LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Dolly Parton’s breasts may be two of the wonders of the entertainment world, but the country music icon says they are a pain in her back.

Parton, 62, said on Monday she would postpone her upcoming North American tour after doctors told her to take it easy for six to eight weeks to rest her sore back.

“Hey, you try wagging these puppies around a while and see if you don’t have back problems,” the folksy singer-songwriter said in a statement.

The tour was due to begin on February 28 in Minneapolis, two days after the release of “Backwoods Barbie,” her first album of mainstream country music in 17 years. She hopes to hit the road in late April.

Parton, also famous for her big voice, big wigs and big smile, has long joked about her famous bust. When she received a songwriters award in New York last year, she noted that she’s been known for two things throughout her career.

“I’m talking about my music and my lyrics,” she said.

Parton, a member of both the country music and songwriters halls of fame, has been enjoying a renaissance since she released the first of a trio of bluegrass-tinged albums in 1999.

As with other veterans such as Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, Parton found that she was no longer welcome at country radio, and changed tack by delving into roots music. Her releases garnered widespread critical acclaim and a fond examination of her 40-year career.

CANBERRA (Reuters) – An Australian barmaid has been fined for crushing beer cans between her bare breasts while an off-duty colleague has been fined for hanging spoons from her friend’s nipples, police said Wednesday.

Police in Western Australia said the 31-year old barmaid pleaded guilty in the local magistrate’s court to twice exposing her breasts to patrons at the Premier Hotel in Pinjarra, south of the state capital, Perth.

The woman “is alleged to have also crushed beer cans between her breasts during one of the offences,” in breach of hotel licensing laws, police from the Peel district of Western Australia said in a statement.

The barmaid and the hotel manager were both fined A$1,000 ($900), while an off-duty barmaid was fined A$500 for helping to hang spoons from the woman’s nipples, police said.

“It sends a clear message to all licensees in Peel that we will not tolerate this type of behavior in our licensed premises,” local police superintendent David Parkinson said.

NEW YORK (AFP) – A man who as a child was cared for by 1920s Paris pin-up queen Josephine Baker has claimed a moral victory after forcing the US postal service to accept postcards featuring the bare-breasted “Black Venus.”

The trouble started last year when Jean-Claude Baker, a New York restaurateur who Josephine apparently described as the 13th of her 12 adopted children, decided to mail out 15,000 postcards promoting his business.

The picture he chose dated from 1926 and showed the legendary African-American dancer, singer and cultural icon posing topless in her feather costume from the Folies-Bergeres music hall in Paris.

“I found this very pretty picture, it was very sweet,” Jean-Claude told AFP, explaining how before printing the postcards, a friend suggested he clear the watercolor with the US postal service.

“When I went there, the teller said ‘This is not at all acceptable. This is pornographic advertising!’ The other tellers and people started to gather around. It was humiliating,” Jean-Claude said.

Not to be beaten, Baker asked his printers to superimpose a banner stamped with the word “censored” over the offending breasts, but again the post office refused to accept the cards.

“The banner still allowed a bit of the breast to be seen,” he said.

He went ahead and posted the cards with a larger “censored” banner, but not before contacting a leading civil liberties organization.

Talks between New York Civil Liberties Union and the US postal service established that the tellers were wrong and the mail carrier eventually agreed to accept the cards.

He is now planning to resend the cards next week in their full, uncensored, original splendor.

“It’s just one tear in a river of freedom,” he said. “It’s the spirit of Josephine, my dear mother. She was a fighter, but she liked freedom.”

Jean-Claude was born in France and met Josephine Baker when he was working in a Paris hotel. The US-born dancer and singer, who took Paris by storm in the 1920s and 30s with her exotic displays, later took him under her wing.

Josephine Baker took French citizenship in 1937, fought in the resistance during World War II and formally adopted 12 children of various races, who she described as her “Rainbow Tribe.” She died in 1975.

