New name for Lunt?

The rural community of Lunt is considering changing its name because of vandals who repeatedly deface the village sign. Residents of the historic Merseyside enclave fear it is becoming a laughing stock because of yobs who frequently deface the first letter of its name.

An alternative name has been proposed by some who are fed up of being greeted by an offensive word every time they enter their village.

Retired police officer Martyn Ball, a prospective Conservative councillor, is canvassing residents for their support for the change.

Dr Ball, now a law lecturer, said: "We are all painfully aware of the repeated times our village sign is defaced by mindless yobs who change the L to a C. Drive in every day and you see a very offensive word."

He has suggested that Launt be used as an alternative name, which he says would be pronounced the same.

But not all the inhabitants of the village next to Sefton in Merseyside are happy with the idea. Parish councillor Steward Dobson, 84, said: "This village is very, very old and people don't want the name changed.

"The vandalism has been done for years, it's not children who are doing it. I know that because we have decent children in this village."

David Roughley, whose family has farmed in Lunt since 1851, added: "At the end of the day we live in Lunt and we don't want to change because of a few yobs. It is the vandals who should change, not the village."

Lunt is an ancient settlement whose existence was first recorded in 1251 in the Chartulary of Cockersand Abbey, according to the village website.

Ice cream ship

DEN OEVER, The Netherlands - A Viking ship made from ice-cream sticks set sail for England from the Netherlands on Tuesday.

The 15-metre (50-foot) long ship, named after the Norse god Thor, is made from 15 million recycled ice-cream sticks glued together by U.S.-born stuntman Robert McDonald, his son and more than 5,000 children.

"If you can dream it you can do it ... I want to teach children that anything is possible," McDonald said.

Badly injured as a child in a gas explosion that killed the rest of his family, he has loaded his ship with cuddly toys and plans to reach London and visit children in hospitals.

He and his crew hope to cross the Atlantic later on the ancient Viking route to North America via Iceland and Greenland.

Ringo beheaded

A foliage sculpture of Beatle Ringo Starr in the band's home city has been beheaded by vandals.

The topiary feature, which took 18 months to cultivate into the fab four, was unveiled at the city south Parkways Transport Exchange last month.

Starr's head was chopped off, but the rest of the Beatles were untouched.

The 67-year-old outraged some Liverpool residents when, after opening the European Capital of Culture events, he said he missed nothing about the city.

Merseytravel funded the topiary which was commissioned from artists in Tuscany and cultivated on the Wirral.

The piece was created by Italian sculptor Franco Covill and then nurtured and shaped into George, Ringo, John and Paul.

No reservation

German police are looking for thieves who stole a mile and a half of the central reservation from a busy motorway. The thieves made off with more than 20 tonnes of the metal strips from the A6 motorway in Vierheim near Frankfurt.

Police said they must have spent hours dismantling the 500 four metre strips of metal that made up the stretch of the central reservation. They said the gang must also have used specialised equipment to take the strips apart and then move them.

A police spokesman said: "We are puzzled how the thieves were able to escape with their load without anyone noticing. A large truck with a lifting device would have been needed to transport all that metal.

"So far we have not been able to find a single witness who would have seen probably a large number of people with a huge truck moving parts of a motorway's central reservation."

Rainforest condoms

The Brazilian government has begun producing condoms using rubber from trees in the Amazon. The health ministry says the move will help preserve the largest rainforest in the world.

It will also cut dependence on imported contraceptives, which are given away to fight Aids. The Brazilian government has one of the biggest programmes in the world to distribute free condoms in the fight against the disease.

The new state-run factory is in the north-western state of Acre, and will initially produce 100 million condoms a year, which will be known by the name Natex.

Officials believe that not only will it generate income for Amazon residents, but it will involve using a product which is widely available and can be obtained without destroying large areas of the rainforest.

The latex will come from the Chico Mendes reserve, an area named after the famous conservationist and rubber tapper who was shot dead in 1988 by local ranchers.

Shortest soccer team?

