Go tidy your room!

A nine-year-old German girl was so upset about having to tidy her room she put up a sign in her window urging passers-by to call police for help.

Pedestrians in the central city of Braunschweig saw the girl crying in the window, holding up a sign up saying "Help! Please call the police!" Next to her sat a small boy. Quickly alerted, officers rushed to the scene to discover the girl had rowed with her mother about tidying her room and enlisted her two-year-old brother's aid to attract attention.

"The room looked like a battlefield," said a spokesman for local police on Monday. "Officers told the girl to tidy her room. When they came back two hours later to check, it was all cleaned up. And the mother and daughter had made up too."