SYDNEY (Reuters) – A photograph of a young Australian policewoman’s breasts, sent to her boyfriend as a get well message on her mobile phone, has sparked an investigation after it was circulated on internal police e-mail.

The Victoria state police constable was in her police uniform with her name badge visible, her shirt undone and her breasts exposed when she was photographed, Australian Associated Press (AAP) reported on Monday.

The image was circulated widely through the force’s internal e-mail, landing in the inboxes of top-ranking officers and ethical standards department detectives.

“She has sent an image to her boyfriend and obviously he has done the wrong thing and forwarded it on,” a Victoria Police spokeswoman told AAP.

“The ethical standards department has been notified. They are aware of the incident, which involved the circulation of a photograph, and they are examining it to see if an offence has been committed.”

PORTLAND, Maine – It’s a bit late for the holidays, but the state’s beer sellers are now free to let Santa’s Butt Winter Porter sit on their shelves.

The Maine Bureau of Liquor Enforcement had blocked a beer importer from selling the brew, along with two beers with labels depicting bare-breasted women. Those decisions were reversed after the state attorney general’s office determined that the company probably would win the lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed on its behalf last month.

Chris Taub, an assistant state attorney general, said Friday a court probably would find the beer labels in question to be protected under the First Amendment.

State officials had barred the English-made Santa’s Butt out of concern its label might appeal to children. It depicts a rear view of a beer-drinking Santa sitting on a “butt,” a large barrel brewers once used to store beer.

The other previously banned beers feature paintings of bare-breasted women on their labels. One of the paintings hangs in the Louvre — Eugene Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” — and the other was commissioned by the importer, Belchertown, Mass.-based Shelton Brothers.

The company was notified of the reversal in a letter dated Dec. 22, but owner Dan Shelton was out of the country and didn’t learn of it until this week.

Shelton, whose company has challenged similar bans in other states, said Thursday he has no plans to drop his lawsuit because state law still allows officials to deny applications for beer labels that contain “undignified or improper” illustrations. About a dozen beer and wine labels, out of 10,000 to 12,000 reviewed, are rejected each year on such grounds.

“You can’t have a law based on propriety and dignity. It’s too vague,” Shelton said.

Taub said his office is reviewing the rule about undignified or improper illustrations but declined to comment further.

PEREIRA, Colombia (Reuters Life!) – Every weeknight millions of Colombians tune in to watch a smash television series about the indignities suffered by a teen-age girl willing to do anything to get her breasts enlarged.

Tired of being poor and going to school with no good jobs in sight after graduation, Catalina decides to do what her friends have done and get breast implants in order to snag a gangster boyfriend who can take care of her.

She tries to prostitute herself to get money for the operation but, in a kind of Colombian Catch 22, has trouble winning clients due to her small cup size.

The show, based on a true story, is both loved and hated for displaying the culture of easy money here in the world’s biggest cocaine-exporting country.

Convinced that an overflowing bosom will be her “passport to heaven,” Catalina continues her quest, which instead leads to episode after episode of treachery and violence.

Some call the series an insult to Colombia, which is trying to end four decades of guerrilla war driven by the drug trade. Others, who enjoy the show’s black humor, say it is helping the country confront its demons.

Gangsters, called “traquetos” after the “traqua traqua traqua”-like sound made by their automatic weapons, are known to send their girlfriends for all kinds of aesthetic surgery.

Younger and younger women are getting operated on in the hope of landing a traqueto of their own.

“Vanity is pushing the girls of Colombia to do crazy things. We are addressing this in the show, not celebrating it,” said actress Margarita Rosa Arias, who plays Vanessa, one of the big-breasted characters Catalina tries to emulate.

‘TELE-TRASH’

In real life, Arias points to herself as an example of responsible augmentation, having had her breasts done by a well-qualified doctor when she was 28, at the behest of her husband.

