A US airman has been credited with saving the lives of more than 300 passengers - after he spotted a fuel leak at 35,000ft.Staff Sgt Bartek Bachleda was a passenger on a flight from Chicago to Narita, Japan, when he saw the leak from a window.
He said he first noticed what looked like a leak during take-off, and kept an eye on it to be sure what he was seeing.
Staff Sgt Bachleda, whose job is to refuel airplanes, eventually realised it was an emergency - but when he raised the alarm he was initially ignored.
Sergeant Bachleda then filmed the leak on video before showing it to the flight attendant and telling her: "Ma'am, it's an emergency."
"She was completely serious and was no longer handing out drinks," he said. "I told her you need to inform your captain before we go oceanic."
The captain came from the cockpit to see the leak for himself and view the video footage. Sergeant Bachleda said the crew had been trying to figure out how the aircraft was losing 6,000lbs of fuel an hour.
The captain made a mid-air announcement the flight would be diverted back to Chicago, but then changed it to San Francisco so passengers could catch the only existing flight to Narita airport.
"When we got off the airplane everyone was thanking us," said the sergeant.
The captain said the flight would have never made it to Japan if Sergeant Bachleda had not raised the alarm.
Council fills in half a pothole
Council workmen filled in only half of three huge potholes - as the other halves were not on council land.
When workmen finally arrived to tackle the potholes, locals in Bloxwich, West Midlands, were delighted, reports the Daily Mail.
But after the contractors left, residents were astonished to see that three of the potholes had been filled in only halfway across.
The reason was because the boundary between the council land and housing association land runs straight through the holes.
The council said it could not carry out repairs on privately owned land without permission because it could be held responsible in the wake of any subsequent 'incident'.
Local butcher Keith Clarke said: "I've never seen anything like it in my life. I don't know why they can't just get their heads together with the housing association and sort the thing out."
Walsall Council, which employed the contractors, said the repairs were a temporary measure.
Glyn Oliver, Walsall Council's traffic and transportation manager, said: "We have a duty of care to maintain the highway but this does not extend to private land.
"If we had repaired the pothole on Walsall Housing Group land we could have been liable should an incident subsequently have occurred."
However, it has since consulted with the housing association and said all of the potholes would be completely filled in when the repairs are made permanent.
Books of few words
Some of the world's best known books have been condensed down to Twitter size.
Tim Collins, author of The Little Book Of Twitter, has transformed them into 140 characters, reports The Sun.
They include Shakespeare's Hamlet which becomes: 'Danish guy's mum marries his murdered father's brother. He sees his dad's ghost. Everyone dies. Fail.'
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, is rewritten as: 'Orphan given £££ by secret follower. He thinks it's @misshavisham but it turns out to be @magwitch.'
Wuthering Heights by Jane Austin becomes the pithy: 'Catherine Earnshaw marries Edgar Linton but really loves Heathcliff *sigh*.'
James Joyce's Ulysses is reduced to: 'Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He's probably overtweeting.'
Collins has also had a go at some modern best-sellers like Dan Brown's The Da Vince Code: 'Professor of symbology tries to solve a murder by following clues around touristy locations in Europe. Very few paragraphs are longer than tweets.'
And he cleverly manages to transform both Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary into the same 18 words.
They are: 'Woman meets man called Darcy who seems horrible. He turns out to be nice really. They get together.'
Story filed: 08:58 Friday 22nd May 2009 -->
