Prisoners at a jail in Lancashire were offering a day out as a raffle prize – until this tantalising glimpse of freedom was withdrawn after the governor found out about it.

According to the BBC, inmates at HMP Kirkham, an open prison, were able to enter the competition for £1, if they agreed to help make a Christmas lunch for elderly people at a nearby day centre.

This would, according to the Prison Service, earn the winner the right to a “single town visit”. The jail later withdrew the prize after admitting the governor “was not aware” of it. A more appropriate prize for the draw is now being considered. You can just see old Norman Stanley Fletcher scowling over this one.

IF SEXUAL experience is occasionally said to be “out of this world”, the birth that can result is not usually thought of in such terms. However, for one US astronaut that is exactly how it was for him. Randolph Bresnik was on board the space shuttle Atlantis when he heard the news of the birth of a daughter back on Earth.

Bresnik, who is on his first space flight, became a father for a second time when baby Abigail was born in Houston, Texas, according to the BBC. Bresnik is the second astronaut to become a father in space – the first was Mike Fincke in 2004. The debate about whether or not fathers should attend the birth of their children occasionally flares up, with a professor recently suggesting having the father present can cause stress.

Most fathers, however, do attend the birth. Any man feeling queasy about the prospect could always copy Mr Bresnik and abscond themselves in space.

MEANWHILE, tragedy struck an expectant father in Australia, according to The Age newspaper.

Bill MacDonald, 46, a NSW-based DJ A was on his way to hospital for the birth of his son when his car slammed into a pole after a suspected road rage incident. He lost control of his car driving to Gosford Hospital as his partner, Joanne Jennison, was in labour.

Mr MacDonald was killed instantly. His son, who has been named Bill Jnr, was the couple’s first child. Mr MacDonald had four other children. Sergeant Brett Samuel, of Sydney’s crash investigations unit, said a witness claimed Mr MacDonald had been involved in a kilometre-long verbal altercation with the driver of another car travelling in the same direction on the Central Coast Highway. ‘‘Technically you could class it as road rage, but it does appear he was travelling to hospital, so whether it was road rage or impatience …’’ Sergeant Samuel said.

SHOULD we ever trust sat-nav systems in cars? One driver in Austria had cause to doubt their helpfulness after his car crashed into a shop window when his sat-sav system told him to turn right. Martin Pohlmann, 38, ended up in hospital after the crash, causing £20,000 of damage to the property at Neuss, Germany. One eyewitness told the Austrian Times: “The car was travelling along perfectly normally then suddenly turned right and ploughed straight into the shop window.”

A VIETNAMESE man dug up his wife’s corpse and slept beside it for five years because he wanted to hug her in bed, it has been reported, in the Daily Telegraph and elsewhere. The 55-year-old man from a small town in the central province of Quang Nam opened up his wife’s grave in 2004, moulded clay around the remains to give the figure of a woman, put clothes on her and then placed her in his bed, Vietnamnet.vn said.

The man said that after his wife died in 2003, he slept on top of her grave, but about 20 months later he worried about rain, wind and cold, so he decided to dig a tunnel into the grave “to sleep with her”. The father of seven said neighbours did not dare visit the house for several years. “I’m a person that does things differently. I’m not like normal people,” he was quoted as saying.