Curious Gaza Strip residents on Thursday inspected a British navy cannon dating from 1910, which was put on display after it was hauled from the sea by local fishermen.

"The cannon is English-manufactured from 1910," declared Saeed Nasser, mayor of the coastal town of Deir al-Balah, the off shores of which the seven-meter, 8.5-tonne gun was discovered.

A woman arriving at Montreal's airport was handed over to Canadian federal police on Thursday after a search of her luggage found cocaine stashed inside Halloween pumpkins.

"The pumpkins seemed heavy, so we decided to run them through an X-ray machine and the drugs were found in bags inside the pumpkins," Canada Border Services Agency spokeswoman Jacqueline Roby told Agence France Presse.

A giant yellow duck on display in Taiwan became a high-profile victim of Thursday's earthquake after it deflated before exploding during an attempt to re-inflate it, officials said Friday.

The 18-meter-tall (59-feet) duck in northern Taoyuan county began to deflate when an air pump went off during a power outage triggered by the 6.3-magnitude quake on Thursday night.

An act of love between Martin the zebra and Giada the donkey in the romantic Italian city of Florence has produced a rare "zonkey" baby that is drawing crowds to an unusual exotic animal shelter.

Three-month-old Ippo is already a star and the owners of the farm say they have received requests to rights over image including one from a soft-toy company and another from Disney to make a cartoon.

Don't wear high heels while driving. Make sure you release the handbrake before setting off. And don't panic if you suddenly realize you're going the wrong way.

Those are some of the suggestions given by the Beijing police department to women drivers in a series of microblog postings that have sparked a backlash among Chinese Internet users who say the tips are sexually discriminatory.

Officials in a Siberian region on Wednesday banned Halloween parties from school classrooms, warning that they foster extremism and encourage children to dabble in a "cult of death".

The education ministry of the Omsk region in Siberia sent out a letter telling schools that "holidays that are propaganda for extremist moods will not be celebrated," its website said Wednesday.

Norway's minister for children, equality and social inclusion, Solveig Horne, said Wednesday she wants parents to go on dates to help reduce the country's soaring divorce rate.

"It's important for parents to find small pockets of time where they can be boyfriends and girlfriends," Horne, from the populist Progress Party, told newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad, arguing in favor of weekly date nights for couples.

With his soaring rhetoric and skilled oratory, Barack Obama is used to knocking it out of the ballpark.

But despite a stirring defense of his landmark healthcare law on Wednesday, Obama accepted that his Boston audience's minds might be elsewhere as the city's baseball team closed in on a World Series victory.

Hugo Chavez may have died in March, but his successor says the comandante is still around -- most recently in an image of his face that appeared on a subway tunnel.

President Nicolas Maduro said Wednesday workers in the tunnel saw the image come and go, and he showed a photo of the alleged visage in a rally in Caracas.

An Australian woman injured when a motel room light fitting fell and hit her while having sex on a business trip failed in a bid for workers' compensation Wednesday.

The public servant suffered injuries to her nose, mouth and a tooth and said she was mentally scarred when the light was pulled down by either her or her partner during intercourse.