Samoans celebrated in the streets at midnight Thursday when, with a song, a prayer and the ringing of bells, they wiped Friday off the calendar this week in a historic leap across the dateline.

The midnight switch from Thursday, December 29 to Saturday, December 31 brought the Pacific island nation in line with its main trading partners Australia and New Zealand who had been a day ahead.

Keepers at a Dutch zoo have found an unorthodox solution to calm down skittish giraffes spooked by the sound of thousands of end-of-year fireworks going off: playing them pop music.

"We have tried a few things to calm the giraffes down over the years," Amersfoort Animal Park spokeswoman Josien van Eijk told Agence France Presse.

An Italian fisherman has recovered his boat after it escaped from its moorings and drifted 700 kilometers (435 miles) to the coast of southern France, the French coast guard said on Friday.

The Dany, a 4.6-meter (15-foot) fishing boat, went missing in bad weather in October from Vernazza in northwestern Italy.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti made fun of his sober image on Thursday, quipping that he was not a robot and had appreciated a German newspaper's description of him as "the ideal son-in-law."

"I am the ideal son-in-law because I don't talk much, I dress in a serious and banal way and I don't make much noise," Monti told reporters at an end-of-year press conference.

Fridges might fly and beds fall from the sky as residents in Johannesburg's Hillbrow district see in the New Year by throwing broken furniture on to the streets below.

South Africa's police will send in helicopters, armored vehicles and special units Saturday night to patrol the unruly area, which has earned a reputation as a trouble spot at the turn of the year.

Sports towels and fleece blankets. A poker tournament. A $1 million Christmas display. A prom for senior citizens. BP gas card giveaways. A "most deserving mom" contest. And advertising, lots of advertising.

Florida Panhandle officials made the mix of eyebrow-raising purchases with $30 million BP gave them earlier this year to help tourism recover from 2010's disastrous Gulf oil spill.

An Australian infant was attacked by a python which wrapped itself around his body and attempted to suffocate him, his terrified mother said Thursday, recalling his "blood-curdling scream".

The two-year-old boy was chasing a ball around his Port Douglas backyard in Australia's tropical north when the snake struck, biting his leg before looping itself around his body, his mother told the local Cairns Post newspaper.

A Japanese department store is offering anyone with a quarter of a million dollars a lucky dip bag stuffed with expensive jewelry to ring in the New Year.

One lucky customer prepared to hand over a numerically significant 20.12 million yen ($259,000) can celebrate the turn of the year with a fistful of precious baubles.

Police have discovered a huge stash of contraband caviar stored in a hospital morgue freezer alongside dead bodies in Russia's second city of Saint Petersburg, officials said Thursday.

Kept in large canisters marked "Aviation Security. Inspected," the stash of both red and black caviar weighed 175 kilograms (385 pounds) -- a haul that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (euros) on the open market.

A bag of presents stolen from a Father Christmas in Rome has been returned with an apologetic note from the thieves after the victim made an impassioned appeal, Il Messaggero daily reported on Thursday.

"We're sorry. We made a mistake. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!" read the scrawled note left by the bag with 1,000 euros ($1,300) worth of presents that were stolen on Christmas Eve but were found still in their wrapping.