The Queen was reduced to a fit of giggles yesterday when a "17th century" military officer clad in armour had a little trouble sitting down next to her.
The monarch saw the funny side of things as she took her place among a group of historically attired servicemen, who act as the Lord Mayor of London's bodyguards, for a group photograph.
When Major Paul Champness, Captain of the Company of Pikemen and Musketeers of the Honourable Artillery Company, tried to take his seat next to the Queen, his metal thigh protectors - known as tassetts - brushed against her. Wearing a breast plate and helmet he squeezed himself between the head of state and the Duke of Edinburgh and wriggled to create some space which left the Queen laughing at their predicament.
It was the second day running a group picture of the monarch with a military unit had suffered a slight mishap.
On Tuesday, the Queen sat down in the wrong seat in front of the massed ranks of the 1st Battalion, the Grenadier Guards moments before a photographer pressed the shutter. (PA)
Pre-dinosaur creature
Brazilian paleontologists have discovered the well-preserved and near-complete fossils of a pre-dinosaur predator that they say lived some 238 million years ago.
The creature, a Prestosuchus chiniquensis, was about seven metres long, weighed 900 kilos and lived in the Triassic Period (250 to 200 million years ago), paleontologists from the Lutheran University of Brazil said.
A team led by paleontologist Sergio Furtado Cabreira and biologist Lucio Roberto da Silva found the fossils in the town of Dona Francisca, some 260 kilometres from Porto Alegre, the capital of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. (AFP)
Passenger detained with weapons in bags
Egyptian authorities detained a passenger arriving at Cairo airport from New York yesterday after finding guns, bullets and knives in his baggage, an airport official said.
Mohamed Ibrahim Marei, a US university professor of Egyptian origin, had flown in on an Egyptair flight from New York's JFK airport.
Customs officials noticed the passenger looked nervous and decided to open his luggage. They found two handguns and 250 bullets hidden in metal boxes, the official said on condition of anonymity. In a secret compartment in the bag, authorities also found two swords, five daggers and six knives, he added.
An investigation has been launched, the official said. (AFP)
Leader fined for 'undermining' party
A firebrand youth leader has been fined for "undermining" South Africa's ruling party, exposing internal divisions that remain sharp two years after a power struggle that brought down a president.
Julius Malema, who heads the youth league of the African National Congress, was found guilty late on Tuesday of bringing the party into disrepute with his controversial speeches.
He was accused of breaking the party line on Zimbabwe, singing a racially charged song about killing white farmers, and calling a BBC journalist a "bastard" and chasing him from a press conference. But an ANC disciplinary committee did not punish him for those incidents.
Instead, he was slapped with a 10,000 rand (€1,000) fine and forced to apologise for saying that President Jacob Zuma was worse than former president Thabo Mbeki, who was ousted by the party in 2008. (AFP)
Flooding risk
Thousands of villagers in northern Pakistan risk losing their homes to a lake formed by a landslide that could burst its banks within days, officials warned yesterday.
About 1,700 people have been forced to flee their homes after floods swept through Ayeenabad and Shishkat villages in the district of Hunza, wiping out dozens of houses about 750 kilometres north of Islamabad.
"We are expecting water from the 15 kilometre-long lake to reach the spillway by May 27 and then (overflowing) will begin," local official Asif Bilal Lodhi said. (AFP)