Centuries before Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama were sized up over their shoes, women's feet had been a platform for showing off their economic and political status.
A new exhibition of more than 60 pairs of rare platform and high heel shoes shows how extreme and impractical footwear became a fashionable symbol of social standing in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The exhibition in Toronto, Canada, is called On a Pedestal: From Renaissance Chopines to Baroque Heels, and includes footwear on loan from 11 international museums.
"The shoes themselves... were not even visible at the time. When you go and look at Renaissance paintings you see these incredibly tall women but you can't see the chopines," said Elizabeth Semmelhack, senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum,
"We're lifting the skirts of these women and letting you see these accessories that link very closely to economics, gender and politics - not just high fashion."
A pair of Venetian chopines in the exhibition is nearly 50 centimetres high. (Reuters)
Moscow hit by record snowfall
Muscovites have been stunned by a snowfall that has broken their 1966 record. Four days of blizzards dumped 67 centimetres across the Russian capital by Tuesday, breaking the February record of 64 centimetres experienced 44 years ago.
Blinding flurries of thick wet flakes have both horrified and delighted Muscovites, who usually take pride in their freezing, long winters which far exceed other European cities'.
The office of Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov said it had dispatched 15,000 snow-clearing machines and 5,000 street cleaners for the sprawling city of 10.4 million. The mayor's office added that almost half a million cubic metres of snow had been cleared away to be melted in special facilities - enough to fill around 200 Olympic swimming pools.
But piles of the white stuff have already caused at least two roofs to collapse. (Reuters)
Prisoner 'spoonfeeds' warders
A violent criminal used a spoon to dig her way out of a Dutch prison.
The 35-year-old woman, held for an unspecified "violent crime", fled Saturday night through a tunnel she had dug with a spoon, prosecution spokesman Wim de Bruin said.
The tunnel linked the inside of the prison in Breda in the southern Netherlands to the outside world, he said, without specifying if it started in the woman's cell.
Justice ministry spokesman Jochgem van Opstal would not say what sentence the woman was serving or for what specific crime. (AFP)
Gigantic re-creation
A reconstruction of the largest Roman mosaic ever found in Britain - featuring 1.6 million tiny pieces - is to go on sale this summer.
The painstaking copy of the Orpheus pavement, discovered in Woodchester, Gloucestershire, took its creators - brothers Bob and John Woodward - 10 years to complete. The work is currently on display at Prinknash Abbey, near Stroud, but the lease has come to an end, and its owner has decided to sell.
Anyone who wants the giant creation will need 2,200 square feet of room to show it off. (PA)
Unfair trade
A 52-year-old woman has pleaded guilty to two charges of trading two children to a couple in exchange for an exotic pet bird and $175.
Donna Louise Greenwell, from Louisiana, received 15 months of hard labour on each count.
She sold the couple a four-year-old girl and five-year-old boy in her care in return for the cash and a cockatoo. (PA)
Queen Victoria's silk stockings
A pair of Queen Victoria's silk stockings is to go under the hammer at an auction.
The black and white hand-stitched garments with crests are valued at £400. They are thought to date from 1874, when she was in her mid-50s, and are believed to have been the monarch's favourite design during the 1870s.
The stockings will be auctioned as part of a fine antiques sale at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh. (PA)