Stewardess Helps Land Flight After Co-Pilot Cracks

After an Air Canada captain had his co pilot handcuffed and dragged from his seat during a January flight, a female flight attendant helped steer the London-bound passenger jet to the ground in Ireland, the Guardian reports. The original co-pilot was “quite harried” when he entered the cockpit, a report released today shows, and his condition quickly deteriorated mid-air.

“The first officer began conversation which was rambling and disjointed in nature,” the report says, becoming belligerent and uncooperative. A struggle ensued, and the cabin crew helped remove the pilot, who was later checked into a psychiatric unit. The heroic attendant, a qualified commercial pilot, came forward when the captain asked passengers if any professional pilots were on board.

Mariners Hire Baseball's First Asian-American Manager

Don Wakamatsu is the first Asian-American manager of a major league baseball team, AP reports, hired today by the Seattle Mariners. Wakamatsu, 45, played catcher, mainly in the minors, before coaching stints with Texas and Oakland. The Oregon native—who says he knows just a little Japanese—inherits a Mariners team that lost 101 games last season.

Ability to 'See' Content Sets New Video Search Site Apart

A new Web site that makes video searchable by actual images, rather than by often inaccurate and misleading metadata tags, is making finding the clips you’re looking for easier, Katherine Boehret writes in the Wall Street Journal. VideoSurf.com—currently in its public beta form—“sees” images rather than relying on tags and, Boehret says, it does a pretty good job.

VideoSurf is at its best when searching for famous faces. It presents results in a “filmstrip” format, allowing users to watch a video from several points, and it allows users to edit videos to specific lengths and send those portions as email attachments. VideoSurf aggregates content from YouTube, CNN, Hulu, ESPN and Comedy Central, as well as 55 other sites.

Japanese girl makes her pitch for pro team

TOKYO – The knuckleball — the fluttering, hard-to-hit pitch that's rare in the major leagues — is propelling a 16-year-old girl to the pros in Japan.

Eri Yoshida was inspired to learn how to throw the knuckler after seeing a video of Boston Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield. On Monday, she broke the gender barrier by being drafted for an independent league team as Japan's first female professional baseball player.

"Hope I can see her pitch one day," Wakefield said in a message he texted to the Red Sox that was relayed to The Associated Press. "I'm honored that someone wants to become me. I wish her the best of luck. Maybe I can learn something from her."

The high schooler was chosen by the Kobe 9 Cruise in the Japanese League, which starts its inaugural season in April.

The Cruise are a far cry from Tokyo's Yomiuri Giants. Making the squad is more like earning a tentative slot on a farm team than warming up in the bullpen for the Red Sox.

Even so, the 5-foot, 114-pound Yoshida has smashed the glass ceiling with her unorthodox, sidearm pitch in baseball-crazy Japan, where women normally are relegated to amateur, company-sponsored teams or to the sport of softball.

Doctors transplant windpipe with stem cells

LONDON – Doctors have given a woman a new windpipe with tissue grown from her own stem cells, eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs.

"This technique has great promise," said Dr. Eric Genden, who did a similar transplant in 2005 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. That operation used both donor and recipient tissue.

Only a handful of windpipe, or trachea, transplants have ever been done.

If successful, the procedure could become a new standard of treatment, said Genden, who was not involved in the research.
The results were published online Wednesday in the medical journal, The Lancet.

The transplant was given to Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old Colombian mother of two living in Barcelona, suffered from tuberculosis for years. After a severe collapse of her left lung in March, Castillo needed regular hospital visits to clear her airways and was unable to take care of her children.

Doctors initially thought the only solution was to remove the entire left lung. But Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, head of thoracic surgery at Barcelona's Hospital Clinic, proposed a windpipe transplant instead.

Once doctors had a donor windpipe, scientists at Italy's University of Padua stripped off all its cells, leaving only a tube of connective tissue.

