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An Air Force reservist working for a defense contractor in Africa was charged Wednesday with making bomb threats on a flight to the U.S. that prompted four air marshals to barricade his boots and laptop in the rear of the jetliner for fear any explosives might go off in midair.

Derek Michael Stansberry, who served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan as an Air Force intelligence specialist, allegedly said that he had packed dynamite in his boots and other explosives in his laptop, and that he had a “pressure switch” to detonate the devices.

The plane, Delta Flight 273 from Paris to Atlanta, carrying 235 passengers and a crew of 13, was diverted to Bangor, Maine, on Tuesday. Stansberry was arrested and charged with interfering with a flight crew and making false bomb threats on an aircraft.

FBI Special Agent James R. McCarty said in an affidavit that Stansberry, 26, of Riverview, Fla., had passed a somewhat incoherent note to a flight attendant:

“I am not an American citizen. I was in Ouaga illegally. My passports and identity are fake. I bought that bag on eBay and have no association with the United States. I will take whatever COA the US wants. I will leave my wallet & passport on this aircraft.”

It was unclear what Stansberry meant by the acronyms.

Stansberry made rambling statements about holding “high level government clearances” for secret material, and said the bombs were to “divert attention from the fact that he had classified information,” McCarty said.

The crew alerted four air marshals on the plane. At that point, McCarty said, Stansberry was moved to the rear of the aircraft, along with his boots, backpack and laptop. Blankets and pillows were braced around the items to serve as a makeshift “bunker … to dampen the effects of any potential explosion.”

Authorities said it turned out there were no explosives in the laptop, although a minute trace of some chemical was “‘preliminarily” found on the boots. They theorized it may have come from his work in Africa.

His father, Richard Stansberry of Apollo Beach, Fla., could not explain his son’s alleged behavior. “Something did happen. But what caused it to happen, I have no clue,” the father said in an interview.

He denied that his son was stressed from his Air Force service from 2005 to 2009, when he conducted mission briefings for flight operations over Iraq and Afghanistan. “He was kind of like a big brother in the sky” to pilots, the father said.

He speculated that his son might have been affected by taking an Ambien sedative for the long flight. The son told authorities he took one Ambien, then said he took eight, then said he also used Valium.

Agent McCarty said the younger Stansberry “was responsive to questions, but he spoke in military jargon and had trouble keeping the events in a chronological order.”

Derek Stansberry told the FBI that fellow passengers were talking about him, ridiculing him and using interrogation techniques on him, and suggested that he concocted the dynamite story to divert attention from the fact he held “classified information,” according to an affidavit.

Passengers reported that seat cushions, pillows and blankets were taken to the back of the plane, where federal air marshals erected a bunker of sorts around the boots and laptop “to dampen the effects of any potential explosion,” FBI Special Agent James McCarty wrote in the affidavit.

Stansberry, 26, of Riverview, Fla., is charged with false information and threats, and interfering with a flight crew. He was ordered detained pending a detention hearing Monday.

His federal public defender, Virginia Villa, said she would seek a competency hearing but had not yet had time to fully review the case.

The Air Force described him as a former intelligence specialist who served four years, ending his Air Force career as a senior airman in 2009 at Hurlburt Field, Fla.

He told an FBI agent after the plane landed that there were no explosives and said he made the claim to deflect attention from the classified information he held, McCarty wrote. He also told an FBI agent that he had taken the sleep aid Ambien and told an air marshal that he’d taken eight of the pills, McCarty wrote.

Stansberry’s father, Richard, described his son Tuesday as “squeaky clean” and said the episode made no sense. He couldn’t be reached for comment Wednesday.

Delta Air Lines Flight 273 was the first of two flight diversions in a 24-hour span. On Wednesday, a Continental Express flight from Houston to the Washington area was diverted to North Carolina after a threatening message was written on a bathroom mirror, the Transportation Security Administration said.

On Tuesday afternoon, there were 235 passengers and 13 crew members on the Paris-to-Atlanta flight when it was forced to land at Bangor International Airport.

Among the passengers who had to spend the night in Bangor were Charde Houston, an all-star for the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx, and J. Alexander, featured on the TV show “America’s Next Top Model.” The weary travelers were finally allowed to depart Wednesday afternoon.

Stansberry came to the attention of the flight crew when he handed a rambling note to a flight attendant that said that his passport and identification papers were fake. He made the claim of having dynamite after being moved to the back of the plane for questioning by a federal air marshal.

Delta Air Lines Flight 273 from Paris to Atlanta was diverted to Maine because the passenger said he had a fake passport and explosives aboard the plane, U.S. officials said. The passport was real, law enforcement officials said, but there were no explosives on the Airbus A330.

The officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.

Richard Stansberry was perplexed after government officials told him that his son, Derek Stansberry, 26, of Riverview, Fla., had been detained Tuesday at Bangor International Airport.

“My son’s profession in the military required he live a squeaky clean life,” Richard Stansberry said.

In Washington, Air Force spokeswoman Lt. Col. Linda Pepin said the man detained on Flight 273 was a senior airman and worked as an intelligence specialist. She said he was on active duty from June 2005 to 2009 and was last stationed at Hurlburt Field, Fla.

