Six men climbed down into the crater of a volcano in Italy on Monday, in protest at the closure of the organization they worked for which maintained trekking paths on Mount Vesuvius, near Naples.
The men have said they will stay as long as it takes and have positioned themselves on a projection of rock about 10 meters (32 feet) below the crater's entrance, where they risk being crushed by a rock-fall.
Full StoryHaving attractive friends will make you more popular on Facebook, especially if you are a woman, according to a new study that takes Charles Darwin into the domain of cyber networking.
The findings show that signs of reproductive fitness sway our decisions about friendship, Dutch researcher Piet Kommers told Agence France Presse.
Full StoryA Holstein cow named Smurf from a farm just east of Canada's capital has set a new world record for the most milk produced in a lifetime -- a whopping 216,891 kg (478,163 pounds) over 15 years.
And she's still producing.
Full StoryRetrieving a lost football is standard fare for many teenagers, but one Japanese schoolboy is getting his ball back all the way from Alaska, where it drifted following last year's tsunami.
Misaki Murakami, 16, lost his house and all its contents when the massive waves of last March crushed his hometown of Rikuzentakata in Japan's northeast.
Full StoryTwitter users turned Sunday's French presidential election into a battle between a green Hungarian wine and a red Dutch cheese in a bid to get round tough laws banning result predictions.
The #RadioLondres hashtag was the top France trend on Twitter during the first-round presidential vote, in homage to World War II codes broadcast to Resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied France from the BBC in London.
Full StoryAn angry four-year-old Saudi boy shot and killed his father for refusing to buy him a PlayStation, Saudi media reported on Monday.
The Asharq daily, citing police in the southern Jizan area, said the child, aged four years and seven months, grabbed his father's pistol and shot him in the head.
Full StoryA stomach-turning way of smuggling cocaine is clogging up local prisons in Peru, as officials warn the life-threatening method is attracting more and more foreigners.
The so-called drug mules -- people who ingest narcotics in a malleable capsule, often condoms or another kind of wrapping, to transport them across borders undetected -- are increasingly coming from abroad to this South American country, and often end up getting caught or killed in the process.
Full StoryU.S. property mogul Donald Trump lent his name Sunday to a new luxury skyscraper project in ex-Soviet Georgia, which is emerging from a 2008 war with Russia and seeking Western tourists and funds.
Trump unveiled the planned building in the Black Sea resort of Batumi at a ceremony attended by President Mikheil Saakashvili, who hailed Trump's presence as "a sign that the country is on the path of an irreversible success."
Full StoryIn schools and backyards, for their birthdays and out with their dads, kids are gaga for archery four weeks into the box office run of "The Hunger Games" and less than 100 days before the London Olympics.
"All of a sudden sales of bows have, like, tripled," said Paul Haines, a salesman at the Ramsey Outdoor store in Paramus, New Jersey.
Full StoryIndia is to declare tea as its national drink to celebrate the life of a pioneering tea-planter who was hanged by British colonial rulers for taking part in the rebellion of 1857.
Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia on Saturday announced the decision while on a visit to Assam, the tea-producing northeastern state that borders on Bhutan and Bangladesh.
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