Judith Hamel, one of four doctors who helped deliver the 6 pound baby aboard the Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to the southern city of Adelaide, described the delivery as smooth.

“I think we all had fun once we knew it was all safe,” Hamel told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio Wednesday.

The flight was diverted to the northern city of Darwin where the 29-year-old mother, Paramjit Kaur, from Punjab state in northwest India, and the baby were admitted to the Royal Darwin Hospital within two hours of the birth, a hospital spokeswoman said on customary condition of anonymity.

The mother was 34 weeks’ pregnant when she took the first flight of her life from New Delhi. She and her first born, six weeks premature, were both well.

The child’s father, Jagdar Jagdar, an Indian-born Australian citizen who drives taxis in Adelaide, flew the 1,900 miles to join his wife and child at the hospital in the early hours of Thursday morning, the spokeswoman said.

Kaur is an Indian citizen entitled to live in Australia as the spouse of an Australian. Her son also becomes an Indian citizen.

Farmer Fabio Anze found the naked baby girl on Thursday, being kept warm among his dog China’s puppies, La Nacion newspaper said. Anze called the police and the baby was taken to a hospital.

Egidio Melia, director of the Melchor Romero hospital, told television and newspaper reporters that the baby was just a few hours old when she was found, and was in good health although she had some bruises.

Nighttime temperatures are chilly but not freezing in the Southern Hemisphere winter in the rural area around La Plata, 40 miles (60 km) south of Buenos Aires.

Police said they had located the 14-year-old girl who gave birth to the baby outdoors during the night.

It was not clear whether the mother left her baby in the dog’s pen or whether the dog found the baby outdoors and carried it in to join her puppies.

(Editing by Bill Trott)

The humpback whale, nicknamed “Colin” by Australian media, was found attempting to suckle off a moored yacht at Pittwater after being abandoned by its mother off Australia’s east coast.

“Our hearts are breaking with what’s happening with baby Colin. It’s looking bleak, but every effort is being made,” New South Wales state premier Morris Iemma said after the military volunteered floats to try to get the calf back to sea.

Vets were taking blood samples from the one- to two-week old whale to see how much it had weakened and whether it should be put down. Efforts to pair it with a surrogate mother from a migrating whale pod have so far proved fruitless.

“To look after this little whale, you need to suckle it for 11 months, that’s never been done anywhere in the word before for a whale this size or for that long,” Environment Department spokesman John Dengate told Australian television.

“You then need to get it to the Antarctic where its food supply is. Letting it go off Sydney, it’s got a 2,000-km trip to make. It doesn’t know how to avoid killer whales or how to find krill,” Dengate said.

With time running out and rescue efforts becoming more desperate, an Aboriginal “whale whisperer” was brought to the bay to “talk” to the calf, Australian television reported. Colin had apparently responded, the report said.

Australia’s military offered an empty fuel bladder as an inflatable raft to tow 5.5-meter (18-ft) Colin out to sea, but Dengate said rescuers were more likely to rely on two pontoons offered by the Sea World theme park on Australia’s Queensland coast.

If vets thought the animal was strong enough, the calf would then be towed offshore and released near a pod of passing whales.

“Even getting it out to sea doesn’t mean saving the whale,” said Australian Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon.

The whale’s struggle to survive has captivated Australians, who strongly oppose Japanese scientific whaling and flock to whale-watching tours during the annual migration to the Antarctic and back to breed in warmer Australian waters.

On Monday a team of workers towed the private yacht out to sea to try to lure the calf into deeper water, hoping that it would find its mother or another passing whale pod, but it was spotted close to the beach at Pittwater again on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Rob Taylor, editing by Roger Crabb)

Guinness World Records has returned the title of world’s tallest man to China’s Bao Xishun after Ukrainian Leonid Stadnyk refused to be measured under new guidelines.

Bao, who stands at 7 feet, 8.95 inches (2.36 metres), held the title for a year before losing it in 2006 to Stadnyk, who is 8 feet 5.5 inches (2.57 metres) tall, Craig Glenday, editor-in-chief of Guinness World Records, told Reuters.

