A Belarus woman snoozed her way through a near-death experience in Brest after she ended her birthday with a kip on a railway track.

Svetlana Yurkova had been celebrating her 32nd birthday in the time-honoured fashion when she was overcome with fatigue, and found herself a comfortable place to bed down. "I just lay down on what I thought was the ground," she explained. "It felt very comfortable, but I later found out it was between two rail tracks and an express train went over me during the night. I didn't even hear it."

"The doctors said it was a good job I was so hard asleep," she went on, "otherwise I would have woken up with the sound of the train and got my head knocked off."

Concerned onlookers called the emergency services, quite reasonably convinced Yurkova was dead after the 90mph train ran over her. The lurking figure of Charles Darwin was observed fleeing the scene, cursing extravagantly. ®

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