Charde Houston, an all-star forward for the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx, was on the flight. She said she saw no clues on the handcuffed man’s face as he was led off the plane on Tuesday.

“He looked extremely calm, like a blank face. No emotion,” Houston said.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.

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Hundreds of job-seekers did just that in Queens in the hopes of landing a coveted union job.

Construction workers, engineers, electricians — hundreds spent the weekend right here. Many left with a job application, while many others walked away empty-handed.

“The sky’s the limit after this!” said Aaron Johnson of Mount Vernon.

Johnson is living month-to-month, struggling to pay the bills, with a 4-year-old daughter to support — and he was one of the lucky ones.

After three days of sleeping on the street, he left with one of just 750 job applications handed out for a position as an elevator technician apprentice — a secure job with pension and benefits and an earning potential up to $40 an hour.

“You don’t wanna keep working these dead-end jobs, check to check to check to check. I don’t want to do that anymore,” Johnson said.

More than 1,000 eager applicants began lining up as early as Friday morning armed with a variety of skills — and warm blankets.

Vivos is building 20 underground “assurance of life” resorts across the US, capable of sustaining up to 4,000 people for a year when the earth no longer can. The cost? A little over £32,000 a head, plus a demeaning-sounding screening test that determines whether you are able to offer meaningful contribution to the continuation of the human race. Company literature posits, gently, that “Vivos may prove to be the next Genesis”, and they are understandably reluctant to flub the responsibility.

Should you have the credentials and the cash, the rewards of a berth in a Vivos shelter seem high. Each staffed complex has a decontamination shower and a jogging machine; a refrigerated vault for human DNA and a conference room with wheely chairs. There are TVs and radios, flat-screen computers, a hospital ward, even a dentist’s surgery ready to serve those who forgot to pack a toothbrush in the hurry. “Virtually any meal” can be cooked from a stockpile of ingredients that includes “baked potato soup” but, strangely, no fish, tinned or otherwise. Framed pictures of mountain ranges should help ease the loss of a world left behind.

“What we have seen is a substantial change in mentality among the overseas community in the past two years,” said Jackie Bugnion, director of American Citizens Abroad, an advocacy group based in Geneva. “Before, no one would dare mention to other Americans that they were even thinking of renouncing their U.S. nationality. Now, it is an openly discussed issue.”

The Federal Register, the government publication that records such decisions, shows that 502 expatriates gave up their U.S. citizenship or permanent residency status in the last quarter of 2009. That is a tiny portion of the 5.2 million Americans estimated by the State Department to be living abroad.

Still, 502 was the largest quarterly figure in years, more than twice the total for all of 2008, and it looms larger, given how agonizing the decision can be. There were 235 renunciations in 2008 and 743 last year. Waiting periods to meet with consular officers to formalize renunciations have grown.

Samsung Electronics Canada, which recently introduced its 3-D TV in this country, admits the company has only now started to study the long-term effects of watching 3-D television using its “active” glasses which shutter on and off.

“Your left eye shutters 60 times per second and your right eye shutters 60 times per second (with the glasses),” marketing director Robert Gumiela said in an interview.

“We’re not sure how you react to shuttering, but we’re issuing this warning: ‘Be very careful. If you start to feel dizzy, stop watching’.”

Samsung issued a 3-D warning several weeks ago and Gumiela says it was done “to make sure we’re doing our due diligence.”

The advisory also urges parents to watch their children for lightheadedness and involuntary movements like eye or muscle twitching, as well as cramps and nausea.

Gumiela was asked why pregnant women, the elderly and people with serious medical conditions were also told to avoid its dizzying effects.

“We don’t have any concrete evidence yet, but the legal teams have just said, ‘Let’s cover all bases just in case’,” he said.

Chicago Democratic Reps. John Fritchey and LaShawn Ford made a public plea to Gov. Pat Quinn on Sunday to deploy troops.

The request comes amid a recent surge in violent crime, including a night last week that saw seven people killed and 18 wounded, mostly by gunfire.

Fritchey says Chicago has had 113 homicide victims this year. He says the police department has done a commendable job, but its resources are stretched thin.

Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis says he appreciates the lawmakers’ frustration and willingness to help, but doubts the National Guard is the best answer.

Two-year-old twin Ashley Jade Epapara had been “perfectly fine” before dying at her Upper Mt Gravatt home, on Brisbane’s southside, on April 9.

Parents David and Nicole are shattered by the mysterious death of their baby girl. “It’s dreadful, it’s a very hard time,” Mr Epapara said yesterday.

National health authorities have ordered doctors to stop giving seasonal influenza vaccinations to children under five after dozens of serious reactions, including convulsions.

Ashley’s death is being investigated by police and the office of the coroner. A spokesman for Brisbane coroner John Lock confirmed yesterday that a report was being prepared.

Mrs Epapara told The Sunday Mail that “tests are being carried out” on her little girl.

…

More than 45 children experienced convulsions and fever, with some having to be taken to hospital in intensive care after receiving the vaccine in Western Australia.