Odd News

CANBERRA (Reuters) - An elderly man who went out to fetch a morning newspaper ended up driving nearly 400 miles after getting lost and taking a wrong turn onto a major Australian highway, police said on Wednesday. The man, 81-year-old Eric Steward, eventually stopped and asked for directions after driving for nine hours, from the New South Wales country town of Yass to Geelong in the southern Victoria state.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - "Pirates of the Caribbean" star Johnny Depp was named People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" on Wednesday, reclaiming a title he first won in 2003.

OTTAWA (Reuters) - A Canadian member of Parliament learned the hard way on Tuesday that insulting a rival legislator by Twitter is not a good idea, especially if you're sitting around the same table at the time.

LISBON (Reuters) - He wiggled, jiggled and even dropped his trousers, but a thief trying to break into a supermarket in Portugal stayed stuck fast in a tiny window until he was rescued by police and the fire brigade.

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization, has a theory about why governments and people are so reluctant to talk about hygiene: it isn't cool.

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.

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.

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.

Iraqi security forces rely on expensive bomb-sensing "divining rods" that U.S. officials regard as no more accurate than Ouija boards

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.

KALAMAZOO, Mich. - Authorities in western Michigan arrested a person twice in three days for driving the wrong way down the highway Kalamazoo County deputies said they were alerted about 1:30 a.m. Friday after several people called 911 when they passed the unidentified driver traveling south on northbound U.S. 131.

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.

RALEIGH, N.C. - A North Carolina doctor could lose his medical license after a patient complained he made cutting criticisms, including telling her she was fat. The News & Observer of Raleigh reported the North Carolina Medical Board will decide if Dr. Earl Sunderhaus of Asheville overstepped the bounds of professional decency.

MERCER, Pa. - A western Pennsylvania woman has been ordered to stand trial on charges she passed a drug-filled balloon to a state prison inmate while kissing him. State police said guards at the State Correctional Institution-Mercer became suspicious when an inmate appeared to swallow something after a prolonged kiss with a visitor on Oct. 19.

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.

LOS ANGELES - California tax officials say an interior designer's false disability claim was uncovered when he was spotted on a home improvement television show.

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.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's former Olympic marathon gold medallist Naoko Takahashi has decided to become a vegetable farmer.