A Turkish court has asked experts to analyse the "Lord of the Rings" character Gollum to decide whether a doctor should be jailed for comparing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the figure, reports said Wednesday. 

Bilgin Ciftci is facing up to two years in jail for "insulting" the president after sharing images comparing Erdogan to Gollum, a thin, pale, gangrel creature with a personality split between good and evil in J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy novels and the hugely successful films.

Prison officers in western India have come up with a novel way for convicts to secure early release -- master some yoga poses and pass an exam, an official said Wednesday.

Inmates at Yerwada Central Jail in Maharashtra state can cut their sentences by up to three months if they impress wardens in the ancient Indian practice, said the prison chief responsible for the programme.

Topless women out, female luminaries in: the latest edition of the famously titillating Pirelli calendar presented in London by U.S. photographer Annie Leibovitz has won praise for its feminist makeover.

The Huffington Post's UK edition called the images "inspiring" and "stunning", while the Daily Telegraph said the calendar had "swapped sex for substance".

France on Friday warmly accepted the offer of a puppy from Russia as a replacement for a police dog named Diesel which was killed during operations after the November 13 terror attacks in Paris.

"The gift from Russian police dog-lovers to their French counterparts... is a very strong and exceptional symbolic gesture on your part," Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve wrote in a letter to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Kolokoltsev.

Six government officials in Tanzania were jailed this week after turning up late for a meeting, reports said Friday, amid a government campaign to tighten standards and tackle corruption.

"The officials spent six hours in custody following the order by the district commissioner," the Uhuru newspaper reported Friday, in an editorial praising the move. 

Singapore has drastically cut its blacklist of banned books and publications, finally allowing citizens to read an erotic novel first published in the 18th century, but a host of adult magazines remain proscribed.   

It is no longer a crime to own a copy of the historic English text "Fanny Hill" or some anti-colonial and communist publications dating back to Singapore's troubled early years as a republic in the 1960s.

Australian man Phuc Dat Bich, who became an Internet sensation after complaining his Facebook page kept being shut down, says he is honored his name has made people laugh.

The 23-year-old, who is of Vietnamese origin, originally posted a complaint on Facebook in January that it was "highly irritating that nobody seems to believe me when I say that my full legal name is how you see it".

More than 600 babies in Japan wriggled to the finish line on their hands and knees in the world's largest crawling competition on Monday.

Japanese publisher Benesse organized the one-day event at a shopping mall in Yokohama, southwest of Tokyo, inviting infants aged between six months and one year and four months to participate in the three-meter (10-foot) race.

When Belgian police requested social media silence during a series of anti-terrorism raids on Sunday, they might have expected a catty response from the Internet.

In fact people politely complied but with a surreal twist, as thousands tweeted pictures of their feline friends when the hashtag #BrusselsLockdown went viral.

Kenyan police said Friday they have begun clearing a three-day traffic jam stretching for tens of kilometers on the main highway between the capital and the country's only port of Mombasa.

The snarl-up began on Wednesday amid heavy rains and after vehicles overtook each other to skip road construction on the route between Nairobi and Kenya's second city.