Respect to the pigeon in the background watching!

A Polish woman has become only the second person to give birth on London’s underground rail network since it opened 146 years ago, the transport authority confirmed on Friday.

Julia Kowalska was travelling with her sister on the network’s Jubilee line on December 19 when her contractions started.

She got off at a station in Northwest London, and gave birth to a healthy baby girl in the supervisor’s office, assisted by an ambulance crew.

The only other birth recorded on the 275-station underground network happened in 1924 when Marie Cordery was born at Elephant & Castle, operator Transport for London said.

China’s freezing northern city of Harbin is building what organizers say is the world’s largest Santa Claus ice sculpture.

The giant Father Christmas, 160 meters (525ft) long and 24 meters high, centers on an enormous face of Father Christmas, complete with flowing beard and hat.

Its huge size and unseasonably warm temperatures have made the job especially challenging, said Tang Guangjun, one of the sculptors.

“It is even bigger and higher than last year’s, and more difficult. The weather swings between warm and cold, so it becomes very wet and slippery on the ice. It is very dangerous for us,” he told Reuters Television.

Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province on the edge of Siberia, is one of China’s coldest places. Winter temperatures can drop to below minus 35 degrees Celsius (-31 F).

Every year the city plays host to a world-renowned ice festival. But the effects of global warming are taking a toll as the snow and ice now melt more rapidly than in the past.

Organizers said they had to artificially make snow for the Santa Claus sculpture.

Still, the sculpture has attracted thousands of tourists from all over the country who want to enjoy a white Christmas despite worries over the economic downturn.

Many said such tourism could help to boost the economy.

“It can stimulate the economy and consumption. When people feel happier, they will want to spend more, so it will lift the economy of the city and even the country,” said Li Qingsheng, a tourist from Beijing.

Officials in Harbin remained optimistic about the tourist outlook for the winter.

An estimated 800,000 tourists, 90 per cent of them Chinese, were expected to visit the ice festival, said Jia Yan, director of the local tourism bureau.

The festival traditionally runs from mid-December to early February.

A panda at a zoo in southern China attacked a student who snuck into its pen hoping for a cuddle with the endangered bear, state media said Saturday.

The 20-year-old male student surnamed Liu jumped over the fence at the zoo in the tourist city of Guilin, ignoring warning signs not to, Xinhua news agency said.

“The panda, named Yangyang, was wide awake. Apparently scared by the intruder, he bit at Liu’s arms and legs,” it quoted an unnamed worker as saying after zoo keepers managed to calm the bear and rescue Liu, the report said.

“Yangyang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him,” Liu was quoted as saying from his hospital bed. “I didn’t expect he would attack.”

Scientists believe fewer than 2,000 giant pandas live in the wild in China

A Japanese man set fire to the hotel where he was due to get married at the weekend, rather than go through with the ceremony later the same day, newspaper reports said Monday.

Tatsuhiko Kawata, 39, had gone along with wedding plans despite already having a wife, the Yomiuri newspaper said.

“I thought if I set a fire I wouldn’t have to go through with the wedding,” the Yomiuri quoted him as telling police.

Guests at the hotel were evacuated and no one was injured when he set the fire in the early hours of Sunday morning at the resort hotel in Yamanashi Prefecture, west of Tokyo.

Kawata and his fiancee had been set to get married before 80 guests. He was arrested after suddenly cancelling the event and behaving suspiciously, the Yomiuri said.

A man discovered making kebabs near a corpse has been banned from managing food businesses and fined 3,800 pounds, Wolverhampton City Council said Tuesday.

Jaswinder Singh, 45, was found by police making kebabs at Pappu Sweet Center and Catering in Wolverhampton in August in a kitchen where a dead man was lying on a sofa.

As well the corpse, the policeman discovered another man smoking and spitting repeatedly on the floor, while in a room near the kitchen, a defrosting chicken, oozing blood and juices, was covered with flies.

Environmental health officers had visited the shop over a number of months previously where they had warned Singh to improve his food hygiene standards after finding rat droppings as well as a dead rat beneath a pot.

“We were called to reports of a sudden death,” said West Midlands Police spokeswoman Joanne Hunt. “A post mortem was carried out, but found the death was not suspicious, so the matter was referred to the coroner.”

Wolverhampton’s city council’s chief environmental services officer Nick Edwards said: “The council will not tolerate those who put the public at risk by preparing food in insanitary conditions.

“We are pleased that the council’s actions have resulted in the courts banning this individual from ever running a food business again.”

A pony-size pig who held an Australian woman hostage for 10 days inside her home will be removed on Wednesday to a piggery, where his bacon will be saved by a stint on stud duties, rangers said.

The 80 kg (176 pound) pig, nicknamed Bruce, kept self-confessed animal lover Caroline Hayes, 63, in her farmhouse near Uki, in northern New South Wales State, with aggressive demands to be fed, even headbutting her bedroom door at night.

“I picked up a broom and poked him out with it and he snapped it in half with his mouth,” Hayes told Australian media.

She said the pushy pig was as big as a “Shetland pony” and wandered onto her property 11 days ago after being let loose in surrounding rainforest by neighbors.

“One of its eyes it couldn’t see out of, so I put cream in it and I fixed its back up. But apparently it’s actually claimed my land and claimed my place,” Hayes said.

Len Hing, a pest animal ranger from the local Tweed Lismore Rural Lands Protection Board, told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio that Bruce was friendly, but his large size made him a handful when he was hungry.

“I wouldn’t like to see the pig go as a pet anywhere because he could become a potentially dangerous animal,” he said.

Rangers were to remove the pig on Wednesday and take him to a piggery where he was to be placed on stud duty, Hing said.

A man was charged with burglary after he allegedly broke into a home, ate cheese from the refrigerator, made a mess in a bathroom and fell asleep on a child’s bed. Tracy Mullins, 47, of Billings, was arraigned in District Court on Thursday by video from the county jail.

Mullins pleaded not guilty to burglary. Judge Susan Watters set bail at $5,000 after rejecting a request that he be released without bail. Public defender Richard Phillips, who made the request, said Mullins had been receiving mental-health counseling.

Court records indicate a woman awoke in her home Monday at 8:30 a.m. to the sound of snoring coming from her 2-year-old son’s bedroom. Her son had slept that night with her and her husband.

The woman said she found a strange man sleeping in her son’s bed. She woke her husband and left to call police from a neighbor’s house. The husband confronted the man with an unloaded shotgun and held him until police arrived.