11-year-old boy flies alone to Rome

Urgent investigation launched after 11-year-old boyflies alone to Rome without passport or boarding pass

 Adam Sherwin

Wednesday, 25 July 2012

Ministers have launched an urgent investigation following a catalogue of security errors which allowed a boy of 11 to fly alone to Rome after boarding a flight at Manchester Airport without a passport, boarding card or money.

Airport staff have been suspended after Liam Corcoran evaded five security checks and boarded the Jet2.com flight unaccompanied. The “stowaway” was only discovered when concerned passengers alerted the flight Captain.

The Wythenshawe boy, who had run away from his mother at a Manchester shopping centre three miles from the airport, was returned safely to his family, at the conclusion of his 3,000 mile round trip.

Justine Greening, the Transport secretary, said: "I take any breach of security, very, very seriously. So we are now investigating with Manchester Airport and, indeed the airline, to find out exactly what happened.”

A spokesperson for Jet2.com said: “We are fully investigating the incident as a matter of urgency and the staff involved have been suspended during this investigation.”

Liam’s adventure began when he evaded his mother and made his way to Terminal 1 at the airport, which was packed with holidaymakers. The boy, said to have a keen interest in planes and buses, “tail-gated” a family group as they passed through security.

He was scanned but security failed to realise he was on his own and had no boarding card. He headed to the gate where passengers were boarding the Monday afternoon Jet2.com flight LS791 to Rome. Liam passed through a further security check at the gate without being asked to show either a passport or a boarding card.

Cabin crew failed to check whether he had a boarding-card stub when he boarded the Boeing plane. It is believed that the crew failed to carry out an accurate headcount after Liam strapped himself into a spare seat.

The pilot, alerted by suspicious passengers, radioed back to Manchester, where police informed the boy’s mother that her son was safe - but on his way to Rome. He remained on board after landing at Fiumicino Airport and was returned on the next flight back.

Five members of staff  working for Jet2.com have been suspended from duty while the investigation takes place.

The return flight was delayed by 80 minutes while the plane's crew were questioned by Italian border police. On this occasion, the elusive Corcoran was accompanied by airline staff who were sat with him.

Passenger Sarah Swayne, 26, from Nantwich, said: “He was very talkative and seemed quite un-fazed by it all. He was just sat there chatting away about how he’d been trying to run away from home. He seemed quite innocent really and I don’t think it had sunk in how serious the situation was.”

A Manchester Airport spokesman said: “This extremely serious matter is now being urgently investigated. It is clear that documentation has not been checked correctly at security and the boarding gate.

“The boy went through full security screening so the safety of passengers and the aircraft was never compromised.”

Ms Greening said the situation was “an unusual and serious breach and we are keen to find out what has gone on.”

START IT UP | Jessica Stillman

Jul 18, 2012

Your Desk Is Making You Stupid

Sitting around all day isn't just making you unhealthy. It might also be making you dumber.

Your desk, scientists reported recently, is trying to kill you.
According to the New York Times, scientists discovered that when we sit all day, "electrical activity in the muscles drops… leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects," and sadly even getting regular doses of exercise doesn't offset the damage. But now there's new evidence of the harm of sitting. Not only is it making you fatter, it might also be making you dumber.
Sabine Schaefer, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany, recently looked at the effect of walking on working memory. Your mother may have warned you not to walk and chew gum at the same time, but when Schaefer compared the performance of both children and young adults on a standard test of working memory when they were sitting with when they were walking, her results contradicted mom's advice. The British Psychological Society's Research Digest sums up the research results:
The headline finding was that the working memory performance of both age groups improved when walking at their chosen speed compared with when sitting or walking at a fixed speed set by the researchers. This was especially the case for more difficult versions of the working memory task, and was more pronounced among the children than the adults. So, this would appear to be clear case of mental performance actually being superior in a dual-task situation.
Or in other words, rather than assume that walking while thinking splits your mental and physical resources, leaving less to devote to each, the scientists actually found "an increase in arousal or activation associated with physical activity… which then can be invested into the cognition," according to the paper reporting the research. Walking increases your resources of energy, which you can then invest in thinking.
Why didn't walking at "fixed speed" have the same effect on working memory as walking at the subjects' preferred pace? The scientists speculate that, "walking at the fixed speed, which was considerably slower than the preferred speed in both age groups, might simply not have been fast enough to increase arousal sufficiently to achieve an effect," or that the need to "pay some attention to adjusting one's walking speed to the speed of the treadmill" interfered with the main memory task.
Of course, not every mental activity can or should be performed while walking, but this new research reinforces anecdotal evidence and other research findings that suggest being too tightly chained to our desks is bad for our minds as well as our physical health. Science shows we often have creative breakthrough when our minds are disengaged from the problem we're wrestling with, hence the common experience of getting great ideas while relaxing in the shower.
Getting up for a walk or a jog is another way to achieve this sort of head space--after all, it worked for Einstein and Charles Darwin. (Beer, apparently, also helps.) Other studies have demonstrated that even five minutes outside in nature can improve your mood and self-esteem.

