Detailed sea-floor maps made during the unsuccessful search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, released by Australia on Wednesday, could help increase the knowledge of rich fisheries and the prehistoric movement of the earth's southern continents. The Indian Ocean search ended in January after covering a lonely stretch of open water where under-sea mountains larger than Mount Everest rise and a rift valley dotted with subsea volcanoes runs for hundreds of kilometers. The whereabouts of the plane, which vanished in March 2014 en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board, remains one of the world's greatest aviation mysteries. However, information gathered during painstaking surveys of some 120,000 sq km (46,000 sq miles) of the remote waters west of Australia should provide fishermen, oceanographers and geologists insight into the region in unprecedented detail, said Charitha Pattiaratchi, professor of coastal oceanography at the University of Western Australia. "There are the locations of seamounts which will attract a lot of international deep sea fishermen to the area," Pattiaratchi said. High-priced fish such as tuna, toothfish, orange roughy, alfonsino and trevally are known to gather near the seamounts, where plankton swirl in the currents. Pattiaratchi said the location of seamounts would also help model the impact of tsunamis, given undersea mountains help dissipate their destructive energy, and potentially change our understanding of the break-up of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana. "To see this work come out of that tragedy that was MH370 is really quite astounding, they've taken it to a new level," said Martin Exel, a commercial deep-sea fisherman at Austral Fisheries who has fished in the area.<br/>
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Striking British Airways cabin crew have announced a further two weeks of action for the first half of August in their battle over pay and sanctions at the airline. Crew in the lower-paid mixed fleet working out of Heathrow started the latest 14-day walkout on 19 July, their 46th day on strike since January, meaning a month of strikes will now take place during the summer holiday peak. BA has said it has so far flown every booked passenger to their destination during the strikes, by merging departures, leasing planes and crew from outside, and rebooking onto other airlines. The mixed fleet crew represent about one-third of BA’s total cabin staff, and around 60% of them are in the Unite union. A British Airways spokesman said: “As during Unite’s previous industrial action, we will ensure all our customers reach their destinations. “Instead of calling further completely unnecessary strikes, Unite should allow its members a vote on the pay deal we reached two months ago.” Unite believes the extended action will soon leave BA unable to fill holes in rosters as non-striking crew – including some drafted in from other departments – reach a legal maximum on flying hours.<br/>
Japanese airport police found 30 bullets in an American Airlines crewmember's carry-on bag and said Wednesday that the flight attendant apparently carried them through his security checks at US airports. Police at Tokyo's Narita International Airport seized the bullets, loaded in two magazines, after finding them Saturday during a security check before the man boarded his duty flight back to the US. He was not carrying a gun. Airport police official Masatoshi Ito said the crewmember — identified only as a male US citizen in his 50s — told police he forgot to leave the bullets before boarding his Tokyo-bound flight. Keeping bullets in carry-on bags on flights is illegal under US law. Police released the man later Saturday as he posed no danger of destroying evidence, Ito said. The man and the airline also promised to cooperate in any future investigation. Police are still investigating why the bullets were undetected when he arrived at Narita and went through customs. Japanese police are also considering a possible violation of the gun and sword control law, but the flight attendant was not charged with any crime.<br/>