An eagerly anticipated pair of giant pandas arrived in Edinburgh on Sunday on a charter flight from China, to become the first of the endangered animals to live in Britain for 17 years.

Yang Guang (Sunshine) and Tian Tian (Sweetie) were welcomed to Scotland to the sound of bagpipes as their "Panda Express" plane touched down at Edinburgh Airport.

A tag from a lobster pot that was swept off the New England sea floor two decades ago during what came to be known as "The Perfect Storm" has washed up 3,000 miles away in Ireland.

The pot that held the tag with Cohasset lobsterman Richard Figueiredo's name on it was one of hundreds he lost when the vicious storm on the Atlantic Ocean struck off New England in 1991.

China's post office is hoping to boost business by allowing customers to send letters postmarked from space.

Emails will be sent to a computer aboard Tiangong-1, a spacecraft currently orbiting the earth, and rerouted to a special China Space Post Office branch on the ground in Beijing, the country's space program said on its website.

Rumors of flesh-eating bananas in Mozambique have sparked a plummet in the sale of the fruit, prompting the health minister Friday to reassure people of its safety.

"From the work conducted by the Ministries of Agriculture, Health and Trade and Industry, it was concluded that there is no record of entry of any infected banana in the country," according to a joint statement.

An Italian bar on Friday began serving up "Spread Cocktails" whose price goes up or down depending on the notoriously volatile differential between Italian and German bonds on any particularly evening.

"We decided to turn the stuff of Italy's nightmares into pleasant evenings," said Simone Liore, a 29-year-old web designer who came up with the idea and pitched it to his local bar in the town of Cuorgne in northern Italy.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Thursday gifted visiting Argentine leader Cristina Kirchner a picture that he painted featuring her late husband and political predecessor Nestor.

Chavez gave her the painting as he inaugurated the Nestor Kirchner Hall at the Miraflores presidential palace.

A man who tried to hold up a bank that closed 17 years ago has been jailed for seven years, a court said, in what the Bild daily called Friday the case of "Germany's dumbest bank robber".

The regional court in the western city of Osnabrueck said the defendant, identified only as 57-year-old Siegfried K., arrived at the bank branch, now equipped only with cash machines, with a toy gun in May.

For anyone who needed official word, a new study confirms that many of us - and the majority of young adults - go online for no good reason at all.

The report from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project found that on any given day, 53 percent of 18 to 29 year-olds go online just to have fun or pass time.

As world leaders held frenzied talks to try to save the crisis-hit Eurozone in the south of France earlier this month, the fate of two giant pandas destined for a French zoo hung in the balance.

Negotiations had been conducted at the highest level of government in Beijing and Paris, and the deal was to have been announced at the G20 summit in the French resort of Cannes, before it was delayed by more pressing matters.

South Korean police said Thursday that they have arrested six crematory workers on suspicion of stealing and selling melted gold teeth from cremated bodies.

Police said in a statement that workers at five crematoriums were suspected of collecting melted gold teeth from the bottom of cremation braziers to sell.