Brazilians have long held a reputation for being the giants of football, now they can also lay claim to being the first country with a team made up entirely of dwarves.

The players may be lacking in height, but after choosing the team name Gigantes do Norte - the Giants of the North - it appears they have a generous sense of humour.

Managed by professional coach Carlos Lucena, the Giants were put together in an effort to raise the profile of dwarves in Brazilian society and challenge "sizeist" attitudes.

The average size of the team is about 4ft, while the smallest player is just 3ft 3in.
Together the 11 dwarves play in Belem, north-east Brazil, taking on youth teams in 40-minute matches.

The diminutive team use full size goals, but this hasn’t proved to be a setback for their 4ft 7in keeper who managed to keep a clean sheet in their last match, beating the opposition by 4-0. Their friendly game was against the Barcarena under-13 team, in the Barcarenao Stadium at the mouth of the Amazon River.

World's smallest girl

At just 1ft 11 in tall, she is dwarfed by her neighbour's baby, but Jyoti Amge is 15 years old. The teenager, who is the world's smallest girl according to the Indian Book of Records, has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia. Now fully grown, she weighs just 11 lb.

Far from being unhappy about her tiny size, Jyoti says that she enjoys the celebrity status her height has brought her.

"I am proud of being small. I love the attention I get," she told the Sunday Mirror. "I'm just the same as other people. I eat like you, dream like you. I don't feel any different."

Jyoti attends her local high school, in Nagpur, India, where she studies alongside classmates of her own age, though she sits at a specially made miniature desk.

Her mother, Ranjana, 45, explained that her daughter's condition was not apparent until some time after her birth.

"When Joyti was born she seemed quite normal. We came to know about her disorder when she was five," she said. "Jyoti is small, yet cute, and we love her very much."

Like any other teenager, she loves listening to pop music and watching DVDs and even hopes to become a Bollywood actress. She has recently recorded an album with her favourite Indian pop star, Mika Singh.

Two-faced girl eating "normally"

The parents of an Indian girl born with two faces say she is eating and breathing normally despite having two pairs of eyes and lips and two noses.

The baby, who is yet to be named, was born to factory worker Vinod Kumar and wife Sushma in Noida, northern India, and has been drawing observers who consider her a deity.

"I had never seen something like this in my life so naturally I was a little scared when I first saw her," her father said. But the girl, born three weeks ago, has found easy acceptance in the family, who have no plans to consult doctors to check if the girl can get treatment or corrective surgery.

"The doctor said everything was normal when she was born. So where's the need to get medical help?" the father said. "She's fed through one mouth and sucks her thumb with the other. We use whichever mouth is free to feed her."

Doctors said it was a rare case, with the girl having two skulls joined together, and that separating them was out of the question.

"Since the heads are fused, separating them is not possible," pediatrician DK Gupta of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences said, adding the child's oral and nasal cavity and other passages should be checked.

Grand theft avocado

California - Two men are doing time for trying to steal avocados after police found them with a pile of the green fruit, 40 gallon trash bags and pruning shears in a Cal Poly orchard.

Braulio Franco of Santa Maria and Alejandro Sanchez were sentenced last week to 60 and 45 days in jail, respectively, according to court records.

Misdemeanor loitering and false identification charges were dropped as part of a plea deal.

“Both guys were charged with attempted grand theft avocado,” said prosecutor Eric Dobroth.

The men were caught at the Cal Poly campus farm around 10:30 p. m. March 12.

Mission Produce company owns the orchards that sit on state land and works with Cal Poly’s agricultural program.

Princess Diana unlawfully killed

Princess Diana was unlawfully killed due to the "gross negligence" of driver Henri Paul and the paparazzi, an inquest jury has found. The jury reached the same verdict for her companion Dodi Al Fayed.

The jury also specified that Mr Paul's drink-driving and a lack of seatbelts contributed to their deaths.

Mr Al Fayed's father Mohamed refused to accept the verdict. Former Met Police chief Lord Stephens said he hoped the verdict would bring "closure".