Meanwhile, doctors at the University of Bristol took a sample of Castillo's bone marrow from her hip. They used the bone marrow's stem cells to create millions of cartilage and tissue cells to cover and line the windpipe.

Experts at the University of Milan then used a device to put the new cartilage and tissue onto the windpipe. The new windpipe was transplanted into Castillo in June.

"They have created a functional, biological structure that can't be rejected," said Dr. Allan Kirk of the American Society of Transplantation. "It's an important advance, but constructing an entire organ is still a long way off."

So far, Castillo has shown no signs of rejection and is not taking any immune-suppressing drugs, which can cause side effects like high blood pressure, kidney failure and cancer.

"I was scared at the beginning," Castillo said in a press statement. "I am now enjoying life and am very happy that my illness has been cured."

Her doctors say she is now able to take care of her children, and can walk reasonable distances without becoming out of breath. Castillo even reported dancing all night at a club in Barcelona recently.

Genden said that Castillo's progress needed to be closely monitored. "Time will tell if this lasts," he said. Genden added that it can take up to three years to know if the windpipe's cartilage structure is solid and won't fall apart.

People who might benefit include children born with defective airways, people with scars or tumours in their windpipes, and those with collapsed windpipes.

Martin Birchall, who grew Castillo's cells at the University of Bristol, said that the technique might even be adapted to other organs.

"Patients engineering their own tissues is the key way forward," said Dr. Patrick Warnke, a surgeon at the University of Kiel in Germany. Warnke is also growing patients' tissues from stem cells for transplants.

Warnke predicted that doctors might one day be able to produce organs in the laboratory from patients' own stem cells. "That is still years away, but we need pioneering approaches like this to solve the problem," he said.

Maine man sheds 140 pounds to join the Marines

Army and Navy recruiters took one look at 330-pound Ulysses Milana and told him to forget about joining. "'You've got to lose weight,'" Milana remembers them saying. But Marine recruiters were willing to work with him as he began his weight-loss journey in December 2007.

Now, 11 months later, Milana is 140 pounds lighter as he leaves Monday for Parris Island, S.C., to begin boot camp.

It wasn't easy, Milana said, but he managed to slim down through exercise, healthier eating habits and forgoing an occasional beer after work. The 23-year-old said he even refused a beer at his going-away party Saturday night.

Milana said he always wanted to follow in his family's footsteps by serving his country. His wife, Latoya, also comes from a military family.

Much of his weight-loss motivation came from Latoya, a nurse, who helped him reduce his calorie intake when he began his effort in earnest last December.

"It was really difficult for him at first. He always said, 'I'm gonna lose weight.' But I never took him seriously," Latoya told the Sun Journal newspaper. "Then, when he started to do it, I told him he needed to cut his portion sizes way down."

Marine recruiters also worked with him, helping to develop a workout regimen.

"You can sit there and preach and preach, but if you're not willing to help, then it doesn't lead you to success," Staff Sgt. George Monteith said. "If I say, 'Go lose weight and I'll see you in a year,' then what kind of help have I offered to make that happen?"

A former culinary student, Milana said it was a challenge to give up favorites like pizza and hot wings, but cracking open a cold beer after work was perhaps the toughest guilty pleasure to abandon.

"It was really hard. You see all your friends drinking beer, and you're like, 'Oh, man, I want one,'" he said. But his determination kept him on track, and he would head for the gym or don a head lamp and go out for a run.

Virginity Lie Not Grounds for Divorce: Court

France has overturned a Muslim couple’s divorce ruling made on grounds that the bride lied about being a virgin, the BBC reports. That means the couple is married again—whether they like it or not. Husband and wife both accepted the original decision, but it sparked a public outcry; some feminists slammed it as “a real fatwa against the emancipation of women.”

In the case, the husband’s lawyers held that he had been duped into marrying a woman who’d assured him she’d never had a boyfriend. Feminists said that, were the gender roles flipped, that argument would never fly; others wondered if the ruling was affected by the couple’s religion in a country that calls itself secular.