Britain's Queen Victoria's stocking have sold at auction for a staggering $16,000. The black and white silk stockings, which bear the royal crest, fetched 40 times their list price when they were bought by David Alcock. Alcock, a bidder from North Wales, bought the legwear for Nottingham's Ruddington Framework Knitters' Museum - in honor of his late father-in-law Jack Smirfitt, who was a curator at the museum.

Police in Toronto have seized up to 2,000 stolen bicycles from a theft ring they busted last week but the huge find has prompted authorities to look for a temporary impound area. The police garage is not big enough to store and display some 1,000 recovered bikes so the search for a bigger space where owners can go and claim their bicycles is on, according to Superintendent Ruth White as cited by CBC. ca Tuesday.

Aside from several Jaguars, an Audi and a Range Rover that run on used cooking oil-based biodiesel, an Aston Martin fueled by bioethanol from wine is the latest environmentally friendly car of Britain's Prince Charles. The luxury car given by Queen Elizabeth as a birthday present when the prince turned 21 has been converted to run on pure bioethanol supplied by Green Fuels Limited. The biofuel is made from excess local vintage produced by English wine makers. The wine comes from a vineyard close to Prince Charles' Highgrove Estate, a spokesman of Green Fuels told CNN. com.

The resident of a small island off the coast of Scotland has declared its independence from the United Kingdom. Stuart Hill, the owner of the island, wants it to be a crown dependency, similar to the Channel Islands. According to a statement on his Web site, Hill, who owns Forvik, a 2. 5-acre island in the Shetland Islands, declared that he no longer recognized the authority of the British government or the European Union.

As expected, the glamorous third wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy stole the show from him and Queen Elizabeth when the First French Couple visited Windsor Castle on Wednesday. From her Christian Dior outfits to her controversial nude photos, Carla Bruni was the talk of a royalty-obsessed nation that compared the 40-year old former supermodel to two global icons of beauty and style - Princess Diana and Jacqueline Kennedy.