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Worm turns on menu for kids (Manchester, U.K.) KIDS are raving about the latest thing in instant snacks on offer at Chester zoo this summer - meal worms. The crunchy wrigglers come in cheese, chilli and barbecue flavours. And they are going down a treat with adventurous young visitors to the zoo's wildlife discovery centre, which is a top attraction. Bowls full of the fried munchies are put out for youngsters to try and a zoo spokesman said they can't get enough of them. Spokesman Matt Lewis said: "They are completely safe to eat and they taste a little like...

A vintage, four-engine Boeing airplane made an emergency landing in Elliott Bay across from an Alki restaurant in West Seattle early this afternoon. All four people aboard got out safely. The Boeing 307 Stratoliner, one of only 10 such planes built by Boeing and the only one remaining, hit the water shortly after 1 p.m. today. Witnesses said they heard the plane's engines sputtering before it made a hard turn and then landed on the water less than 100 yards from Salty's restaurant. Those on board were a 43-year-old man from Puyallup, a 46-year-old man from Graham, a 43-year-old man...

A man from the town of Nizhny Tagil in the northern Urals has been hospitalized after finding metallic mercury in his Balkanskaya Zvezda (Balkan Star) cigarettes. The unlucky customer bought seven packs of the Russian brand cigarettes at a local market and smoked four of them before discovering that the tobacco was a far greater health hazard than usual. On February 21 specialists at the local sanitary inspectorate conducted basic chemical tests on the cigarettes and established that they contained metallic mercury. The cigarettes were then sent to Yekaterinburg, the regional centre of the Sverdlovsk region, for more detailed analysis, ...

Doctors at a hospital in the Russian town of Ulyanovsk have removed a star from the stomach of an army officer. It transpires that the officer was celebrating his promotion to the rank of captain and in keeping with tradition, threw his freshly awarded epaulet star into a glass of vodka. The unnamed newly promoted captain downed the glass with such enthusiasm that he forgot about his prized new star. The operation to remove the insignia took over an hour.