Selfridges has opened its Christmas store – with only 142 shopping days left to buy all the celebration’s essentials.

The London department store claims to be the first in the world to launch its Christmas shop, with the North Pole-themed space set to welcome shoppers dressed for the height of the British summer.

More than 700 square feet of space on the fourth floor of the London flagship has been decked out with more than 100,000 Christmas decorations, expected at this stage to appeal mainly to tourists wanting to take home a memento.

Customers can choose from more than 300 different crackers, almost 450 Christmas tree styles and some 200 different styles of decorations.

Child drivers banned from the road

A 12-year-old British girl and seven other youngsters aged either 12 or 13 are among people disqualified from driving, according to latest figures.

These young offenders are among 230 people under the age of 17 who are currently disqualified, statistics from the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) show.

The figures were supplied by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency following a Freedom of Information Act request made by the IAM.

The underage offenders could, typically, have been caught driving stolen cars or been illegally let loose behind the wheel by mis-guided parents.

Cashing in a sweet treat movement

Pez dispensers buried on New York city beaches at the weekend contained something even sweeter than the usual treats: cold, hard cash.

The backers of the popular Hidden Cash movement filled three-dozen of the devices with $100 US bills and scattered them for a scavenger hunt in Brooklyn’s Coney Island and Brighton Beach.

One lucky boy found a Superman-shaped dispenser that was good for two round-trip airline tickets to anywhere in the US.

Runaway tortoise sent back home

A giant tortoise found ambling down a street in suburban Los Angeles has been reunited with its owners.

A family claimed the reptile, named Clark a day after it was spotted strolling along the street, a spokesman for the Alhambra police department said.

It took two officers to lift the creature into a patrol car so they could turn it over to animalcontrol authorities.

The department posted photos of Clark on its Facebook page in the hope of finding the owner and cracked a tortoise and hare joke about officers capturing the animal after a brief pursuit.

Copping on to drink-drive scheme

A drunken woman tried to drive away in an unmarked police car – with two officers still inside, according to police in Pittsburgh.

A criminal complaint says the woman got into the car outside a nightclub. Police then said she sat in the driver’s seat and told the two officers, who were not in uniform, in the back seat that she intended to drive the vehicle to where her own car was parked.

A police spokesman said she was arrested before she could drive anywhere.