The inquest into the 1997 Paris crash that killed them and Mr Paul lasted six months.
The jury returned joint verdicts of unlawful killing through grossly negligent driving - or gross negligence manslaughter.

Coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker thanked them for their "considerable devotion" to duty.

Princess Diana and Dodi was killed when Mr Paul crashed a hired Mercedes into a pillar in the Pont de l'Alma in Paris in the early hours of 31 August, 1997.

Lincoln letter record

A letter written by former US President Abraham Lincoln has sold for $3.4m (£1.7m) at auction in New York, setting a record for any American manuscript.

The 1864 reply to a petition by 195 children asking for the freedom of "all the slave children in this country" surpassed the previous record of $3.1m.

It was bought by an American collector bidding by telephone, Sotheby's said.

The letter was the highlight of a sale of some 100 manuscripts written by other American historical figures.

Other highlights included documents written by George Washington, a Lincoln autograph penned on the day of his famous Gettysburg Address, and one from the sixth US president, John Quincy Adams, foretelling the Civil War.

Sotheby's said the record-breaking manuscript was "arguably Lincoln's most personal and powerful statement on God, slavery and emancipation".

Fight over a blankie

LITTLETON, Colorado - Six police cruisers responded to an emergency alarm at Willows Child Learning Center only to find a teacher and a parent fighting over a child's favorite "BaBa."

Littleton Police spokesperson Lt. Mike Broadhead says officers scrambled to the center, at 5301 South Lowell Boulevard, between 7 and 8 a.m. Thursday.

"This came in as a holdup or a panic alarm," Broadhead said. Broadhead says a teacher was arguing with the father of a kindergarten-age student over whether the student's favorite blanket, "BaBa", could be brought to the day care.

Willows Child provides blankets to kids and discourages them from bringing their own, which could contain germs.

Broadhead says police called the day care before responding to make sure the alarm signified a genuine emergency.

"She said, 'Yeah, I need help right now,'" Broadhead recalled.

Upon arrival, the angry parent had left and police told the teacher to save the alarm for true emergencies. Broadhead says the father was asked to take his child from the day care and never return.

Police declined to identify either the teacher or parent.

Eye fixed after 67 years

A man who was blinded in one eye during the Blitz has had his sight restored by Scottish specialists, 66 years later. John Gray, 87, was badly injured during the Luftwaffe's bombing raid on Clydeside and was told he would never again see through his right eye.

However, when he started to go blind in his left eye too, specialists decided to see if there was anything they could do about the wartime wound. An eye surgeon at Glasgow's Southern General replaced the scarred lens. Mr Gray can now see through the eye he has not used in six decades and is sufficiently sighted to sit a driving test.

In 1941, he was on duty as a firewatcher when the air raid sirens sounded. As the night drew on he watched as the German Luftwaffe flew overhead on their way to drop thousands of tonnes of explosives on Clydeside.

It was to be the most devastating bombing raid the Germans were to carry out in Glasgow. And it was the last thing John remembered for several days.

Olympic torch debacle

The mayor of Paris has canceled the last section of the Olympic torch relay following protests in the city, the London Times reported. Mayor Bertrand Delanoe announced the cancellation after Green Party members of the city's council hung a Tibetan flag over the City Hall's facade.

Security officials snuffed out the Olympic torch and carried it through Paris in the safety of a bus at least five times Monday as the chaotic protests against China's human rights record turned the relay into a chaotic series of stops and starts.

Despite massive security, at least two activists got within almost an arm's length of the flame before they were grabbed by police. A protester threw water at the torch but failed to extinguish it and was taken away. Officers tackled numerous protesters and carried some away.

Yesterday, the Olympic torch was met with widespread protests and scuffles between demonstrators and police Sunday as thousands turned out to protest Olympic host China's human rights record and its recent clampdown on Tibet.

Some demonstrators threw themselves at the torch, and at least one tried to snatch it away. Another tried to put out the flame with a fire extinguisher. They were quickly pushed back and cuffed by Metropolitan Police, which said its officers made 36 arrests on a variety of charges.

