Two masked armed thieves who robbed a shop in Germany over the weekend got away with a disappointing booty: one pink piggy bank containing 20 euro cents ($0.26) and two bars of chocolate.

Police in the western German city of Duesseldorf said the two robbers fled in panic when the alarm was raised, managing only to grab what was to hand.

A giant panda lent to the United States by China and living at the National Zoo in the U.S. capital has given birth to a cub, zoo officials said Monday.

The birth occurred at about 10:46 pm local time Sunday (0246 GMT Monday), according to the zoo's chief veterinarian, Suzan Murray.

Seventy "lucky earthworms" have been married off in an elaborate wedding ritual in south Taiwan in a bid to raise awareness about the environment and the problem of soil erosion, organisers said Monday.

The worms arrived Sunday at Takang Park in Tainan city inside a traditional wedding sedan draped in red cloth to "tie the knot with the soil of the park", Takang Community Development Association said.

Talk about the old ball and chain.

A judge sentenced an Oklahoma man to four years in federal prison on a firearm charge — then minutes later performed a marriage ceremony to wed the new inmate and his longtime girlfriend.

Colombia police said Friday they have arrested two men who had each ingested about $40,000 before trying to enter the country, in what may be a novel form of money laundering.

The men were detained separately during the past week at the international airport in Colombia's second city of Medellin and were on flights arriving from Costa Rica, according to security officials here.

He won't carry passengers but he might serenade passing cargo ships, says a 71-year-old Venetian gondolier who set off from Vienna Friday for Budapest in a bid to link the two cities by gondola for the first time.

Vittorio Orio, who already crossed the English Channel in 2001 and also paddled down the Hudson River in his typical Venetian vessel, will cover about 60-70 kilometers (37-44 miles) per day, with a first stop planned in Slovakia's capital Bratislava later Friday.

Doctors' handwriting has never been renowned for its elegance, but an Indian medical group is so concerned about sloppy scrawls that it has started an awareness drive to prevent fatal errors.

More than 100 doctors across Maharashtra state met last week and found handwriting legibility to be one of the most alarming issues they faced, according to the non-profit umbrella body Medscape India.

A New Zealand man threw away a winning lottery ticket worth NZ$27 million ($22.5 million) after reading the wrong results and thinking it was useless.

It was not until the following day, when he heard the lucrative prize had not been claimed, that he searched for the ticket and found he had won.

Britain's Prince William declared Friday that he is no fan of durian, the spiky and notoriously pungent Southeast-Asian fruit, after sampling it on a visit to Malaysia.

The future king and his wife Catherine were served durian, revered in the region as the "king of fruits", during a welcome lunch with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak after their arrival Thursday for a three-day visit.

Striving for a Guinness World Record in oral hygiene, officials in Lagos have called on 300,000 students to take out their toothbrushes on December 5 and start scrubbing simultaneously at noon.

The current record was set in India on October 9, 2007, when 177,003 people gathered at 380 locations and brushed at the same time, according to guinnessworldrecords.com.