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Mary Jane Plane

If you’re going to traf­fic drugs, it may be best not to fly near a heli­copter car­ry­ing the Pres­i­dent of the United States.  Two Air Force F-16 fight­ers inter­cepted a pri­vately owned Cessna air­plane that entered the same Los Ange­les air­space as marine One yes­ter­day as heli­copter was fer­ry­ing Pres­i­dent Barack Obama.  Police report­edly dis­cov­ered about 40 pounds of mar­i­juana inside the plane after it landed at Long Beach Air­port.  The Secret Ser­vice said the pres­i­dent was never in any dan­ger.  Home­land Secu­rity ques­tioned the pilot, who has been turned over to Long Beach police and remains in cus­tody.  He will face local pros­e­cu­tion, offi­cials said.  A NORAD spokesman declined to dis­close how close the Cessna came to Marine One.  The Fed­eral Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion had noti­fied pilots that there was an eight-mile radius around Los Ange­les Inter­na­tional Air­port that was off-limits to air traf­fic yes­ter­day.  It was that radius that the Cessna violated.

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