the Soviets agreed to deliver "60-80 tons of Western-manufactured firearms and ammunition from Hanoi to Havana, to be passed on to our Salvadoran friends." According to a 1970 document, the Soviets also took an interest in America's would-be revolutionaries, the Black Panthers. Deeming the Panthers "a dynamic Negro organization which poses a serious threat to America's ruling classes," the document declares that the Communist Party of the USA "is attempting to influence the organization in the necessary direction." If the radical movement thrived, it could help "distract the attention of the Nixon administration from pursuing an active foreign policy." In addition, according to Bukovsky's manuscript, the Soviets worked to manipulate foreign opinion. They gave thousands of tons of paper to congenial newspaper and book publishers, subsidized foreign publishers by spending millions of dollars on their publications, and covered the operating deficits of communist bookstores in the United States, England, Israel, Belgium and Australia. In 1979, half of Soviet trade with Spain went through a firm whose president was helping arrange publication of a book by Brezhnev. Moscow correspondents of friendly foreign periodicals received free housing, telegraph and telephone service, travel, medical treatment and access to resort facilities. Bukovsky also documents dealings between the Soviets and American media companies. A 1966 memo reports that the ABC network hoped to produce a TV special on the daily life of a Soviet factory worker, with Soviet authorities to exercise prior approval before it could be shown on U.S. television. A 1967 memo seeks authorization to sell "one of the largest American television corporations," not further identified, the rights to Soviet documentaries on Vietnam, which would be incorporated into an American program and broadcast "on propagandist and economic conditions favorable to us." According to a 1979 memo, Francis Ford Coppola met with a Soviet representative in Cannes to discuss a joint Soviet-American film on disarmament. Coppola said the project had the endorsement of President Carter. "If agreement is reached," the memo reports, "the Soviet side will reserve the right to exercise control over the ideological and artistic content of the film at all stages of its production." The Soviets also worked in other ways to strengthen the disarmament movement. One target in the early 1980s was the international Palme Commission, whose members included former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and former British Foreign Secretary David Owen. "Despite agreeing generally with the Soviet point of view on many issues," the committee's Soviet delegate wrote, "such members of the committee as C. Vance, D. Owen, ... and a number of others tried (in the commission's report) to avoid wording which would be an exact repetition of Soviet terminology, and explained in private conversations that they are (wary) of accusations that they are following 'Moscow policies.'" The Palme report strongly urged "multilateral arms reductions." Fascinating stuff -- so why can't you buy the book? Troubles arose over the commentary and analysis that Bukovsky interspersed with the extracts of documents. Bukovsky's Random House editor, Jason Epstein, didn't return a call seeking comment. From correspondence that Bukovsky provided, it appears that Epstein believed the manuscript was too quick to accuse particular individuals of doing Moscow's work. "It is possible to have sympathized with the peace movement in good faith, as thousands of people did, without assuming either treachery or cynicism on their part," Epstein wrote. He wondered if the document concerning the Palme Commission might reflect an underling's "boasting to his bureaucratic superiors" rather than subversion. He wanted Bukovsky to follow up on various matters, too. Did Coppola make the film on disarmament? "Mr. Coppola is an important figure in the United States, as you know, and a letter or phone call from you to him would settle the matter. ... Your implication that Coppola agreed to Soviet censorship is, in the absence of further research on your part, potentially libelous under American law," he wrote. Epstein also discerned a "strongly anti-American bias," reflecting Bukovsky's conviction that the United States should have taken far stronger actions against the Soviet Union. In response, Bukovsky accused Random House of trying to make him "falsify history," and added: "I will never accept any political censorship, and anything even remotely resembling it can only provoke my extremely negative reaction. Due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to this form of relation between a publisher and an author." That letter extinguished Random House's interest in the project. John Murray, a small British press, then agreed to publish the book in partnership with the American company Regnery Publishing. John Murray announced the book in its catalog and hired attorney Martin Soames to vet the manuscript for libel. But Soames judged it "one of the most defamatory books which I have read since I became a solicitor," replete with such "wildly intemperate" criticism that the manuscript might simply prove unpublishable. Some of Soames's concerns seem excessive -- to avoid litigation, he recommended that Bukovsky document his assertion that John Le Carre writes "bad spy stories" -- but many others reflect the relative ease with which libel plaintiffs can prevail in British courts. Bukovsky dismissed the Soames letter as "rubbish" and sought a second opinion from his longtime friend Peter F. Carter-Ruck, author of a respected treatise on libel. Based on the manuscript's first 50 pages, Carter-Ruck concluded