A Greek Orthodox priest and his assistant have been caught digging for buried treasure, police said Friday.

The pair were caught red-handed late Thursday after neighbors tipped off the police in the town of Fiska, in northern Greece.

A sleepy snake came to a rather untimely end after having its head half chewed off by a fearless toddler in an Arab town in northern Israel, the child's family told Agence France Presse on Friday.

Thirteen-month-old Imad Aleeyan, who has six teeth, was found chewing on the head of the 30-centimetre snake by his mother, who alerted the neighborhood with her screams.

A drone enthusiast testing out his airborne camera discovered a river of blood behind a Texas meatpacking plant, prompting outrage and investigations by local authorities.

"We were very concerned with the fact that this discharge was going into the creek which is going into one of our treasures -- the Trinity River," Zachary Thompson, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services, told Agence France Presse.

A policeman from the former communist East Germany has been doing the rounds in his squad car for 22 years without a valid driving license, a police spokesman told Agence France Presse on Friday.

The oversight was discovered when the officer, who has not been named, found he had to wear glasses and had to change his license which, it emerged, was valid only for tractors and motorbikes, said spokesman Bernard Wessner.

Lebanon's animal rights activists are fighting to bring to national attention what they say are rampant trafficking and abuse, problems that are far from priorities in a country plagued with turbulence.

While there are no official studies, activists estimate thousands -- if not tens of thousands -- of animals are smuggled into Lebanon annually, where they are sold, transferred to other destinations or subject to neglect or abuse.

Talks about a referendum on independence for Scotland due to take place on Friday have been cancelled because the British minister in charge of challenging the move to break up the UK is ill.

Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond was to meet the London-based government's Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Moore in Edinburgh for the first talks about the terms and timing of a referendum.

A shoe advertised as the one Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard lost when she was bundled to a car by her bodyguards attracted a Aus$2,000 (US$2,120) bid before it was pulled from eBay on Friday.

The navy-blue suede wedge shoe came off Gillard's foot on Thursday in Canberra as she fled angry Aboriginal rights protesters.

A leopard badly mauled two people including a pregnant woman on Friday after straying into the largest city in India's northeast Assam state -- the third such attack there in as many weeks.

The leopard caused panic when it wandered into a densely populated residential neighborhood in Guwahati, where it pounced on a 20-year-old man and a pregnant woman in her second trimester.

A 10-year-old French boy was apprehended by police on Thursday after taking his father's car and trying to drive it to school when he missed the bus.

The boy, who brought along a nine-year-old friend who also missed the bus, managed to make it more than two kilometers (more than a mile) in his father's Renault Megane before crashing into a roadside pylon, police in the southeastern town of Valence said.

A 16 kilo consignment of cocaine lost by Mexican drug traffickers has turned up in an unlikely place -- the United Nations in New York.

Police and U.N. officials Thursday told how two fake U.N. diplomatic pouches containing drugs -- which experts said had a street value of more than $2 million -- sparked an alert when they were delivered by accident to the global body's headquarters.