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A “furious” Mayor Bloomberg denounced the dunces who dreamed up the stunt – and the NYPD officials and bureaucrats who never told him about it.

By day’s end, an obscure City Hall deputy named Marc Mugnos, who makes $60,000 a year, was taking the fall for not telling Bloomberg that the low-flying planes were coming. He was reprimanded.

But there was plenty of blame to go around.

Louis Caldera, the director of the White House military office who sent Air Force One and the fighter jet on an “aerial photo mission,” got slammed by an angry President Obama.

“I approved a mission over New York,” Caldera said in a hastily prepared statement. “I apologize and take responsibility for any distress that flight caused.”

Obama was not on the flight.

Sources said the chief reason for the panic-inducing flight was to create souvenir pictures of Air Force One flying over the Statue of Liberty to be given out – like a presidential tie clip – to family, friends or supporters.

Air Force One has done flyovers of historic sites and monuments like Mount Rushmore and the Golden Gate Bridge for PR glam shots – at taxpayer expense.

Told to stay quiet about mission

Caldera did not state a reason for the “mission” in his apology, but he insisted that “federal authorities took the proper steps to notify state and local authorities in New York and New Jersey.”

NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said the department was told of the “aerial photo mission” last Thursday but was ordered to stay quiet about it. But they did alert 911 operators at 7 a.m. to tell callers it was an authorized military mission, he said.

Juliano Verbard, who was serving a 15-year term for rapes and sex assaults on children, and two of his jailed followers were hauled on board a chopper hijacked by three accomplices, senior regional officials said.

Verbard’s flight was France’s 11th helicopter jailbreak since 1986, and is bound to revive questions about security in its jails.

“It’s a great first for the island, one that Reunion could well have done without,” said prefect Pierre-Henry Maccioni, the French state’s representative and police chief in the territory.

“We would never have imagined anyone would use a helicopter to escape on a island where there’s very little chance of getting away abroad,” he explained, adding that an emergency manhunt had been launched.

The helicopter landed on waste ground a short distance from the jail and the gang escaped in a van that had been waiting for them, officials told AFP. The two crew members were unhurt and are assisting police.

The hijackers had chartered the chopper pretending to be tourists, before seizing control and directing the pilots to Domenjod prison, where it hovered just above an outdoor walkway and took on the escapees.

“One of them put a gun to my temple while another threatened to set fire to a bottle of petrol he had in his hand with a cigarette lighter,” the pilot told local broadcaster Antenne Reunion.

Verbard, 27, was the guru of the self-styled “Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary”, a cult with no connection to mainstream Catholism on the island of Reunion, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, some 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) from the African mainland.

He escaped with two followers, the father and son duo Alexin Jismy Michel, 51, and Fabrice Michel, 24, who were jailed for their part in the kidnap of a boy, 12-year-old Alexandre, whom Verbard had decided would be his successor.

He was jailed in February 2008 for attacks on children aged nine and 13, whose mother was the sect’s treasurer. He was also convicted of Alexandre’s kidnap and is under investigation in another alleged paedophile case.

At the time of his trial, psychiatrist Gerard Toulfayan described Verbard as “a extremely powerful manipulator with great intelligence.”

Verbard launched his cult in 2002 after convincing scores of followers that the Virgin Mary appeared to him every month. Adepts paid 20 euros (26 dollars) each for the honour of taking part in an appearance ceremony.

According to Verbard, Mary called him her “Lily of Love”.

Authorities attempted to dismantle the sect after Verbard, while on the run from police, was implicated in the kidnap of Alexandre, a boy that the cultist claimed was destined to become his successor at the head of the group.

Spectacular helicopter escapes have become an embarrassment for French penal authorities and, unlike Reunion’s Domenjod, jails in mainland France now often have protective nets over their exercise yards.

Since 1986, there had been 10 escapes from French jails in helicopters, most recently in July 2007 when gangster and murderer Pascal Payet managed to get out of Grasse prison in a hijacked chopper.

The Army’s solution is the Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System (ARSS), a small, unmanned helicopter equipped with a powerful .338-caliber rifle. An autopilot system handles the tricky business of flying while the operator lines up the kill shot on a remote monitor.