that "with modest amendments this work can be made reasonably safe." He added that he had encountered similar "timidity" some four decades earlier, when working to bring about the British publication of another Russia-born author's work. In the end, though, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita "was successfully published and we faced no proceedings." But John Murray didn't move forward with the British publication. "We can't," says Murray's Grant McIntyre. "The problem is potential libel --it's an absolute killer." He hopes, he says, to transfer the project to another British publishing house that has expressed interest. Regnery Publishing had planned to sell the British books with Regnery covers in the United States. "Without them, we couldn't do much of anything," says Alfred S. Regnery, president of the company. And there the project stands. John Murray still holds the English-language rights, says Bukovsky, so "I'm in a kind of limbo." While the manuscript was under consideration at Random House, two leading Sovietologists vetted it. Harvard's Richard Pipes called it "a fascinating work which demolishes a few more myths prevalent in the West about the Soviet Union and the Cold War." Some of the revelations are "stunning." Robert Conquest of the Hoover Institution deemed the book "a massive and major contribution," though he agreed with editor Epstein that the criticisms of the United States ought to be toned down: "My main qualm is that these passages will attract the main attention, and damagingly distract from the other highly valuable material." John Earl Haynes, a political historian at the library of Congress and the co-author of "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America" (1999) and other works, read Bukovsky's first chapter at UPI's request. The documents, Haynes said, "are extremely rich. ... No other source has produced so many high-level Soviet documents on these covert matters for the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s." Documents, Haynes added, need an explanatory text to place them in context and explain their significance. "Bukovsky does this, and does it very well, although he does not do it in the way I would. But then, he isn't a professionally trained research historian and I'm not an astoundingly brave Soviet dissident and a Gulag veteran. It is only natural that he would write with a different voice from that of a historical scholar." What to make of all this? Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as Bukovsky points out, public opinion in the West has flipped. Twenty years ago, those who accused Moscow of manipulating world affairs often got charged with recklessness, paranoia, or McCarthyism (Bukovsky himself endured more than a few such accusations). The Soviets, it was said, wanted peaceful coexistence, nothing more. Now that the Cold War is over, documents such as Bukovsky's significantly discredit the peaceful-coexistence viewpoint -- yet those who espoused it suffer no stigma, no loss of reputation. Instead, the revelations get shrugged off as old and unsurprising news. (In an illustration, Francis Ford Coppola's publicist declined even to ask him about the document suggesting that the filmmaker planned to submit to Soviet censorship. "That was what, 30 years ago?" she said.) In many circles, it seems that allegations of Soviet skullduggery went from the scandalously unspeakable to the tritely commonplace in a single leap. From Bukovsky's perspective, many Americans just don't get it. The Cold War was not merely "an obscure quarrel between the 'Russians' and the 'Americans,'" he said in a letter to Epstein, but rather "an ideological confrontation between communist dogma and democracy." In the former Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe, communists and former communists still hold power, and "their accomplices in the West are still very much a part of the establishment." And, as his personal history attests, Bukovsky cannot abide being pushed around by the establishment -- any establishment. In writings and interviews in recent years, he has likened the European Union to the USSR, contended that feminists are heeding "a Marxist strategy," and pronounced the American ban on in-flight smoking "a violation of human rights." Once a dissident, always a dissident. "Judgment in Moscow" would be an important book, historian Haynes predicted, but not a universally popular one. "Large sections of the academic world and the media world ... will either attempt to ignore the book or treat it with condescending disdain," he observed. "The New York Times will probably not approve. That is the price of saying what Bukovsky is saying, and I don't know of any way around that." For now, though, what Bukovsky is saying can't even be heard.

you may find the following details that are missing from your piece of interest jozef: upon touchdown, the two israeli security guards left the airplane via the emergency hatch located in the cargo hold. they sneaked across the tarmac and boarded a tel aviv el al flight thus escaping british justice - the plane landed at heathrow in September 1970 you see and the 'security guards' didn't want to become involved in the inevitable british investigation, especially since they had killed a nigerian hi-jacker. leila khaled was on remand in britain when the USA forced the british government of ted heath to hand her over ( 3 weeks after her arrest) in exchange for hostages held by the PLF in jordan when they hi-jacked 5 aircraft and blew 3 of them up for the cameras. the event became known as 'black september'. this term was later adopted by the organistation that resulted from the merger of several palestinian resistance movements. stories within stories?