The British parliament is to spend up to £100,000 (120,000 euros, $150,000) on refurbishing two toilets used by members of the House of Lords and guests, it emerged on Sunday.

A contract put out to tender by the House of Commons authorities says the toilets, installed in 1937, have not been refurbished for 20 years "and have reached the end of their serviceable life".

A runaway lioness is roaming South Africa's countryside where it has been spotted on a sugarcane farm and by passengers on a bus, a parks authority said Friday.

"It's been seen twice," said Musa Mntambo, spokesman for Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, which oversees public reserves in the eastern Kwa-Zulu Natal province.

China's law enforcers are having an unusually public debate about a delicate topic: Do paid sexual services known as "happy endings" at massage parlors count as crimes if they don't involve actual sexual intercourse?

While prostitution is illegal in China, its boundaries are being discussed with rare candor by courts, police and state media — even the usually stodgy flagship newspaper of the Communist Party.

Officials have finally identified the culprit behind a 20-hour Internet and cellphone outage last week in northern New Mexico —an eager beaver.

CenturyLink spokesman David Gonzales told The Associated Press on Friday that a beaver chewed through the fiber line last week. He says the evidence was discovered by contractors who worked to repair the outage.

Tempers flared and police had to be called in Thursday as anxious Singaporeans rushed to McDonald's outlets to buy Hello Kitty plush toys being sold by the fastfood chain as a promotion.

Hundreds had begun queueing from Wednesday night to get their hands on a kitten in a skeleton outfit, depicting a character from the German fairy tale "The Singing Bone".

Japan's banks emerged from the 2008 global credit crisis largely unscathed because senior employees did not speak English well enough to have got them into trouble, the country's finance minister said Friday.

Taro Aso, who also serves as deputy prime minister, said bankers in Japan had not been able to understand the complex financial instruments that were the undoing of major global players, so had not bought them.

There's nothing slippery about Elif Bilgin's idea of using banana peels as a substitute for old-school petroleum-based plastics.

The 16-year-old student from Istanbul spent two years perfecting a way to make a bioplastic out of discarded banana peels that could, in turn, be used for the electrical insulation of cables.

A Dutch woman kept her dead 83-year-old mother in the freezer for a week because she couldn't bring herself to say goodbye, police said on Wednesday.

"The woman froze her mother's body and kept it for a week," police spokeswoman Esther Boot told Agence France Presse.

A U.S. couple are letting customers at a Starbucks coffee shop choose the name of their baby.

Twenty-five-year-old Jennifer James and 24-year-old Mark Dixon of West Haven tell the New Haven Register (http://bit.ly/1adT5d6 ) they have been struggling between two names for the boy they are expecting in September.

A two-headed turtle has hatched at the San Antonio Zoo and officials have named her Thelma and Louise.

The female Texas cooter arrived June 18 and will go on display Thursday at the zoo's Friedrich Aquarium.