Luke who's back

A British lottery winner has gone back to his old job serving burgers at McDonald's.
Luke Pittard, 25, shared a £1.3million jackpot with his girlfriend 18 months ago.

He celebrated in the usual way, buying a new home and splashing out on a lavish wedding and holiday in the Canary Islands. Then he realised that he really missed his job.

So he asked to go back and couldn't be happier, getting up at the crack of dawn to flip burgers for £5.85 an hour.

Pittard, dubbed the McMillionaire, said: "I loved my work at McDonald's before I won the money, and I'm really enjoying being back there again. There are so many familiar faces that it was like coming back to a group of old friends. To be honest, there's only so much relaxing you can do. I'm only young and a bit of hard work never did anyone any harm."

Butts needed

Australian artist Adrian Avenell needs 200,000 two-tone cigarette butts to make a sculpture and he wants smokers to help him.

"I've estimated if I can get 50 40-a-day smokers to save their butts for me I could get what I need in about six months," Mr Avenell of Devonport in Tasmania said. "I'm asking smokers to save their butts and post them to me, then I'll reimburse them their costs."

Although a smoker himself, Mr Avenell says his 10-cigarette a day habit would never provide enough butts for the 4.5m-long, 1.8m-wide sculpture he is planning.

The sculpture will feature a pavement covered with cigarette butts, a coffin and the Grim Reaper.

"I am hoping Australia's anti-smoking lobby will commission the piece, or maybe even QUIT or Clean Up Australia, but the sculpture is not necessarily intended to have an anti-smoking message," he said.

"It is just an artistic piece I want to make using quite different material."

Assault with a hedgehog

A man in New Zealand has been charged with using a hedgehog as a weapon, the New Zealand Herald has reported. Police said William Singalargh, 27, had hurled the hedgehog about 5m (16ft) at a 15-year-old boy.

"It hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks," said Senior Sgt Bruce Jenkins, in the North Island town of Whakatane.

It was unclear whether the hedgehog was still alive when it was thrown, though it was dead when collected as evidence. The police spokesman said the suspect was arrested "for assault with a weapon, namely the hedgehog."

Mr Singalargh is due to appear in court on 17 April. If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.

Solar tsunami

Astronomers have captured the first footage of a solar "tsunami" hurtling through the Sun's atmosphere at over a million kilometres per hour. The event was captured by Nasa's twin Stereo spacecraft designed to make 3D images of our parent star.

Naturally, this type of tsunami does not involve water; instead, it is a wave of pressure that travels across the Sun very fast. Details were reported at the UK National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast.

In a solar tsunami, a huge explosion near the Sun, such as a coronal mass ejection or flare, causes a pressure pulse to propagate outwards in a circular pattern.

Co-author David Long, from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland, commented: "The energy released in these explosions is phenomenal; about two billion times the annual world energy consumption in just a fraction of a second.

Meet Honey Monster

A cereal-mad office worker has shocked friends and family by changing his name to Honey Monster.

Peter Thomas, 31, has eaten at least one bowl of Sugar Puffs a day since he was nine - even taking boxes on holiday with him so he didn't miss out on his daily treat.

Yesterday he got confirmation that his new name is now Honey Monster, like the cereal's promotional mascot, after taking delivery of the official deed poll certificate which cost him £34.

Peter, or Honey as he is now known, also got his first credit card in his new name and plans to stock up on 20 boxes of the sugary treat with his first purchase.

He said: "I've loved Sugar Puffs since I was a kid. I used to tape all the adverts and watch them over and over again. It drove my mum and dad mad." Speaking about the ribbing he is getting for changing his name, he said: "All my mates think I'm mad but I don't care. It's the most original name there is. Even the guy inside the monster outfit has a different name but I'm the real Honey Monster now."

He decided to change his name when one of his friends jokingly suggested he might as well be the Honey Monster because of the amount of Sugar Puffs he gets through.
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The Brighton-based insurance worker said: "As soon as my friend said it, I thought, That's a good idea. Why not?' My mum and dad think I'm crazy but I love the name."

A slice of the auction

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