QUIRKY WORLD ... Catch of the day: Motorist uses fishing line to avoid toll

USA: A truck driver was caught using a fishing line to flip his licence plate in a bid to avoid paying tolls into New York City.

Police said 41-year-old Javier Marte was seen to drive through an electronic toll lane on the George Washington Bridge without the toll registering.

Officers stopped his truck and found a fishing line rigged from the cab to a hinge on the front licence plate. They said the line could flip the plate out of view while going through the toll plaza, while the rear licence plate was bent up to defeat security cameras.

Sticky end

ISRAEL: Fifteen tonnes of Snickers chocolate bars met a sticky end in the Gaza Strip. Hamas authorities hurled boxes of the bars into a bomb crater, dousing them with fuel and lighting them in a crackling bonfire after confectionery giant Mars recalled sweets from its Netherlands factory last month when “a small piece of red plastic” was found in a Snickers bar.

Three children from a nearby encampment managed to snatch some of the chocolate bars before they melted.

Wildlife firsts

ENGLAND: A number of “wildlife firsts” have been discovered during the biggest survey yet of nature around Britain’s coastline.

Wildlife experts and nature lovers recorded more than 3,400 species at 25 of the National Trust’s sites along the coasts of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Among the discoveries was the first recorded sighting of the Balearic shearwater seabird, Puffinus mauretanicus, at Blakeney on the Norfolk coast. At Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire, West Wales, a slow worm, Anguis fragilis, was found for the first time since 1966.

Vintage van

ENGLAND: A 1950s delivery van rebuilt with bodywork retrieved from a Stoke-on-Trent salvage yard has gone on show at Crufts — after its owner ignored calls to scrap it.

The Morris Commercial J-Type was unveiled at the NEC by Lincolnshire-based Laughing Dog farm bakery after a 1,750-hour restoration overseen by William Grant, the grandson of the firm’s founder.

Cocaine blues

ENGLAND: A driver who tried to smuggle cocaine worth potentially £18m (€23.3m) on a bus taking Romanian children on a trip to Britain has been jailed.

Ioan Buciuta, 53, attempted to use the pupils’ trip to London as cover to try to smuggle the Class A drug through the Port of Dover in Kent. But he was caught after Border Force officers found around 130 tape-wrapped packages behind a false bulkhead in the luggage compartment.

Keeping abreast

USA: Politicians in New Hampshire have rejected a bill which would have made it a crime for women to expose their breasts or nipples in public.

The bill — which would have made it a misdemeanour for women to show their breasts with “reckless disregard” for whether it would offend someone — was partly a response to a “Free the Nipple” movement that led to two women being cited for going topless at a beach.

Supporters had warned that allowing women to go topless at beaches could lead to them doing the same at libraries and sports events.

But the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted against the bill, which also caused a spat after a male policy-maker claimed that if women want to show their breasts publicly they should be OK with men wanting to “grab” them.