A 396-metre-long reclining woman which is the world’s largest human form sculpted into the landscape is to open to the public next month.
People will be able to walk over the goddess-like Northumberlandia, which can be seen by pilots coming in to land at nearby Newcastle airport.
The £3 million sculpture has been shaped from the rock, earth and waste from Shotton surface mine, outside Cramlington, Northumberland. It will soon be open to the public after a private ceremony with the Princess Royal on Monday, and it is hoped that people will warm to her curves.
Katie Perkin of the Banks Group believes there was no intention to make a Pagan figure or mimic any ancient fertility symbols, despite the sculpture’s “breasts” which rise almost 100 feet above the ground.
A divine intervention?
Thieves on a train stole a priest’s backpack containing a vial of the late Pope John Paul II’s blood but police recovered the relic a few hours later.
It was found near a railway station in the Italian seaside town of Marina di Cerveteri, where the thieves had disembarked.
Police said the priest boarded the train in Rome and was heading to a sanctuary north of the capital, where the relic was to be put on display for admirers of the Pontiff, who died in 2005.
Stingray thief fails mission
Aquarium staff have installed CCTV after they say a visitor attempted to make off with a stingray.
Management at the Sea Quarium in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset in the UK said a customer was spotted reaching in to an enclosure in an effort to grab a freshwater stingray.
They said the attempted theft was witnessed by another visitor, who informed staff. However, they were unable to trace the suspect, prompting the introduction of security cameras to protect the endangered species.
Pampered schoolchildren
One in 10 parents who live within 500 metres of their child’s school admits driving them to the school gates, research in Britain suggests.
More than half of British schoolchildren will not be walking to school when term starts next week, according to data collated by parenting website parentdish.co.uk. A third of children who get a lift to school live less than a mile away, the study finds.
Around two-thirds of parents would rather their children walk to school but give them a lift because of time pressures.
A case of mistaken hijack
An airliner was at the centre of a mistaken hijack alert yesterday after being escorted in to land by two military fighters.
Initially it was thought the plane had been taken over en route from Malaga in Spain to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. The plane, said to be from airline Vueling, was escorted to Schiphol by two F16 fighter jets scrambled from the Netherlands.
But later reports said there had been a communications mix-up and the airliner had not been hijacked.