Pet owners can now turn their dead animals into diamonds.
The gems are made using carbon from the pet's ashes at Pet Crematorium CPC, of Thiplow, Hertfordshire. The crematorium charges between £2,100 to £15,000 depending on the size of the diamond, reports Metro.
The firm's spokesman, Duncan Francis said: "Having a stunning diamond created from the pet's ashes provides an everlasting link which some people find very comforting."
Police have questioned a Polish father for allegedly teaching his young sons to drink and smoke.
The man's wife showed police a film clip on her mobile phone of him with their four sons, aged between two and eight.
Mariusz Lechniak, 35, from Warsaw, reportedly told officers he wanted to make sure his sons turned into real men. His wife Irene became suspicious after her two-year-old son walked into the kitchen with a cigarette.
And when her husband refused to stop and also started giving the boys beer, she made the video clip which she gave to police.
A boy believed to be the youngest sex change patient in the world wants to bring forward the operation two years.
The German youngster, christened Tim and now called Kim, was allowed to start hormone treatment at the age of 12. Now aged 14, Kim told Germany's Stern TV his dearest wish was to have the final cosmetic surgery to remove male genitalia when he is 16.
Under German law the operation can not take place until Kim is 18, which would mean either a law change or traveling abroad.
Pictures of him on German TV showed Kim looking like a typical teenage girl, playing with strands of his long hair while seated in the pink attic bedroom of his parents' house.
He keeps a piggybank filled with change he has been saving for the operation - since the age of five, even though all the costs so far have been paid by the German National Health Service.
When he was just two Tim tried on his older sister's clothes and played with Barbies. As soon as he could speak he told his parents "I'm a girl" and later had a row where he declared he wanted to "cut off my thing".
His father, named only as Lutz P. for legal reasons, said they realised then it was not just a phase and that the problem was serious.
Kim's mother, who has not been named, said: "If your child has a heart defect you send him to a specialist, but when your child is transsexual, everyone seems to have an opinion."
Kim's family turned to Dr. Bernd Meyenburg, head of a clinic for children with identity disturbances at Frankfurt university. He has studied transsexuality since the 1970s but said Kim was a "real dilemma".
He said: "If we do something about it, it's irreversible. And if we allow nature to take its course, that too is irreversible." He added however that: "it would have been a crime to let Kim grow up as a man".
A Taiwanese golfer lost his memory after hitting a hole-in-one.
Wang, 50, was playing golf with friends at a course in Xinzu city when it happened. "The ball flew and dropped directly into the hole, which is a standard three-par hole," said one of his friends.
Wang was initially overjoyed - but when his friends picked up the ball and came to congratulate him they found him muttering on a hill and asking: "Why am I here?"
He was sent to the hospital immediately and doctors diagnosed him as suffering a blackout or temporary memory loss. After a couple of hours of rest, Wang's memory was pieced together again, but his golfing success was still missing.
When Wang revisited the doctor a week later, he still didn't remember the hole-in-one, reports Taiwan News.
A Russian man lost his wife in a game of cards after putting her up as a stake instead of cash.
Andrei Karpov, from Murmansk, had run out of money in a game of poker and offered his opponent his wife instead of cash to stay in the game.
When he lost the game and his opponent Sergey Brodov turned up to claim his winnings his wife Tatiana was so angry she decided to divorce her husband and started a relationship with Brodov.
She has since married Brodov, and said she does not regret leaving her first husband.
She said: "It was humiliating and I was utterly ashamed. But as soon as my ex-husband did that I knew I had to leave him.
"Sergey was a very handsome, charming man and I am very happy with him, even if he did 'win' me in a poker game."
A farmer whose cows produced pink milk after eating carrots got them to produce normal coloured milk by feeding them white carrots instead.
Peter Houguez from Jersey added carrots to the cows' diet of grass and hay. After the milk turned pink Mr Houguez contacted his local vet who told him to feed them white carrots, imported from France.
According to the Metro, Mr Houguez said: "The cows go mad for carrots. White carrots taste just same as orange so the problem was solved."
Ian Johnson, of the National Farmers' Union, said cows are fed all sorts of things - including liquorice allsorts.Mr Johnson said: "Pink milk is probably healthier with all the nutrients from the vegetables."
A Chinese man had to have his contact lenses surgically removed after he did not take them out for a year.