China, Russia and Taiwan said it would quarantine visitors showing symptoms of the virus amid a surging global concern about a possible pandemic.

World stock markets fell as investors worried that the deadly outbreak could go global and derail any global economic recovery. Airlines took the brunt of the selling.

The virus was suspected in up to 103 deaths in Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak with more than 1,600 cases suspected, while 20 cases were confirmed in the United States and six in Canada.

In Luxembourg, European Union Health Commissioner Andorra Vassiliou urged Europeans to postpone nonessential travel to the United States and Mexico “unless it is very urgent for them.”

The struggling automaker also said it will offer 225 shares of common stock for every $1,000 in notes held by bondholders as part of a debt-for-equity swap.

The annoucements came in a filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The story of these “ghost prisoners” was comprehensively documented last week by Pro Publica, an online investigative journalism group.

In September 2007, Michael V. Hayden, then director of the CIA, said, “fewer than 100 people had been detained at CIA’s facilities.” One memo released last week confirmed that the CIA had custody of at least 94 people as of May 2005 and “employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these.”

Former President George W. Bush publicly acknowledged the CIA programme in September 2006, and transferred 14 prisoners from the secret jails to Guantanamo. Many other prisoners, who had “little or no additional intelligence value,” Bush said, “have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments.”

But Bush did not reveal their identities or whereabouts – information that would have allowed the International Committee for the Red Cross to find them – or the terms under which the prisoners were handed over to foreign jailers.

The virus surfaced in February at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where 19-year-old Pvt. David Lewis told his drill instructor that he felt tired and weak, although not sick enough to skip a training hike. Lewis was dead with 24 hours.

The autopsy revealed that Lewis had been killed by “swine flu,” an influenza virus originating in pigs. By then several other soldiers had been hospitalized with symptoms. Government doctors became alarmed when they discovered that at least 500 soldiers on the base were infected without becoming ill.

It recalled 1918, when infected soldiers returning from the trenches of World War I triggered a contagion that spread quickly around the world, killing at least 20 million people. Fearing another plague, the nation’s health officials urged Ford to authorize a mass inoculation program aimed at reaching every man, woman and child. He did, to the tune of $135 million ($500 million in today’s money).

Mass vaccinations started in October, but within weeks reports started coming in of people developing Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease, right after taking the shot. Within two months, 500 people were affected, and more than 30 died. Amid a rising uproar and growing public reluctance to risk the shot, federal officials abruptly canceled the program Dec. 16.

Baxter spokesman Christopher Bona said the company has expertise in pandemic planning, research and development and manufacturing to rapidly develop potential flu vaccines.

“So when Baxter learned about the swine flu outbreak, the company requested a virus sample from the World Health Organization,” he said.

Baxter isn’t the only vaccine maker taking initial steps toward making shots against swine flu. GlaxoSmithKline Plc, based in London, has had conversations with WHO as well.

Bona said it’s premature to give any kind of time frame on how long it might take Baxter to develop a potential swine flu vaccine. But the company’s cell-based vaccine technology enables it to produce or manufacture vaccines in about half the time as conventional methods that use eggs. That effectively cuts production time to roughly 13 weeks from 26 weeks, once a vaccine is developed, he said.

Baxter has been developing a vaccine to protect against a potential bird flu pandemic. The vaccine, called Celvapan has received approval in Europe and is in clinical trials in the United States. Governments around the world have pandemic planning programs with Baxter. Some have stockpiled Celvapan or contracted to receive the vaccine if a bird flu pandemic breaks out.

Signalling the end, says Blackwell, to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print, or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton’s Book of Needlework. Blackwell hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer – the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

“This could change bookselling fundamentally,” said Blackwell chief executive Andrew Hutchings. “It’s giving the chance for smaller locations, independent booksellers, to have the opportunity to truly compete with big stock-holding shops and Amazon … I like to think of it as the revitalisation of the local bookshop industry. If you could walk into a local bookshop and have access to one million titles, that’s pretty compelling.”