Barack Obama said Thursday he received the "most unique gift" since becoming American president when he was presented with a framed crocodile insurance policy in northern Australia.

Obama made a whirlwind stop in Australia's tropical north to address troops in Darwin on his way to Bali, where he is due at the East Asian Summit.

Italy's former prime minister and cruise-ship crooner Silvio Berlusconi released an album of love songs on his last day in office on Wednesday.

The self-declared Latin lover, who often boasted that he single-handedly kept large groups entertained for hours on end with his charm and silky voice, wrote the lyrics for the album entitled "True Love."

The Vatican said Thursday that it was taking legal action to prevent the publication of a photo montage showing the pope kissing a leading imam as part of a Benetton advertising campaign.

The White House slammed the campaign, which also showed U.S. President Barack Obama kissing Chinese President Hu Jintao and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez in photoshopped pictures.

Italian store Benetton on Wednesday launched a provocative publicity campaign with photo montages showing the pope kissing an imam on the lips and the U.S. president smooching his Chinese counterpart.

The shock pictures show Pope Benedict XVI in a passionate kiss with Egyptian Imam Ahmed el Tayyeb, Barack Obama kissing Hu Jintao and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu smooching Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

The Swiss branch of the Raelian religious sect on Wednesday asked the European Court of Human Rights to overturn a ban on the group's posters depicting aliens.

Authorities in the Swiss canton of Neuchatel in 2001 banned the group from putting up the posters, which also carried a web address and a phone number.

Italy's departing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has reportedly packed up two gifts ahead of his last day in office on Wednesday -- a scimitar from Kazakhstan and a Ming dynasty vase from China.

The report in La Repubblica newspaper said the larger-than-life billionaire, who has been in power for 10 of the past 17 years, had chosen the two objects as having particular sentimental value out of hundreds of gifts received.

A British heavy metal vocalist who has become a cult sensation in crisis-hit Greece for his dead-on similarity to the nation's finance minister has dismissed his look-alike as 'fat' and evil-looking.

"I'm not sure, but I think there's something evil hiding behind his gaze," Steve Grimmett, the 52-year-old front man of heavy metal band Grim Reaper, told leading Ta Nea daily on Wednesday after performances in Greece last week.

An audio recording from Air Force One after the 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy has been located and was offered for sale Tuesday by a Philadelphia dealer in historical documents.

The tape, believed to have been lost for decades, includes conversations between the presidential plane, the White House situation room, and other places in the immediate wake of the assassination, according to the Raab Collection, which values the tapes at $500,000.

Vladimir Putin, known for his earthy sense of humor, made a rare appearance on a popular Russian comedy show, seeming to relish a vulgar gag about Stalin and wincing at a Lada joke.

Putin seemed to cry with laughter at some points and at other times looked deeply uncomfortable, as he sat in the front row at the show, aired as a recording on state television late Sunday.

A court in Nepal has convicted 19 villagers over the murder of a group of farmers during a fight over a prized aphrodisiac plant dubbed the "Himalayan Viagra", an official said Tuesday.

Seven farmers were killed in the remote northern district of Manang in June 2009 after going to forage for Yarchagumba, a rare parasitic plant that is a major source of income for many Himalayan communities.