Liu, 40, started to wear contact lenses a year ago and never took them out because he found it difficult. "I only have some eye drops for when they feel uncomfortable," he told Chutian City News.
Liu recently felt his eyesight was getting worse, so he bought another pair of lenses and wore them on top of the old ones. But when his eyesight still didn't improve, he took another startling decision.
"I put a pair of used disposal contact lenses over the other two pairs in my eyes. By then, I was wearing three pairs of lenses," he said. By the next day, Liu's eyes had reacted badly to his DIY eyecare and he finally sought medical attention.
A doctor was shocked to find the first lenses had grown into his eyes and surgery was needed to take them out.
A cat has been put on anti-depressants after being bullied by other cats.
Twiglet's weight ballooned to 15lb because she was too scared to go out.
Her owner Jackie Martin, 28, had to install a bigger cat flap because Twiglet was too fat to get through. Jackie took her to a vet, who prescribed amitriptyline - similar to Prozac, reports the Sun.
Jackie said: "She was given the drugs to calm her down and alleviate her anxieties. "The problem is, you need to hold her jaw and drop the tablets in but she was a violent cat."
Twiglet began to get better as a result of the tablets and when the bullying ginger tom moved away. Twiglet is now average weight after shedding 6lb in five months.
Fifty-five nuns - all called Maria - are on the run after racking up debts of £400,000.
The women had secretly run a knitwear company on the side for ten years. Their convent supplied 25 shops and they blew money traveling to fashion shows across Europe, reports the Sun.
The nuns of St Kyrikos and Ioulite in Northern Greece hit money problems after spending huge sums on new machinery.
Their expensive knitting machines were put on a lorry and the sisters disappeared a few days later. Greek Orthodox Church officials believe they may be hiding at a monastery in Volos, Central Greece.
The nuns' lawyer Dionysios Pelekis said they had asked church superiors to settle the debt by selling 16 convent-owned properties. But the request was refused.
A Chinese man has married himself to express his "dissatisfaction with reality".
Liu Ye, 39, from Zhuhai city, married a life sized foam cut-out of himself wearing a woman's bridal dress.
"There are many reasons for marrying myself, but mainly to express my dissatisfaction with reality," he said. "This marriage makes me whole again. My definition of marriage is different from others."
The ceremony was held at a traditional courtyard packed with more than 100 guests.The 'couple' were led out by a bridesmaid and a groomsman and bowed to ancestors and senior guests for blessings.
Liu says he is not gay, but admits he's "maybe a bit narcissistic", reports New Express.
A Belgian school is to let pupils smoke - but only if they stand in a cage and wear a graphic badge.
The badge shows an x-ray image of a pair of lungs, blackened by smoking, reports De Morgen. The new rule will be introduced for pupils over the age of 16 at the Vesalius Institute in Ostende in February.
Assistant-director Claudine Lesaffre said: "We do a lot to promote a healthy lifestyle in our school.
"One third of our 600 students smoke. We've been trying to motivate the youngsters over the years, encouraged teachers to attend smoke free courses. But nothing seems to help. "By wearing the badge, students expresses it is by their own free will they are damaging their health. If this won't help, I don't know what to do anymore."
But the students seem more concerned about having to smoke in a cage than wearing the badge. One is quoted as saying: "It's like putting us in a cage in the zoo."
The Belgian Commissioner For Children's Rights, Ankie Vandekerckhove, criticised the move. She said: "It's stigmatising for the students, because they will be looked at by the whole school. They can take measures that are far better than that badge or that cage."
A new company in Kazakhstan charges customers to take their places in the country's notorious queues.
For a small hourly fee, it provides people to stand in line for clients and then phone them when they are nearly at the front. It also offers a more expensive service where the client gives the company power of attorney to take care of everything.
The company was set by two entrepreneurs in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, reports the Express-K newspaper.Queues to see state officials for personal business, such as applying for ID papers and driving licenses and registering property, are notorious in Kazakhstan.
"We can stand any kind of a queue," says Ruslan Akkuzhin, deputy director of the company. "As a rule, the worst queues are related to real estate issues.". The two directors currently do all of the work themselves but say they may soon have to expand.
A woman who asked for her bank statement was sent financial details of 75,000 other customers too.
Stephanie McLaughlan, 22, received five packages from Halifax Bank of Scotland, each containing 500 sheets crammed with confidential information. Each page details 30 customers' names, their account and sort code numbers and how much they have paid in and out.
