estern Europe's highest peak Mont Blanc (French for white mountain) is taller than ever as snow piled atop its summit, experts described it as a weather change related occurrence. The height was found to be 15, 783. 79 ft (4,810. 90 m) on Sept. 15 and 16 respectively - a 7. 05 ft (2. 15 m) increase in two years.

An American hit the Guinness Book of Records as the world's top stone skimmer after throwing a stone that skipped on water 51 times. It was last July 19 when Russell Byars, 43, from Pennsylvania, shattered the previous world record of 40 skims.

A French female tourist was stripped of her pants, shoes and socks while she took photographs of an wild orangutan in Malaysia's Semenggoh Wildlife Centre, located on Borneo. The orangutan involved in the incident is named Delima, and roams freely through the wildlife preserve.

A Cambodian-born French woman who left a smudge of lip stick on a white canvas painting she is suspected of kissing faces criminal prosecution. The woman, who is herself a painter, stands accused of "damage to a work of art," by kissing it and leaving her lipstick on an otherwise bone white canvas. The painting, valued at $2 million, was on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon.

A man with a brain significantly smaller than average managed to live an entirely normal life working as a civil servant. When the 44-year-old man's brain was scanned, it showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber took up most of his skull. French researchers say it left room for only a thin sheet of actual brain tissue. "He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant," Dr Lionel Feuillet of the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille said in the Lancet medical journal. When Dr Feuillet's staff took his medical history, they discovered he had had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away water on the brain as a child. The researchers were shocked when scans showed a "massive enlargement" of the lateral ventricles - chambers, usually small in size, that hold the fluid that acts as a cushion for the brain. Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not enough to classify him as mentally retarded or disabled. "What I find amazing to this day is how the brain can deal with something which you think should not be compatible with life," said Dr Max Muenke, a brain specialist at the National Human Genome Research Institute. "If something happens very slowly over quite some time, maybe over decades, the different parts of the brain take up functions that would normally be done by the part that is pushed to the side. "