The UK’s only female giant panda is still behaving as though she is pregnant, zoo bosses said as their wait goes on for the arrival of a cub.
Edinburgh Zoo said they are still within the time-frame for a possible birth.
Panda breeding is not an exact science and it remains “really difficult” to tell if a female panda is expecting a cub, the zoo said in a statement.
Tian Tian (Sweetie) has been keeping her keepers, and the public, guessing over her possible pregnancy since she was artificially inseminated in April.
Blind man is fit for the job
A blind man who was forced to take early retirement 12 years ago was left in shock when he was told he is now fit to return to work.
Richard Alcock, of Bury, attended an assessment which ruled he was no longer entitled to employment support allowance. The 62-year-old has been registered blind from being 18 months old. He is originally from the West Midlands, moving to Bury two-and-a-half years ago.
Mr Alcock lives with his wife Rachel, 64, who is also blind. He told the Bury Times: “I had to wait for a support worker to come and read the letter out to me. I can read Braille so, as far as they are concerned, I can read.”
Black girl not Latina enough
The winner of the Little Miss Hispanic Delaware contest has been stripped of her crown over concerns that she is not Hispanic.
The News Journal of Wilmington said seven-year-old Jakiya McKoy lost the title two weeks ago. Pageant organisers require contestants to be at least 25 per cent Hispanic but some critics of the decision claim it was made because she is black and not Latina enough.
Daniel Jose Older, who started a Change.org petition, said the girl’s grandmother was born in the Dominican Republic and lived illegally in the United States before she died.
RoboCop gets his own statue
A 10-foot tall bronze statue of the science fiction crime-fighting cyborg RoboCop is to be erected in Detroit.
The 1980s science fiction movie was set in a futuristic and crime-ridden Detroit and a movement for a RoboCop statue started in 2011 after a social networking campaign took off in support of the project, quickly raising money to make it happen.
Brandon Walley, of the Imagination Station, said the statue “will add nicely to Detroit and the rejuvenation that’s happening here”.
Roman skulls unearthed in London
Roman skulls have been unearthed in an “unexpected and fascinating discovery” during work in London.
The cross-London scheme has already led to a number of exciting discoveries with the latest coming while workers were building a utility tunnel at the Liverpool Street station site.
Construction workers carefully removed the human skulls and Roman pottery, found in the sedi-ment of the historic channel of the River Walbrook. The skulls were found below the Bedlam burial ground established in the 16th century. Archaeologists suggested that the River Walbrook possibly eroded a Roman cemetery under Eldon Street in the Liverpool Street area.