A curator at the Louvre Museum in Paris has stumbled upon some unknown drawings on the back of a painting by Leonardo da Vinci that look like they might be by the Italian master himself, the Louvre said yesterday.

The extraordinary find was made by chance, when Louvre staff unhooked Leonardo's The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne from the museum wall as part of a broad programme of study and restoration of paintings by Leonardo, including the Mona Lisa.

"When the work, which is painted on wood, was unhooked, a curator noticed two barely visible drawings on the back of the painting, showing a horse's head and half a skull," the museum said.

"This is an exceptional discovery because drawings on the back of paintings are very rare and no example by Leonardo was previously known," the Louvre said.

The picture shows details of an infrared image provided by France's Louvre Museum, yesterday, which reveals the drawings, probably by Leonardo da Vinci (circa 1508).

London's wobbly bridge

Pedestrians' natural walking patterns caused London's Millennium Bridge to wobble and sway, forcing its closure just two days after opening in 2000, scientists have said.

Controversy has raged over the reason for the swaying of the elegant walkway linking the Tate Modern art gallery on the south bank of the River Thames to St Paul's Cathedral. The Norman Foster-designed bridge has since been reinforced.

It had previously been thought that the wobble was due to pedestrians synchronising their footsteps with the bridge motion.

But University of Bristol engineers found, to their surprise, that pedestrians walking randomly and keeping balance as normal could cause swaying. The same problem has also been seen on other bridges, including Bristol's famous Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Playboy's new direction

Look for Playboy magazine to adopt an edgier editorial tone and classier pictorials if Hugh Hefner's teenage sons take the helm of the 55-year-old magazine some day.

Marston Hefner, an 18-year-old college student, and his 17-year-old brother Cooper have said that change is inevitable at the struggling publication.

"Down the road, I'd say it would probably need to take a different direction," said Marston.

"In the 1960s we had amazing civil rights leaders doing interviews or writing stories for the magazine. The fight is still out there. The civil rights movement may not be that big, but we could still do articles on edgy things that people are afraid to talk about and appeal to forward thinkers."

Cooper Hefner said he "definitely" wants to be involved with the company because he likes business.

"I'd want the girls to be presented more as they were in the pictorials back in the 1950s and 1960s - kind of artsy, classy. I would like to bring back that retro-class feel," he added.

Snowfall buries credit crunch

Skiers are flocking to Swiss resorts to take advantage of heavy December snowfalls with bookings so far unaffected by the global financial crisis, a tourist board official said yesterday.

"The conditions are just so perfect at the moment and people are really keen to get to the mountains," said Daniela Baer, spokesman for the Swiss Tourism Board.

Bookings for accommodation over the Christmas and New Year period will remain on a level comparable to last year's, when a record number of people visited ski resorts, Ms Baer added.

The number of tourists travelling to Switzerland from countries hardest-hit by the economic downturn such as Britain and the United States was expected to decline slightly from January. But the full impact from the slowdown was not likely to be felt by the Swiss tourism industry until spring and summer of 2009.

Carla Bruni wins damages

A French court awarded first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy €40,000 in damages from a company that sold bags emblazoned with a picture of her in the nude.

The nude photo of Carla Bruni was taken in 1993, when she was a professional model. She had asked for €125,000 in damages from Pardon, a fashion chain in the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion which used it without her permission." Pardon does not trade in mainland France.

"The unauthorised use of the image of Carla Bruni caused her moral and economic damage," a court in the island capital Saint Denis de la Reunion said yesterday.

The nude image printed on the bags was this news earlier in the year, when an original black-and-white print of the Michel Comte photo fetched $91,000 at auction in New York.

In it Ms Bruni stands in a pigeon-toed pose, covering her private parts with her hands.