More libraries in Kentucky's Kenton County are letting kids and teens pay library fines by reading books. Under the plan called Fresh Start Club, introduced years ago by the Mary Ann Mongan Library in Covington, children up to 17 years old who incurred fines for not returning borrowed books on time can pay off the debt at a rate of 10 cents for every minute that he or she reads a book at the library. The reading is monitored.

orld-popular cartoon characters The Smurfs are now 50 years old and Belgians have prepared a big birthday bash starting early this week. The celebration will cover key European cities including Paris and Berlin. The Smurfs, the diminutive blue-colored forest dwellers, were created by late Belgian cartoonist Pierre Culliford, fondly called 'Peyo,' through a comic strip in the late 1950s-back then, they were still called Schtroumpf. In the early 1980s, Smurfs debuted on US television and became hugely popular worldwide since then.

A 102-year-old man from Southampton has set the record as the oldest English Emigrant after setting to sail for New Zealand on Saturday. Eric King-Turner, a retired dentist, embarked on a six-week voyage from Southampton with Kiwi wife Doris, 87.

After being berated by her parents who find her 'language' too difficult to understand, a schoolgirl has come up with a guide to teenage slang so her parents could understand her better. After writing "The A-Z of Teen Talk," 13-year old Lucy van Amerongen, from Box in Gloucestershire, is now "stoked" (very happy) because sales of her "nang" (cool) book are "owdish" (excellent).

An expert on artificial intelligence predicts that by 2050, human will start having sex robots, which by that time, "will be nearly indistinguishable from real people. "In his book, Sex With Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot relationships, David Levy states, "Great sex on tap for everyone, 24/7. What's not to like?"