A restaurant owner in England has been criticised after health inspectors saw a mouse jumping from a bowl of sweet and sour sauce in the kitchen.
Inspectors visiting the Kam Tong, Hung Tao and Kiasu restaurants in Queensway, Bayswater, west London, found mouse droppings all over the kitchens and cockroach eggs in the dim sum and baskets of prawn crackers. One rodent was photographed scampering along a kitchen drainpipe in the Kam Tong restaurant after jumping from a bowl of sweet and sour sauce which was about to be served to customers.
Owner Ronald Lim admitted to breaching food hygiene regulations at Southwark Crown Court yesterday. Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC ordered him to pay fines totalling £30,000, plus £18,131 costs, and handed him an eight-month jail term suspended for two years.
The three restaurants were shut down between May and August 2008 but have since reopened.
Baby 'drowned' at baptism
Police in Moldova are investigating the death of a six-week-old baby who apparently drowned during his baptism.
The boy's relatives said he died after swallowing water during the ceremony last Friday in a village. In the Orthodox religion, babies are baptised by being briefly immersed three times in water. Priests hold the infant's mouths and noses.
Film shot by relatives shows the baby moving after being taken out of the font, but then suffering difficulty breathing as he is dressed. Twenty minutes later, he started bleeding from his nose and mouth and died.
A church spokesman said the priest who performed the baptism was being investigated for manslaughter.
Slowest channel swim record
A 56-year-old woman said yesterday how she inadvertently set a new record for the slowest crossing of the English Channel while fundraising for charity.
Jackie Cobell from Kent, hoped to make the 21-mile crossing and reach the French coast at Calais in between 18 and 20 hours.
But she had not taken into account the difficulties the tides would present her, and ended up doing about 65 miles and finishing in 28 hours and 44 minutes.
Mrs Cobell's time is said to have beaten the previous record for the longest solo swim of 26 hours and 50 minutes set by Henry Sullivan in 1923.
The mother-of-two said: "When you are in the water without a watch you lose sense of where you are. I kept thinking, I'm nearly there, as I could see the beach but I kept getting taken away by the tide."
Bank worker steals £30,000
A 22-year-old bank worker who stole more than £30,000 from elderly and vulnerable account holders has been jailed, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said yesterday.
Brittany Perfect systematically defrauded elderly customers and stopped statements being sent to their homes. Ms Perfect was working as a personal banker for Barclays in Attleborough, Norfolk, when she committed the crimes between November 2008 and last November. She transferred cash from the savings of three elderly victims into the accounts of her mother, sister and grandmother before forwarding the money into her own account.
Ms Perfect was handed a six-month jail term yesterday after she pleaded guilty to five charges of fraud by abuse of position of trust.
'Don't play with escaped tiger'
People in a South African town were yesterday warned against approaching a Bengal tiger that escaped from its owner.
The tiger, named Panjo, broke open the canopy of a truck carrying it and jumped free in Delmas, 40 miles from Johannesburg.
Panjo's owner Rose Farreira said it was tame but warned that it may attack unfamiliar people. She said the tiger could turn aggressive if it had been hurt in its escape. Tigers are not native to South Africa.
Circus act
A man robbed a bank wearing a woman's blonde wig, fake breasts under a sweater and clown pants.
Police in Pennsylvania said 48-year-old Dennis Hawkins was sitting in a parked car covered in red dye from an exploding packet in a bag of money when he was arrested.
Mr Hawkins robbed the bank at gunpoint, using a toy he had shoplifted from a store.