Eideard

A film-maker was arrested by armed police as he was preparing to shoot his latest picture, after two toy cap guns were mistaken for real weapons.

Chris Martin sparked a security scare when neighbours reported that they had spotted guns and claimed a petrol bomb had exploded in a back garden in Bristol. A police helicopter was scrambled and about 20 officers – including an armed response unit – swooped and arrested Martin.

But the weapons turned out to be a harmless toys and the explosion a controlled one carried out in preparation for the film, which tells the story of a young man’s struggle in credit-crunched Britain. Martin, 42, said: “Police cordoned off the whole street and arrested me. I was told to put my hands up and warned that the officers had loaded weapons.

“I was shouting ‘they are prop guns, they are prop guns!’, but I was handcuffed, put up against a wall and ordered not to move or speak. There must have been around 20 police there in total…

Martin, a city councillor, said he had visited a police station to show them the guns and tell them they were going to be used in his film, Cal. But it went wrong on Saturday when he held a prop day at his house in Montpelier for his crew to go through some stunts…

Police realised the mix-up after 15 minutes and de-arrested Martin. He said: “I don’t have any complaint against the police. They behaved perfectly properly and I realise they were doing their job…

Avon and Somerset police confirmed that armed officers and the force helicopter had been sent to the scene…

There was a bright side for Martin – he was able to get some shots of the police helicopter that he intends to use in the film.

It’s an ill wind, blah, blah…

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A destroyed helicopter lies on its side in the parking lot of the Joplin Regional Medical Center in Joplin, Mo. A large tornado moved through much of the city, damaging the hospital and hundreds of homes and businesses.

The alert was raised by several members of the public yesterday afternoon when they spotted what they believed to be a live white tiger in a field near Hedge End, Southampton, Hampshire.

The police helicopter was scrambled and a golf course cleared after police arrived at the scene and confirmed the sighting.

Armed police were called to the scene in case the animal came too close to members of the public.

Specialist staff from nearby Marwell Zoo also attended to advise and potentially tranquilise the wild animal…Plans were put in place to close the nearby M27 motorway if necessary in case the tiger moved in that direction.

But as police officers carefully approached the ”wild animal” they realised it was not moving and the helicopter crew, using thermal imaging equipment, realised there was no heat source coming from it…

”The tiger then rolled over in the down draft from the helicopter and it was at that point it became obvious it was a stuffed life-size toy.

At this moment they’re treating as a lost-and-found event. Har!

A climber who fell 1,000ft down the face of a Scottish mountain was found by a rescue helicopter, standing up and studying a map and suffering only cuts and bruises.

The 36-year-old man, who has been named as Adam Potter, from Glasgow, was in a group of four climbers who reached the 3,589ft summit of Sgurr Choinnich Mor, about five miles from Ben Nevis, early yesterday afternoon, when he lost his footing and fell. He was kept overnight at the Southern General hospital, in Glasgow, for observation for injuries that were said to be “non life-threatening”.

Police said Potter was happy for his name to be released but would not be giving any interviews. They described him as “the very fortunate climber”.

His first piece of good fortune was that a Royal Navy Sea King helicopter was already in the air on a training exercise and arrived at the scene only 35 minutes later…

When they spotted somebody standing far below at 792.5 metres and beneath three high craggy outcrops, they assumed it must be the wrong man and flew back to the summit, where they saw bits of Potter’s kit scattered in a vertical line down the face of the mountain…

“We honestly thought it couldn’t have been him as he was on his feet, reading a map,” Lieutenant Tim Barker, the observer for the crew from HMS Gannet, based in Prestwick, Ayrshire, said. “It was quite incredible. He must have literally glanced off the outcrops as he fell, almost flying…”

Barker said: “He is lucky to be alive. It’s hard to believe that someone could have fallen that distance on that terrain and been able to stand up at the end of it, let alone chat to us in the helicopter on the way to the hospital. I have to say that, when we got the call and realised the details of where he’d fallen, we did expect to arrive on scene to find the worst-case scenario.”

Sometimes you’re lucky. Sometimes you aren’t. There’s a very detailed relation of Adam Potter’s fall and survival over here.

I’ve had the good fortune to stand atop Sgurr Choinnich Mor. Tired; but, enjoying a very special view. A few years later I attended the funeral of one of the best climbers I knew. He died on Ben Nevis.

Two lost hikers in Annadel State park were rescued Saturday evening by the Sonoma County sheriff’s helicopter, thanks to the light from their cell phones.

“We were able to locate them because they shined their cell phones up at us. We have night vision goggles on board. That kind of stuff stands out like a spotlight,” said Sgt. Dave Thompson.

The sheriff’s helicopter was in the area on another call just after dusk…when a 911 call came in at 6 p.m. from two lost hikers…The two young women who had hiked or jogged into the park before dark after parking their car on Carissa Avenue called authorities to say they were lost…

The sheriff’s helicopter was able to locate the two young women relatively quickly on Orchard Trail. The chopper landed and took them back to the deputies waiting outside the park…

“They were definitely dressed for a walk or run in the park. They had on summer clothes and short sleeve shirts,” Thompson said. “As temperatures drop, you can start to get into trouble if you’re out there overnight.”