According to the Mirror, Stephanie from Aberdeen said: "I did not expect them to be so lax with security as to be sending out private and confidential information of so many of their customers.
"In the wrong hands these documents would allow criminals to run amok through people's personal and financial lives." The bank has apologised and is launching an immediate inquiry.
An angry husband who threw old clothes into the garden and set fire to them because he couldn't find any clean underpants accidentally burnt his home down.
Ivo Jerbic, 55, from Prikraj, near Zagreb, told police he had lost his temper after failing to find any clean underpants in a closet full of old clothes.
He had thrown them all in the garden and set fire to them.He told police: "My wife never throws anything out, I just lost my temper."
But the fire spread to the house which burned to the ground. Local news agency Hina reported that Jerbic could end up in jail for up to eight years for putting other family members in danger, even though no one was injured.
A man claims he is Britain's longest-serving landlord after pulling pints at the same pub for 58 years.
Dick Grainger, 87, is about to celebrate six decades as a publican of The Wharf Tavern in Stalybridge, Greater Manchester.
Dick and his wife Kathleen are throwing a party to mark their 60th anniversary as publicans and will be joined by their five children, ten grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. According to the Sun, a spokesman for the British Beer and Pub Association said: "Dick deserves immense credit for the services he has provided over the years."
NORTH BONNEVILLE, Wash. - A man who said he used a stun gun on his wife's 79-year-old grandmother was arrested for investigation of domestic assault.
Aaron de Bruyn, 26, was cited with fourth-degree domestic violence assault Wednesday and released from the Skamania County jail Thursday, Police Chief Calvin Owens said. The grandmother wasn't injured.
De Bruyn said he was arguing with Rosemary Garlock, who accused him of abusing his 7-month-old son when he swatted the boy's diapered bottom to stop him from grabbing electrical wires.
When she refused to leave, he said he shocked her on her right shoulder as she sat on the living room couch.
"She yelped, because getting Tased hurts," de Bruyn told The Columbian newspaper.
De Bruyn said he had the 50,000-volt Taser X26 energy weapon to protect against burglars. He said he called authorities, saying he had a relative in his house who would not leave.
De Bruyn's stun gun was confiscated.
"If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't," he said.
DUBLIN, Jan 25 (Reuters Life!) - An Irish convict who stole a car to get back to prison after missing a weekend release deadline has been given a six month suspended jail sentence.
Trevor Doyle, 25, grabbed the vehicle after falling asleep on a bus and overshooting his stop near Shelton Abbey open prison in Arklow on Ireland's southeast coast, Wexford district court officials said Thursday.
The court, which would not reveal the man's prior conviction, also fined him 300 euros ($390) for failing to submit to a breathalyzer test.
A hospital patient went to the loo and returned to find staff had given her bed to another woman.
Pat Roberts, 68, was away from her bed for less than 20 minutes, reports the Sun.
Staff at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital told her she would have to wait for another bed. Husband Ron said: "I was with my wife and helped her to the bathroom. When we returned it was not a case of them making up the bed, it was already full. "We were only away from the bed for the time it took me to push her through the ward to the toilet and back again."
A spokeswoman for the hospital said they would investigate the incident.
Police were called in after a cat tried to pull a mouse out of a jam jar and got its head stuck.
Officers said the incident was reminiscent of a Tom and Jerry cartoon, reports the Peterborough Evening Telegraph. A motorist went to a police station for help after finding the cat wandering beside a road in Peterborough, with the jar on its head and the mouse millimeters from its nose.
A receptionist and three officers pulled and twisted but were unable to release the cat. Eventually the animal freed itself - and the mouse - by smashing the jar on the floor of Thorpe Wood police station.
"It was like a scene from Tom and Jerry," said a police spokeswoman. "I don't think anyone had ever seen anything like it before. The mouse ran off - it's still running around Thorpe Wood police station somewhere."
PONTIAC, Mich. - A man who acknowledged a sexual fetish for female-shaped mannequins was sentenced Thursday to more than a year in prison after repeatedly breaking into storefront windows.
Ronald Dotson, 39, of Detroit, was sentenced to 18 months to 30 years on charges of breaking and entering and being a habitual criminal.
He was arrested in October after police in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak spotted him near a smashed storefront window containing a mannequin wearing a French maid outfit.