While Bao has been measured by Guinness, which required him to be measured six times in one day — both standing and lying down — Stadnyk has refused. His title was awarded based on a statement from his doctor.

“We realized there was such interest and excitement in these categories to do with height that it was too important a category for us to leave it to a doctor alone,” Glenday said. “So we decided to tighten things up completely to make sure there was no doubt.”

Glenday said Guinness had been asking Stadnyk since about 2004 — when the organization first heard of him — if they could measure him, offering to fly officials to the Ukraine or fly him to Britain.

“He has gone on record saying he doesn’t want to be bothered. Basically he doesn’t want the fame and publicity that comes with being the world’s tallest man,” he said. “Whether or not that’s the real reason … I’m not sure, but that’s what he’s told us.”

Stadnyk, who lives with his mother in a tiny village in central Ukraine, told Reuters last year he doesn’t “need glory. I just want a normal life under normal conditions.”

MORE BURDEN THAN BLESSING

Stadnyk said he sees his height more as a burden than a blessing, saying “the world is built for medium-sized people.” He and his mother were living off a pension of about $100 (54 pounds) a month and whatever else they earn from growing tomatoes and cucumbers and raising chickens, cows and pigs.

Bao, however, loves the publicity that came with his title and “was a bit gutted” when he found out he had lost it to Stadnyk, Glenday said. The Inner Mongolian livestock herder has not yet learned he is again officially the world’s tallest.

Bao is recrowned in the Guinness World Records 2009 edition, which will be released on September 17.

“He was a bit of a recluse. He looked after goats. Then the fame that he got from being a Guinness World Record holder meant that he found himself a wife, his life improved,” said Glenday, adding that Bao and his 5 foot 6 inch (1.68 metre) wife are expecting a baby later this year.

Bao hires himself out for publicity stunts and his wedding last year was sponsored by at least 15 companies. In December 2006, Bao saved the lives of two dolphins by reaching deep into their stomachs with his 3.47-foot (1.06-metre) long arm to pull out pieces of plastic, according to Chinese media.

Bao reached his height in a seven-year spurt that began in his teens which doctors have yet to explain, according to Guinness, while Glenday said Stadnyk’s growth is said to have been caused by a tumour on his pituitary gland that stimulated over-production of a growth hormone.

The tallest man on record was Robert Wadlow from Alton, Illinois, who measured 8 feet 11 inches (2.72 metres) and died in 1940, according to Guinness World Records.

Guinness has also crowned a new shortest man under the new rules — He Ping Ping, who stands 2 feet 5.37 inches (74.61 centimetres) tall and lives just a few hundred miles from Bao in Inner Mongolia, Glenday said.

(Editing by Todd Eastham)

A stillborn Israeli baby who was pronounced dead by doctors “came back to life” on Monday after spending hours in a hospital refrigerator.

The baby, weighing only 600 grams at birth, spent at least five hours inside one of the hospital’s refrigerated storage units, before her parents, who had taken her to be buried, began noticing some movement.

“We unwrapped her and felt she was moving. We didn’t believe it at first. Then she began holding my mother’s hand, and then we saw her open her mouth,” said 26-year-old Faiza Magdoub, the baby’s mother.

The baby was pronounced dead several hours earlier, after doctors at Western Galilee hospital in northern Israel were forced to abort her mother’s pregnancy because of internal bleeding. Magdoub was 23 weeks into her pregnancy.

“We don’t know how to explain this, so when we don’t know how to explain things in the medical world we call it a miracle, and this is probably what happened,” hospital deputy director Moshe Daniel said.

The baby was then taken to the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit for further treatment, but doctors were not sure how long she will live.

Motti Ravid, a professor of internal medicine, told Israel’s Channel 10 that the low temperature inside the cooler had slowed down the baby’s metabolism and likely helped her survive.

(Writing by Avida Landau, Editing by Mike Collett-White)

The couple, from the southeastern town of Trebic, had some doubts about the child as her hair was blonde and they both had dark hair. Fellow drinkers’ suspicions got on their nerves.

But the test showed neither of the parents had the same DNA as the baby, Czech news agency CTK reported Wednesday, suggesting a mix-up at the hospital. Authorities were looking into the case.