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Bizarro Earth

The accent transplant: Brain surgery leaves Yorkshire boy speaking like the Queen

With her nine-year-old son William lying desperately ill in hospital following emergency brain surgery, Ruth McCartney-Moore prayed that she would one day hear his voice again.

But when he did speak weeks later, she was in for a shock.

He had lost his strong Yorkshire accent and was now speaking the Queen's English.

"We noticed that he had started to elongate his vowels in words like 'bath' which he never did before," said Mrs McCartney-Moore, 45, a music teacher from York.

©NNP
Recovering in hospital: William had a rare strain of meningitis.

Crusader

Love Jesus and have more babies, says Pope amid priest sex abuse scandals

Pope Benedict XVI blasted Europeans for being selfish and not having enough children, in a sermon at the 850-year-old pilgrimage site of Mariazell in Austria.

"Europe has become child-poor. We want everything for ourselves and place little trust in the future," the Pope told a crowd of faithful from his canopied area at an open-air, afternoon mass that took place under heavy rain.

Wine

Nebraska State Senator Sues God

LINCOLN, Neb. - The defendant in a state senator's lawsuit is accused of causing untold death and horror and threatening to cause more still. He can be sued in Douglas County, the legislator claims, because He's everywhere.

State Sen. Ernie Chambers sued God last week. Angered by another lawsuit he considers frivolous, Chambers says he's trying to make the point that anybody can file a lawsuit against anybody.

Life Preserver

Woman saves dog from python in Hong Kong

A British woman fought with a 14ft (4.5 metre) Burmese python to save her pet dog from being crushed to death on a walking trail in Hong Kong.

Expatriate Catherine Leonard, 41, kicked and punched the snake after seeing it wrap itself around her pet dog, a 20 kg mongrel called Poppy, near her home in the former British colony.

Stop

Venice to ban rice at weddings over pigeons

Throwing rice at newly-weds will soon be banned in Venice as the city steps up its fight against pigeons soiling its squares and chipping away at monuments.

The mayor of the canal city is preparing a measure to stop pigeons banqueting outside the central Palazzo Cavalli, where civil weddings are celebrated, municipal police chief Marco Agostini said on Monday.

Attention

Holocaust song title has firm squirming

Canada's biggest phone company has apologized after a punk-rock reference to the Holocaust appeared on billboard advertisements for its cellphones.

The ads for Bell Canada's Solo discount service showed a young woman decked out in flashy punk rock attire, with a button that reads "Belsen was a gas" -- the controversial title of a song by the Sex Pistols, and a reference to Nazi Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

HAL9000

Cell Phones Can Watch What You Eat, So You Can Become A Robot

Talk about watching what you eat.

Dieters will soon be able to send a cell-phone camera photo of their meals to a computer that will accurately gauge what's on their plates and then send back feedback.

Bomb

Hedgehog in a spin

A young hedgehog has been named Lucky after surviving a spin in a washing machine.

The female "hoglet", about eight weeks old, was washed and tumbled at a house in Bognor Regis, West Sussex. She had made her way into a pile of washing that was put into the machine.

Video

Burglar says TV taught him his craft

A man who says he learned how to rob homes by watching a TV show was sentenced to 12 years in prison for a string of burglaries in central Kentucky.

Michael W. Hobbs, 36, of Waco, Ky., pleaded guilty to five counts of burglary. He was sentenced Thursday.

Police said Hobbs learned how to break into homes by watching the Discovery Channel TV show "It Takes a Thief." The show features two ex-convicts who show property owners how vulnerable they are to theft.

Wine

Oktoberfest for dogs

Dogs are to get their own version of the famous Munich beer festival.

Dogs that are brought to the Bunter Hund cafe in the Austrian capital Vienna will be given special beer for canines, pretzels and traditional Bavarian veal sausage just like at the real Oktoberfest.