Seventeen years after Srebrenica, the cover-up continues

Posted By Michael Dobbs Wednesday, July 11, 2012 - 1:18 PM Share

Today marks the seventeenth anniversary of the fall of the United Nations "safe area" of Srebrenica, which led to the most serious war crime in Europe since World War II. In what has become an annual ritual, 520 more coffins were brought to the memorial complex outside the U.N. base at Potocari with the newly identified remains of Muslim men and boys executed by Bosnian Serb forces commanded by Ratko Mladic. (See photograph above.)
There is a simple -- and horrifying -- explanation for why it has taken so long to identify the dead. In a belated attempt to cover up the crime, Mladic's men dug up mass graves containing the remains of the victims and scattered the bones all over north-east Bosnia. It took a massive international effort involving hundreds of investigators, forensic scientists, and DNA specialists to establish what happened. In some cases, remains were found in twenty different locations before being returned to loved ones.
It would be good if Bosnians of all ethnicities could remember this tragedy, pay their respects to the victims, and move on, as happened in Germany after World War II. Unfortunately, despite a wealth of corroborative evidence that around 7,000 prisoners were systematically executed, there are still many people who deny the basic facts of what happened at Srebrenica. As I showed in a previous post, this denial industry is being financed in part by the highest authorities of the Bosnian Serb statelet known as Republika Srpska.
Just a few years ago, in 2004, the Republika Srpska government apologized for the "enormous crimes" in the area of Srebrenica and issued an official report acknowledging that Serb forces had murdered thousands of Muslim prisoners. But the present Bosnian Serb president, Milorad Dodik, has backed away from this apology under the pressure of public opinion. Even though he personally had nothing to do with the crime, he has made himself complicit in the cover-up.
For a glimpse of the tactics used by the denialists, you need look no further than the comments section of my earlier blog post. Stephen Karganovic, who heads a Republika Srpska financed group calling itself the "Srebrenica Historical Project," claims that most of the Srebrenica victims were killed in legitimate "combat operations" with Bosnian Serb forces. In order to sustain this argument, he cherry-picks selective portions of the evidence, frequently misquoting testimony to the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal.
Thus, for example, Karganovic draws on the testimony of a Bosnian army general, Enver Hadzihasanovic, quoting him as saying that "2,628 officers and soldiers of the 28^th Division were killed in the post-July fighting from Srebrenica to Tuzla." As a reader pointed out, this is a complete distortion of the general's testimony, which you can find here. (See line 20 of page 9532.) He testified that 2,628 men of the 28^th Division were killed -- but did not make any determination about how many of these men were killed in fighting or in mass executions.
If Karganovic cannot be trusted to quote tribunal witnesses accurately, his entire "scholarship" is open to question. When challenged on the accuracy of his quote, he maintained that "it would seem likely that there must have been casualties on the Muslim side" as a result of fighting. That is no doubt the case, but it is altogether different from attributing to a Bosniak general the claim that 2,628 members of the 28^th Division were killed in combat.
Another argument frequently employed by Karganovic is that the DNA evidence collected from the remains of Muslim victims tells us nothing about the cause of death. That is true, if you look at the evidence alone, out of context with the rest of the crime scene investigation. In order to understand the significance of the DNA evidence, you have to consider it in relation to everything else, including soil samples, pathologist reports, eyewitness testimonies (not just by Muslim survivors but also by their executioners).
The Srebrenica crime scene was like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle deliberately scrambled by the perpetrators that took more than a decade of hard investigative work to reassemble. Karganovic's technique is to seize on individual pieces of the jigsaw puzzle -- a contradictory piece of evidence here, some misquoted testimony there -- in an effort to tell a completely different story. It is a technique that suits the purposes of those determined to deny the truth, including his Republika Srpska paymasters, but it should not fool anyone else.