Homeowners fed up with council's refusal to repair road outside their houses order ton of tarmac and fill in the potholes themselves. Daily Mail

  Fed up residents forced to fix their own potholes after a year long dispute

  The 100 metre stretch of road had 100 potholes, some were 6ft wide 

  Homeowners, some in their 90s, said the potholes were 'dangerous'

  The pensioners, with an average age of 75, filled the holes themselves 

  Council refused to mend potholes due to a wrangle over road ownership 

Homeowners were fed up with their council's refusal to fix potholes outside their houses - so they ordered the tarmac and did it themselves.  

After a year long fight to fix 100 potholes on a 100 metre stretch of road, six pensioners, of Pudsey, Leeds, took matters into their own hands and repaired them themselves.

The men refused to take no for an answer when Leeds City Council highways bosses declined to carry out the work on the basis it is a private unadopted road.

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A hero for our time: Inspired by the man who built his own toll road? He's one of countless Britons rising up to solve problems the State's too useless to fix Daily Mail

Businessman sets up private toll road just 340 yards long charging motorists £2 a time to bypass closed section of main road. Daily Mail.

Militant Spanish mayor plans invasion of Gibraltar in anti-British protest, Daily Express

A MILITANT Spanish mayor has announced plans to occupy Gibraltar with thousands of supporters in a one-day protest to claim the disputed territory for Spain.

Communist Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo made headlines two years ago after organising Robin Hood-style raids on supermarkets and handouts of the stolen food to poor families.

Now the left-wing union he leads is preparing for a mass invasion of the Rock on August 29.

Gordillo, mayor of the town of Marinaleda near Seville as well as head of the Andalucian Workers Union, has claimed they will cross the border peacefully.

But he has insisted on keeping secret the details on how he and his supporters will get into Gibraltar, hinting union members could cross by foot and car as well as arriving by plane and boat before staging their headline-grabbing protest.

Around 2,000 people are expected to take part although the union has 20,000 members and is hoping for support on the day from Spaniards who work on the Rock or are visiting as tourists.

Mr Sanchez, who boasts of running his town like a communist utopia, told a Spanish paper: "We will enter Gibraltar from different points and then see what we do. "It will be a peaceful demonstration but a very revindicative one."We have to take advantage of the surprise factor to be able to achieve our aims."

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Gibraltar rejects Spanish border plans, Daily Telegraph

Britain's first armed police on routine patrol, BBC, Why on Earth, do we need armed police ?

In a little-noticed move, a small number of police officers are now routinely carrying sidearms while on patrol in much of Scotland - the first in the UK outside Northern Ireland to do so. How did this come about, and does it alter the relationship between the constabulary and the public?

Saturday night in Inverness. Outside a McDonald's restaurant, a scuffle between two men breaks out. Three police officers arrive to intervene. So far, so mundane.

Except that strapped around the hips of each of the policemen approaching the brawl is a holstered Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol.

It's a sight that once would have been unthinkable. In this corner of the Scottish Highlands - an area with one of the lowest crime rates in the UK - the officers showing up to a relatively workaday disturbance are armed.

Although every police force has a firearms unit, for decades it has been an article of faith that in the mainland UK, almost uniquely among major industrialised nations, the police do not carry guns as a matter of course.

But with little fanfare at first, a policy of routinely allowing specialist officers to wear sidearms as they walk the streets of Scotland has come into being.

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