survey by Abbey banking revealed that 70 percent of most British parents believe that choosing the right name for their children could influence their future success or failure. The survey showed that 32 percent or a eight million parents think that the right name can give a child confidence, while a further two million think it will help their children's career prospects.

Teachers and officials at a coed British school were shocked to see a class with an all-boy attendance on the first day of school. For the first time since it opened 30 years ago Bassetts Farm, a primary school with a population equally split between girls and boys, suddenly had a class of 20 4-year old boys, an occurrence that is still puzzling people.

Trying to duplicate a scene from the movie, "A Christmas Story," two fourth-grade boys ended up with their tongues stuck to a frozen flagpole. According to reports, Gavin Dempsey and James Alexander were on flag duty at Jackson Elementary School Friday morning, when the pair decided to test whether their tongues really would really stick to the freezing metal as what they've seen in the movie.

A gray seal was spotted Saturday morning, walking along the streets of eastern Maine, passing in front of several houses and a horse pasture, then wondered onto one of the highways. Suspected to have come from Whiting Bay, the seal reportedly got on Route 189 in Washington County. It then ran into trouble upon getting on the highway, with its body shape preventing it from proper mobility on the asphalt. Drivers who spotted the animal stopped.

Authorities said Monday that a 10-year-old Mexican boy glued his hand to his bed because he was still not ready to go back to school after the Christmas vacation. "I thought if I was glued to the bed, they couldn't make me go to school. I didn't want to go, the holidays were so much fun," the boy Diego told AFP.