The show’s main character is based on last year’s novel by Gustavo Bolivar about a 14-year-old girl played by Maria Adelaida Puerta, a long-necked, flat-chested beauty from Medellin.

When the book was released, people in the city of Pereira where the story is set were offended. The television show it inspired is like salt in the wounds to local business leaders who were already struggling to improve Pereira’s image.

“We will not be defined by this tele-trash!” city spokesman Luis Garcia told Reuters. “All the guys in the story are assassins and the girls sell themselves in order to augment their breasts. It is the stereotype we object to.”

For years Pereira, in the heart of Colombia’s coffee-growing region, was known as one of the country’s top party towns, where drug smugglers, coffee workers and truck drivers could blow money on famously beautiful prostitutes.

Defenders of the show say it reflects the conflicts that girls face in places like Pereira, a short drive from the home base of the still-powerful Norte del Valle cocaine cartel.

While Colombia has become safer thanks to a U.S.-backed crackdown on the drug trade, Pereira’s murder rate remains above the national average and many young people still turn to the drug-trafficking world as a way of escaping poverty.

“People are angry about “Sin Tetas” (“Without Tits”) but I think it’s OK because it shows the reality of a lot of girls,” said a woman in Pereira’s town square, declining to give her name.

HELSINKI (Reuters) – A fee of 25,500 euros ($32,000) is way too much for a woman to charge a man for fondling her bosom, a Finnish district court ruled.

The court jailed a couple in their twenties for more than a year for charging a 74-year-old who suffers from dementia a total of 25,500 euros to enjoy the woman’s breasts on 10 occasions.

“Based on general life experience alone, it is indisputably clear that a 25,500 euro charge is disproportionate to the compensation in question,” Judge Hasse Hakki, who heard the case, told Reuters Friday.

But he said the court in Kokkola, about 300 miles north of Helsinki, would not decide “the proper financial value of the compensation.”

The retiree filed charges against the couple, who were convicted of extortionate overcharging, even though he told the court he paid the price willingly at the time.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – An Israeli woman’s breast implants saved her life when she was wounded in a Hizbollah rocket attack during Israel’s war with the Lebanese group, a hospital spokesman said Tuesday.

Doctors found shrapnel embedded in the silicone implants, just inches from the 24-year-old’s heart.

“She was saved from death,” said a spokesman for Nahariya Hospital in northern Israel. The woman has been released from hospital.

LONDON (AFP) – The search has begun for a new glamour girl to appear topless on the celebrated page three of Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper, The Sun.

The first 10 hopefuls bared their wares for Wednesday’s readers, who are invited to vote for their favourite beauty to burst through to the next round.

“Our judges have picked some of the swellest from thousands of entries,” The Sun said.

An indisputable star feature of the tabloid, the phenomenon known as the “Page Three Girl” is synonymous with the pun-laden newspaper.

“You can change the life of one of these lovelies,” it read, detailing the life of luxury on offer to the “Page 3 Idol”.

The winner scoops a year’s modelling contract, a Japanese car, 2,000 pounds (2,900 euros, 3,500 dollars) to spend on clothes, a “glamourous modelling assignment in an exotic foreign location” and 1,000 pounds-worth of sexy garments and acessories.

Wannabe models from across Britain are busting to land the plum job.

Among the contenders are Freya, 20, from Nottingham, Kimberley, 22, from Orpington and Gemma R, 18, from Rochdale.

The lucky girl could become bosom buddies with previous winners Nicola T, Krystle and Keeley.

The Sun sells over three million copies per day, with Page Three Girls getting off their chests their analysis of current affairs in a speech bubble.

In a gamble which sent The Sun’s sales soaring in 1970, Stephanie Rahn, a 20-year-old German, became the newspaper’s first topless model, sparking outrage from women’s groups and conservatives.

Many have since tried to ban Page Three Girls but The Sun has bounced them all off with SOS “Save our Sizzlers” campaigns — proving it can handle the knockers.