A Brit Abroad

A delegation of Pakistani military officers has abandoned a trip to the US after being mistaken for terrorists and ordered off an airliner. The eight officers, led by a two-star Navy rear admiral, were on their way to a meeting at US Central Command. They had boarded a United Airlines Flight from Washington to Tampa on Monday but were taken off the aircraft because of comments made by one of the men, according to an airline spokesman.

Pakistani officials said the officer, weary from the journey to the US, had said, “I hope this is the final plane to the destination” causing a female passenger, who believed he was threatening the aircraft, to panic.

Major General Athar Abbas, a spokesman for the Pakistan military, said the officers had been cleared by subsequent security inspections.

“However, as a result of these checks, military authorities in Pakistan decided to cancel the visit and called the delegation back,” the army said in a statement.

The dispute appeared to be a sign of the mistrust between the US and Pakistani military, which claimed the delegation had been subjected to “unwarranted checks”.

Paranoia gone mad people!

AJ Goode and his wife Mary lived in their car for five months before getting a room at the shelter in Los Angeles, California

Mary Goode and her husband, AJ greet each other with a kiss and dissolve into laughter. They are irrepressibly upbeat.

But their attitude belies their story - and their status as faces of the new, working homeless.

The two are not destitute, but they live in one room at the five-storey Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles.

The homeless shelter is a step up from their previous address - a white Chevy pick-up truck.

“We were working in Tennessee at this motel, and it got really slow there. And we lost our jobs,” Mr Goode says.

They lived where they worked, so they lost their home, too.

Mrs Goode laughs: “It’s a good truck. But we lived in it for four months because of the recession.”

“Life can be very hard on you. If you don’t have a steady base of income coming in, if you don’t have any savings, you can go down real fast and stay there,” she says.

I find it hard to reconcile this housing situation and the idea of no state health care with a country like America. So good at some things, so poor at the things that make a society work. It just seems that either you make it or you die. Can that be right? Or maybe I’m just not looking deep enough? Sometimes I think “Yeah, I could live there, near the family” then I see this kind of story and think “but what if that happened to us? How would we survive?”Maybe some of you would call me a Socialist in a denegrating fashion but quite honestly I find the idea of caring for the whole of society from top to bottom preferable to throwing members of that society onto the scrap heap if they happen to stumble.Please tell me I’ve got it all wrong.