The driver of a horse-drawn carriage in New York’s Central Park has been found guilty of operating while under the influence of liquor.

Police officers pulled the 49-year-old up when they saw him swigging from a bottle of beer. He told them he’d had two beers with lunch.

He was fined $US175 and suspended from his job for 30 days.

Central Park’s horse-drawn carriages are popular with both tourists and locals, operating year-round.

A standard ride, lasting about 17 minutes, costs $US34 a carriage, plus tip.

A Carnival Cruise Lines passenger has pleaded guilty to a charge of burglary after raiding the vessel’s medicine cabinet for drugs during a sailing from Los Angeles to Mexico last month.

LA media say an affidavit alleges that the 30-year-old broke into the medicine supply area of the liner Carnival Paradise.

He was thrown into the ship’s brig after a search of his cabin turned up morphine and other drugs reported missing.

The news report doesn’t mention any court sentencing.

A man who caused chaos at one of New York’s busiest airports in January when he slipped past a security checkpoint to give his departing girlfriend a farewell kiss has been ordered to undertake 100 hours of community service.

The incident led to a six-hour shutdown of Newark airport.

Some 200 flights were delayed or cancelled and thousands of passengers had to be re-screened.

Haisong Jiang, a Chinese migrant, was finally tracked down five days later and charged with defiant trespass. He pleaded guilty in a court on Tuesday.

As well as community service, he must pay $US650 in fines and court costs.

One-time screen siren Raquel Welch had to undergo a patdown search at Chicago’s O’Hare airport last week after activating a metal detector, the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper reports.

The paper says the culprit was the black-satin bustier the actress was wearing.

The garment, described as a bra with built-in torso, is lined with little strips of metal.

Ms Welch, 69, wore it for a taping of the The Oprah Winfrey Show and had planned to change into something more comfortable for her flight back to Los Angeles, but ran out of time after signing autographs for members of the audience.

She was on the show to promote her new book ‘Raquel Beyond the Cleavage’.

An aircraft almost hit a ride-on lawnmower as it landed at Dublin airport last May, according to a report issued on Wednesday.

"I could have sworn I saw a man riding a lawn mower", the co-pilot of the Boeing 757 is reported to have said during the night touchdown.

The captain immediately reported the sighting to air traffic control, where a controller said: "I don’t believe it. They told me they were clear of the runway".

The groundskeeper on the machine moved off the runway seconds after the aircraft passed him.

The plane was carrying 198 passengers on a flight from Egypt.

An air investigation report issued Wednesday said the incident could have had catastrophic consequences.

It said pilots had reported that runway lights were being obstructed by tall grass, which had not been cut because of bad weather.

It was decided that mowing needed to be done as a matter of priority and night cutting was being undertaken during flight operations.

London has been voted the UK’s worst-smelling city by respondents to a poll conducted by makers of household cleaning product ‘Flash with Febreze’.

Car fumes, rubbish and public toilets contributed to the city’s unsavoury odour.

Birmingham is considered second-smelliest, followed by Coventry, Swansea and Glasgow.

Residents of Paris have been labelled snobbish, arrogant, aggressive and self-regarding - by the French themselves.

The views were expressed in a survey undertaken by political magazine Marianne.

Commenting on the findings, the magazine said the Parisians were found to be "hard-working and cultivated".

But above all, they were far more "arrogant, aggressive, flirtatious, stressed, chauvinistic, snobbish and self-regarding" than other French people.

At the same time, the survey found that Parisians were under more stress than other people, worked harder and travelled longer distances to work, so they were perhaps entitled to be unpleasant to one another and to other people.

It seems even animals can’t stand British football fans.

A plan to set up a giant screen near London Zoo during the coming FIFA World Cup in South Africa is being opposed by zoo management because of the harm it could cause the occupants.

"We believe that 24 days of exceptional noise adjacent to the zoo could create a serious animal welfare issue", zoo director Ralph Armond has said in a letter to the local council.

The huge screen is one of seven planned by FIFA for cities around the world, other than in South Africa.Sydney is one of them. The others are Berlin, Paris, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and Rome.

One of America’s leading museums has declined an offer to display the suit high-profile criminal O.J. Simpson was wearing when he was found not guilty in 1995 of the murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington said the suit was not appropriate for its collection.

Simpson’s former sports agent Mike Gilbert and Ronald Goldman’s father have been arguing ownership of the suit for 13 years.

Gilbert finally came up with the museum donation plan as a way of ending the dispute.

"It’s part of Amrican history", he said this week.

"People should be able to see it and reflect on what went wrong for someone who had everything".

Simpson is currently in jail in Nevada, two years into a nine-year term for armed roberry and kidnapping.

A drunk airline passenger has been fined after disembarking from a plane and trying to walk down the runway at Sumburg airport in Scotland’s Shetlands Islands.

A court was told that Ian Flaws followed other passengers down the steps of the plane, but then turned in the opposite direction and walked towards the runway.

He stopped only when a fire engine raced after him and blocked his path.

A magistrate called his actions "arrogant and stupid" and said they could have had far more serious implications at a bigger airport.