Flight finally arrives two days late to Toronto

An Air Canada flight that saw passengers stranded in Manchester, England, for two days landed in Toronto on Sunday afternoon.

The airline said it will be in touch with the affected customers for a full refund.

The flight to Toronto was scheduled to leave Manchester on Friday, but Air Canada said as many as 197 passengers had to wait until Sunday before taking off.

An Air Canada spokeswoman called it an “unfortunate situation” caused by mechanical problems and crew duty restrictions.

Isabelle Arthur said in an email to The Canadian Press that the airline wanted to “apologize for the extended delay.”

Arthur said the situation didn’t meet Air Canada’s standards and “we are sorry we’ve let our customers down.”

Canada’s largest airline was taking heat from the stranded passengers over the weekend.

One person tweeted “horrendous experience.

Stuck in Manchester for 2 days and no one has been in contact to tell us what’s going on.”

Another tweet to Air Canada said “A second night in Manchester ... due to more flight delays. AirCanada this is not how to treat your passengers.”

Manchester residents Melanie Best and her husband had booked the flight with plans to attend a wedding celebration in Toronto.

In an email to The Canadian Press late Saturday night, a frustrated Best described their long and trying ordeal.

She said they boarded the plane Friday after a two-hour delay, then sat on the tarmac for the next five hours while mechanics tried unsuccessfully to fix a hydraulic pump.

Thomas Sutherland, who was held captive in Lebanon for more than six years until he was freed and returned home to become professor emeritus at Colorado State University, has died.

Sutherland died in Fort Collins on Friday at the age of 85, according to Colorado State University, where he taught animal science until he left to become dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Science at American University in Beirut.

There he was taken hostage by Islamic terrorists in 1985 and held for more than six years.

Sutherland was one of a number of Americans in Lebanon - including Associated Press bureau chief Terry Anderson who were kidnapped by terrorist groups in the 1980s.

“I spent six years out of the seven years I was in captivity with Tommy,” Anderson told The Associated Press on Saturday. “We were kept in the same cells and sometimes on the same chain. Whenever they moved us, generally Tommy would show up with me. He was a kind and gentle man.”

Sutherland taught him French when they were hostages, Anderson said. “He spoke beautiful French. We practiced irregular verbs,” he said.

Anderson said Sutherland “was a guy who remembered everyone he ever met. He never forgot anyone. I don’t know how he did it. He was such a people person that he remembered everybody. When we were in prison, we would sit and talk about things we had done and places he had gone. He always talked about the people he met there, and he remembered them. He was a very, very good man.”

When Sutherland was freed in 1991, he returned to CSU and served as professor emeritus. The Denver Post reported Sutherland took up acting in his early 70s and donated millions to area arts organizations (http://dpo.st/2a51OE0).

“The entire Colorado State University community joins once again in honouring a true hero - who believed that an understanding of agricultural science could bring relief to people and communities in hunger - and that education could be a force for good and light in our world that would transcend borders and differences among nations,” Colorado State University President Tony Frank said in a posting Saturday on CSU’s website.

In 1996, Sutherland and his wife, Jean, came out with a book about the Middle East and their ordeal titled “At Your Own Risk: An American Chronicle of Crisis and Captivity in the Middle East.”

The Sutherlands were longtime community leaders and volunteers, CSU said. They formed the Sutherland Family Foundation, which has supported many Fort Collins nonprofits.

In 2014 the Sutherlands received the annual Founders Day Medal in recognition of their service to the university, Fort Collins, and higher education worldwide. The medal is given “to those whose pioneering efforts have had an extraordinary influence on the character and development of CSU,” the posting on CSU’s website said.

Thorbjorn Falldin, a pipesmoking sheep farmer who became prime minister in Sweden’s first non-Socialist government after World War II, has died at 90.

Falldin, who had led the Center Party, died on Saturday evening at his farm in northeastern Sweden, Center Party leader Annie Loof said.

Loof described Falldin as one of the top political leaders of the 20th century in Sweden.

“He was a sharp politician and confident leader and a committed and caring person,” she wrote on the party’s website. “He is a true model and icon for many of us.”

As head of the agrarian party, Falldin led a centre-right coalition to power in 1976, ending 40 years of Social Democratic rule. Two years later the government collapsed amid disputes over nuclear power, which Falldin’s party strongly opposed at the time.

He was reappointed prime minister after the 1979 election, serving until 1982, when his government was defeated by Olof Palme’s Social Democrats.

Falldin was born on April 24, 1926, into a family of farmers in the northern village of Hogsjo. Throughout his political career he remained close to his roots, returning to his farm on weekends to care for the sheep or dig up potatoes.

Falldin’s calm, quiet manner contrasted with Palme’s wit and sometimes aggressive debating style. The two dominated Swedish politics until Falldin resigned in 1985 after a dismal election result. Palme was assassinated a year later, a murder that remains unsolved.

Falldin rose through the ranks of the Center Party with grass-roots support and became party leader in 1971. He took the party in a pro-environment, anti-nuclear direction. To this day, the Center Party tries to be seen as the green alternative in Sweden’s non-Socialist camp, though it has relaxed its opposition to atomic energy.

Falldin is survived by his wife Solveig, their daughter and two sons.