Sideswipe

David Wishart and his workmates have found a creative use for fruit stickers.

Checkout operator Katie explains that the stickers on individual pieces of fruit and veges distinguish varieties and may have an embedded code for easy pricing. "There are about five different types of apples and three different pears and so on, so it's not always easy for the checkout operator to remember the code and/or brand name of the fruits. In order to solve this problem, how about growing your own fruit and veges or accept long delays at checkouts when operators are trying to find the name and prices!"

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Labour MP Darren Hughes may be the party's junior whip but he is one of its senior wits. On the matter of the Prime Minister's near-death drama in the skies above his electorate on Wednesday, the Otaki MP quipped that Helen Clark would go to great lengths to visit his electorate. "I said to her the door is always open - drop in whenever you like."

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Our Helen's mid-air drama caused headlines round the world. The Sun tabloid newspaper proclaimed "PM's Jet Flight Terror" and the posher Guardian story on the matter was headed "NZ official's plane door opens".

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Four years on from 9/11, capturing the perpetrators is such a priority that not one of the 30,000 people who work at the FBI has gotten round to updating the "Most Wanted" profiles of Osama bin Laden to include any mention of 9/11. Bin Laden is wanted in "connection with the August 7, 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people", says the FBI website. No mention of the World Trade Centre, just a vague reference to bin Laden being "a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world".

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A family of gluten intolerants claim the tiny stickers on fruit are like poison to them: "The adhesive on the stickers must be edible so they use gluten-containing ingredients. So I and my fellow gluten-free family and friends must buy only stickerless fruit and veg because, believe me, washing does no good, especially after the adhesive has soaked into the fruit. Surely this must be significant in terms of the food labelling legislation (gluten-containing foods must be declared as such) since, contrary to common sense, a banana or apple really does contain gluten because of those stickers. Get rid of the stickers!"