The arrest came less than a week after he had been paroled for his sixth breaking-and-entering conviction in 13 years. Some of the previous cases also involved mannequins. Police once found him in an alley behind a women's clothing store with three mannequins dressed in lingerie.
"I've never been able to take care of myself," Dotson told Judge Denise Langford Morris at sentencing.
Morris acknowledged that Dotson had never assaulted a person but said his behavior "strikes fear in the community."
Guard dogs protecting a fruit orchard in Malaysia have met their match -- a 7.1-metre-long (23-ft-long) python that swallowed at least 11 hounds before it was finally discovered by villagers.
"I was shocked to see such a huge python," orchard-keeper Ali Yusof told the New Straits Times in an article published beneath a picture of the captured snake, which was almost long enough to span the width of a tennis court and as thick as a tree trunk.
Villagers did not harm the snake, which was tied to a tree then handed to wildlife officials, the paper said on Friday.
A man who led a 30-year campaign for a new bypass has become the first person to crash on it.
Jim Burley fought for the bypass in Pegswood, Northumberland, to reduce heavy traffic through the village.
Parish council chairman Jim, 70, and his wife Eunice, 69, were not seriously hurt when their Vauxhall van was in a head-on collision with another van.
The accident was on a section of the bypass which is open to traffic while work continues to complete the remaining stretch. Jim told the Sun: "I can certainly see the irony in being involved in the first accident on a bypass for which I have been campaigning for 20 to 30 years.
"Other parish councillors have been ringing to say they can't believe it was me involved in the accident when I have been making a song and dance about the bypass for years."
A dumped bride went ahead with her wedding reception - using her dog to replace the groom.
Emma Knight, 41, was dumped two weeks before her wedding to Paul Fox, 37. To cheer herself up she decided to go ahead with her wedding reception anyway. She dressed her faithful dog Dennis up as the bridegroom and he was treated to a piece of the four-tier wedding cake.
Emma wore the £1,500 wedding dress she had bought and partied until the small hours with her 100 guests. The next day Emma flew to France with her best pal on a pre-booked honeymoon to St Malo, France. To try and recoup some of her £3,000 losses, Emma, of Portland, Dorset, is selling items bought for the wedding in a local paper.
According to the Sun she said: "It's the best we could make of a bad situation. We had a great time."
A quest to identify the worst noise in the world has ended with top 'honours' going to the sound of someone vomiting.
The year-long online study, which attracted 1.1m votes, ranked microphone feedback as the second worst sound.Crying babies and the scrapes and squeaks of train wheels were joint third, reports the Daily Telegraph.
Some sounds expected to figure highly in the poll, did not do so. Fingernails being dragged down a blackboard came 16th while the dreaded dentist's drill was only 20th.The study, set up by Trevor Cox, a professor of acoustic engineering at Salford University, sought opinions on 34 sounds at the website www.sound101.org.
"From a scientific perspective, we really don't understand why some sounds are so horrible, but our reactions are part of what makes us human," he said. "If, as engineers, we can learn what offends people then, in some cases, we may be able to engineer them out of existence or at least reduce their impact."
A fox forced a posh shoe shop to close its doors for the day.
The fox decided to have a look at the shoes in Office in Portobello Road, West London.It followed a shopper inside before wandering around the footwear displays, then settling down with snome trainers, reports Metro.
Shop manager Sarah Adeyemi said: "Nobody even noticed him when he first walked in because he was just trotting along behind a woman and a pram, minding his mown business.
"The shop was quite busy, so it wasn't long before he was spotted and then there was a real commotion. We often deal with wasps and pigeons but have never had a fox to visit."
RSPCA officers eventually cornered the fox behind the till, and took him to be released into the countryside.
A woman has finally passed her driving test after 23 years.
Maria McCarthy started taking lessons when she was 17.She has had over 250 lessons and ten instructors.
Maria from Sidmouth, Devon, claims she had "driving dyslexia" which stopped her negotiating roundabouts and corners.According to the Sun, she said: "Nothing about driving came easily to me. It was a mixture of nerves and lack of ability."
A blind Spanish man caught in a radar trap driving 100mph has been allowed to keep his disability pension after proving he could not see.
Benefit officials tried to strip the disability allowance from Domingo Merino after he was snapped doing 154kmh (98mph) near Barcelona.He also faced having to repay a £360,000 insurance payment for the loss of his sight in a car accident in 1996. Insurers Mapfre said the charge proved he could see.
