Odd News

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Santa Claus should avoid kissing children and shaking their hands to prevent spreading the flu and should get vaccinated against the illness, Hungary's state health authority said.

LONDON (Reuters) - A first edition of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," which had been kept in a toilet bookcase for years, will go on sale this week and is expected to fetch 40-60,000 pounds ($66-100,000).

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A Santa in New Zealand with a droopy eye has received a NZ$100,000 ($74,000) face-lift in the run-up to Christmas so that his aging face does not scare children.

LIMA (Reuters) - Peruvian police said on Thursday they had broken up a gang that allegedly killed dozens of people and sold their fat to buyers who used it to make cosmetics.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Swedish police have arrested two North Korean diplomats on suspicion of smuggling 230,000 cigarettes into the Nordic country, the Swedish Customs Office said Friday.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Shuttle Atlantis astronaut Randy Bresnik awoke early on Sunday to a much-anticipated call that his new daughter had been born.

GIBSON, La. - A real estate agent showing a house got to the basement and found about 100 human bones in a corner. James Kenny, a forensic investigator with the Terrebonne Parish Coroner's Office, says the bones found Saturday were so old that dirt had saturated the marrow inside them. He says they probably are remains of Native Americans buried long before the house was built.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Herman Van Rompuy, the European Union's new president, may not be very well known around the world but he's already winning fans in Japan -- as a poet rather than a politician.

ROME (Reuters) - An art collector has found a tooth, thumb and finger of the renowned Italian scientist Galileo Galilei who died in the 17th century, Florence's History of Science museum announced on Friday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New fossils unearthed in what is now the Sahara desert reveal a once-swampy world divided up among a half-dozen species of unusual and perhaps intelligent crocodiles, researchers reported on Thursday.

PERKASIE, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - Carin Froehlich pegs her laundry to three clotheslines strung between trees outside her 18th-century farmhouse, knowing that her actions annoy local officials who have asked her to stop.

BETHLEHEM, Pa. - An eastern Pennsylvania prosecutor wants charges dropped against a couple who refused to pay a tip at a restaurant where they said they got poor service. Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli said he's recommending that Bethlehem police drop the theft of services charges.

LONDON (Reuters) - Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes might have thought twice about naming their daughter Suri if they'd known that it means "pickpocket" in Japanese, "turned sour" in French, and "horse mackerels" in Italian.

BERLIN (Reuters) - A car expert says he has tracked down Hitler's favorite Mercedes to a garage near the town that helped the Austrian-born Fuehrer become a German citizen.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's football chief has joined in the chorus of protestors wanting the noisy vuvuzela trumpet to be banned from next year's World Cup in South Africa.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Unfazed by a recession and rampant inflation, image-conscious Venezuelans show no signs of cutting back on the facelifts, liposuction, and breast augmentation that have become de rigueur beauty treatments.

ATLANTA - Celebrity chef Paula Deen got an unexpected serving of ham — across her face. The Food Network star was helping unload 25,000 pounds of donated meat for an Atlanta food bank on Monday when someone threw one of the hams like a football and accidentally smacked her.

ROME (Reuters) - Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, in Rome for a U.N. food summit, spent several hours in the company of 200 Italian women recruited by an agency and tried to convert them to Islam, Italian media reported on Monday.

TAIPEI (Reuters) - A man in Taiwan was robbed of more than $2 million in cash that he had just withdrawn from the bank, a police official said on Tuesday.

MELBOURNE, Australia - A kangaroo startled by a man walking his dog attacked the pair, pinning the pet underwater and slashing the owner in the abdomen with its hind legs. The Australian, Chris Rickard, was in stable condition Monday after the attack, which ended when the 49-year-old elbowed the kangaroo in the throat.