Don't Panic! Lighten Up!S


Magic Wand

Woman's bus adverts for egg donor

A 54-year-old woman and her husband are advertising for an egg donor on London buses in a last-ditch attempt to try to have a baby.


Monkey Wrench

Garage has nose for hidden snake

A mysterious smell in a family saloon car led mechanics to a grisly find - a dead snake behind the instrument panel.

Staff at Murketts Garage in Histon Road, Cambridge, said they spent about three hours exploring a Vauxhall Astra before locating a 3ft python.

Mail

Human liver, partial head mistakenly delivered to Michigan family home

CASCADE TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) - Two packages containing human body parts - including a liver and a partial head - that were intended for a lab were delivered to a home instead and officials said more than two dozen similar packages could be dispersed across the United States.

Comment: You gotta wonder where these body parts came from... given the stories one hears about the Chinese using prisoners for body parts.


Magic Wand

Couple leave son, 3, on plane

A Chinese couple were in such a rush to meet relatives they left their three-year-old son on a plane.

An attendant on the China Southern Airlines flight from Guangzhou to Dalian city found the child after landing.

She told Bandao Morning News that she spotted an unclaimed red coat on a window seat after the passengers had disembarked.

"I lifted the coat, and found a child around three-years-old sleeping underneath," she said.

Bizarro Earth

Obese woman unaware of pregnancy until near birth

A woman who weighs more than 400 pounds (180 kg) said on Sunday she did not know she was pregnant until two days before giving birth this week to a healthy baby boy.

April Branum, 39, of Garden Grove, just south of Los Angeles, went to a local emergency room on February 26 with stomach pain only to discover she was pregnant with a full-term fetus.

Doctors discovered the baby as they took X-rays of Branum's abdominal area and referred her to UCI Medical Center in the nearby city of Orange, California, for prenatal testing, said Susan Mancia, a spokeswoman for UCI Medical Center.

No defects were detected and two days later on February 28, Branum gave birth by caesarean section to a healthy, 7-lb 7-oz (3.4 kg) boy named Walter Scott Edwards III.

Grey Alien

Can a space alien rest in peace?

A barking dog runs up and down the length of the chain-link fence. His frenzied warning: Come any closer, I'll tear you to pieces.

I knock on the door. No answer. I knock again and hear a voice. I knock one more time and notice two eyes peeking from behind some blinds. Flashing my badge, I explain I'm doing a story about the alien.

It takes awhile, but she pries open the door a third of the way.

"I'm not sure I can be of any help," she says, in a girlish voice.

"Do you know where he was buried?"

"When people come here, I know they come to see him 'cause they go straight for that tree. The one over there that curves like an arm."

Light Saber

Little Mermaid statue vandalised...again.

Vandals have covered Copenhagen's famed Little Mermaid statue with pink paint, tourists who visited the landmark said.

Police could not immediately to confirm the incident, and it was not clear whether the vandalism was linked to two days of left-wing youth riots in the Danish capital.

"It was pink from head to toe," Kristoffer Eriksen, 29, said.

He said police were taking pictures of the statue while a cleanup crew tried to remove the paint with soap and high-pressure water cleaners.

Video

Nude photos bring conman down to earth

A German who built a hut at the top of a telecommunications mast to avoid going to prison has been lured down by nude photos of his wife.

Fred Gregor, 45, from Werben, spent ten days in the wooden hut at the top of the 72ft metal aerial to avoid serving 15 months for an internet fraud conviction.

But he was lured down when his 25-year-old former stripper wife Suzi sent him naked pictures of herself inside a food parcel.

Life Preserver

Trickster put shark in Austrian river

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water - well, it is, actually.

A mystery triggered this week by the bizarre discovery of the carcass of a 3-foot-long shark in a freshwater river in northern Austria ended Saturday when a man confessed he had put it there as a joke.

The prankster, an apprentice chef working at a hotel in the province of Upper Austria, told the newspaper Oesterreich that he put the dead shark in the river Voeckla after it began to smell while he was thawing it out for a buffet.

Sheeple

Lonely Irishman brought donkey to hotel room, court told

A man who was found dressed in latex and handcuffs brought a donkey to his room in a Galway city centre hotel, because he was advised "to get out and meet people," the local court heard last week.

Thomas Aloysius McCarney with an address in south Galway was charged with cruelty to animals, lewd and obscene behaviour, and with being a danger to himself when he appeared before the court on Friday. He was also charged with damage to a mini-bar in the room, but this charge was later dropped when the defendant said that it was the donkey who caused that damage.