He said the women, in their late teens or early twenties, “were definitely a little cold, a little disoriented. They were certainly happy to be located.”

Cellphones rock. Back in the day, the reason I got my first cellphone was that our local sheriff’s office had moved to an early arrangement utilizing cellphone towers to get a rough location on folks who were lost or injured in the wilderness. Which comprises a lot of what is northern New Mexico.

I had recently crashed my mountain bike on a trail in the Caja del Rio that I later learned probably hadn’t been traversed in two years. Almost broke my ankle. Intimations of mortality are a bear!

A French woman had to be rescued by helicopter after she got stuck in a tree where she took refuge from a herd of wild pigs she encountered while strolling in a valley.

The 30-year-old was walking near the southwestern town of Bagneres-de-Luchon on Monday when she took fright after seeing the boars and climbed up a nearby tree.

When she later tried to climb down she fell six feet and got stuck in branches from where she called rescue services with her GPS-equipped mobile phone and was able to give them her exact location, police said.

When rescue workers arrived they decided they would need a helicopter to extricate her safely from the tree and summoned one from a nearby base.

“She was shivering and suffering slightly from hypothermia” but had no broken bones or other injuries, said a rescue worker.

Fearless little buggers!

Ready to give out parking tickets

Patricia Pantano, education director of the Camino de Paz Montessori School and Farm in Cuarteles, between Española and Chimayó on N.M. 76, said the raid occurred Sept. 21 during the lunch hour.

“We were all as a group eating outside as we usually do, and this unmarked drab-green helicopter kept flying over and dropping lower,” she said. “Of course, the kids got all excited. They were telling me that they could see gun barrels outside the helicopter. I was telling them they were exaggerating.”

After 15 minutes, Pantano said, the helicopter left, then five minutes later a state police officer parked a van in the school’s driveway. Pantano said she asked the officer what was happening, but he only would say he was there as a law-enforcement representative.

Then other vehicles arrived and four men wearing bullet-proof vests, but without any visible insignias or uniforms, got out and said they wanted to inspect the school’s greenhouses. Pantano said she then turned the men over to the farm director, Greg Nussbaum.

“As we have nothing to hide, you know, they did the tour and they went in the greenhouses and they found it was tomato plants and so that was the story,” she said…

Some parents, who did not want to be named, said they, too, were concerned about the raid on their children’s school.

Pantano said she did not want to make too big an issue out of the raid, but questioned why such a commotion was necessary when anyone who asked would have been given a tour of the greenhouses.

“We’re sitting here as a teaching staff, always short on money, and we’re thinking, ‘Gosh, all the money it takes to fly that helicopter and hire all those people, it would be great to have this for education.’ ”

Let’s all be glad we live in the land of Liberty, a nation that has its priorities in order.

Har!

From the GUARDIAN Eyewitness series

Pakistanis crowd around an army helicopter as it delivers desperately needed food supplies to the village of Tul in Sindh Province, southern Pakistan, which is surrounded by floodwaters.

Chopper recovery – after the gang ditched it

The company that owns a cash depot targeted in a daring helicopter raid this week said Friday it is offering a reward of more than $1 million for information about the heist.

G4S said it is offering up to 7 million Swedish kronor ($1.01 million) for information leading directly to the arrest and conviction of the offenders or the recovery of the stolen money…

The company did not disclose how much money had been lost, but the thieves could have gotten as much as the equivalent of several millions of U.S. dollars, according to CNN affiliate TV4.

A group of heavily-armed thieves used a helicopter early Wednesday to land on the roof of the cash depot in Vastbarga, Stockholm, which serves automatic teller machines all across the capital.

They used explosives to get into the building, witness Bjorn Lockstrom told TV4, and later hoisted bags of money to the waiting chopper.

The thieves had also placed a bag marked “bomb” outside the police heliport, meaning Swedish police couldn’t immediately pursue the thieves because they had to first deal with the bag.

TV4 later reported that the bag never contained a bomb.

The thieves had also blocked the roads around the cash depot with metal spikes.

Newspaper and TV Talking Heads criticized the coppers for not opening fire on the helicopter as it lifted off the building – in the middle of Stockholm.

Well, duh! Disabling the chopper or not, there would have been a serious likelihood of shooting up a chunk of the city, as well.

Daylife/Getty Images

Employees of Tiversa, a security company that specializes in peer-to-peer technology, reportedly found engineering and communications information about Marine One at an IP address in Tehran, Iran.

Bob Boback, CEO of Tiversa, told WPXI-TV: “We found a file containing entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One, which is the president’s helicopter.”

The company was able to trace the file back to its original source.

“What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,” Boback said. Tiversa also found sensitive financial information about the cost of the helicopter on that same computer,

Someone from the company most likely downloaded a file-sharing program, typically used to exchange music, not realizing the potential problems, Boback said.

A minor number of Web-ignorant ideologues have announced this was Iran’s government “hacking” into U.S. secrets. No doubt the “enemy” source in Iran was another file-sharing geek as ignorant of security requirements as the unnamed Pentagon contractor’s IT department.

There is no patch for stupidity.