But a Barcelona court threw out the claims after Merino explained he had wanted to drive one more time. He said he had persuaded his wife to sit beside him telling where to steer as he travelled along a straight stretch of road.
A brewery in the Netherlands has created a beer - especially for dogs.Kwispelbier makes the special brew from a mix of beef extract and malt.
The beverage is the brainchild of pet shop owner Gerrie Berendsen from the eastern town of Zelhem.The beer is non-alcoholic and fit for human consumption, but costs four times as much as a Heineken.
Ms Berendsen said: "Once a year we go to Austria to hunt with our dogs, and at the end of the day we sit on the verandah and drink a beer. So we thought, my dog also has earned it."
A woman has been given an Asbo - for singing Gary Glitter songs in the bath.
Mother of two, Caroline Bishop, 39, sang songs like Leader Of The Gang to annoy neighbours.
Alistair and Kerry Law complained they endured months of harassment in Ingham, Lincolnshire.According to the Sun, Mrs Law said: "You could hear it from my kitchen with the window shut - day in, day out."
Council spokeswoman, Belinda Moore, said: "In isolation these matters would be trivial, but they occurred many times."The Asbo bans Bishop from loud singing or shouting, and abusing or harassing neighbours.
She said: "We are being victimised."
Lonely farmers in North Wales are to be pictured on milk cartons to help them find love.
Dairy co-operative Calon Wen is behind the 'Fancy a Farmer?' campaign, reports the Daily Post.
Stickers on Calon Wen's organic milk will feature three men and two women looking for a date.
Among them is 30-year-old Iwan Jones, of Groes Bach, Groes, near Denbigh, who dreamt up the idea.
He said: "It's a bit of a laugh really - but if I was approached by an attractive young lady I wouldn't turn her away."
Mr Jones is a director of Calon Wen, a co-operative of 20 Welsh organic dairy farmers, which has joined forces with a Welsh online dating agency.
By logging onto www.pishyn.com, shoppers can discover how to meet the farmer of their dreams.
Mr Jones said: "The Welsh countryside is a great place to live, with stunning scenery, but it can be a hard place to find a date as I'm finding out!"
Mr Jones admitted the two young women were recruited to the campaign "after a bit of arm-twisting".
"We didn't want to be accused of being sexist," he said.
A duck has been found alive in a fridge two days after being shot.
The duck was discovered alive after the hunter's wife opened the door and the duck lifted his head.at their home in Talahassee, Florida.
Local vet Laina Whipple said: "The man's wife was going to check on the refrigerator because it hadn't been working right and when she opened the door, it looked up at her.
"She freaked out and told the daughter to take it to the hospital right then and there."
The duck was transferred to Goose Creek Wildlife Sanctuary, where it was been treated for wounds to its wing and leg.
Sanctuary veterinarian David Hale said it will probably never be released back into the wild, reports the BBC.
He said the duck, which has a low metabolism, could have survived in a big enough refrigerator, especially if the door was opened and closed several times.
A Bosnian hospital patient spent seven hours repairing hospital machinery so his operation could go ahead.
Doctors had told car mechanic Slobodan Mocevic, 56, his operation to remove a kidney stone was cancelled because of faulty equipment.
Mocevic asked to borrow a set of tools and then stripped down and repaired the Extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy machine at the hospital in Kasindol.
He said: "I was in agony, and there was no way I could have waited any longer."
The device removes kidney stones by sending a sonic wave through a patient's body to break up the stone.
A drunk man who fell asleep and got trapped inside a church rang out SOS in morse code with the bell.
When the man awoke in St Faith's Church in Havant, near Portsmough, he found the doors locked.
Reportedly worried about ghosts, he started ringing out the morse code for SOS on the church bell, reports Portsmough Today.
As dusk began to fall, he was still ringing for his life but eventually a local resident realised something was wrong.
He alerted two Police Community Support Officers who, in turn, contacted church verger Vicki Mockford who came to the rescue.
She said: "I was called by police saying someone was using the bell as a sign they were trapped.
"When we found him inside he told us he went into the church to have a sit down but fell asleep. He told the police he had been drinking which may have made him a bit dozy.
"He looked quite embarrassed about the whole incident when we found him. Maybe after this he might consider taking up bell ringing as a hobby."
