This gives new meaning to punching in at work: doctors at a Brazilian hospital covered for absentee colleagues by using fake silicone fingers with their prints to fool biometric machines.

Globo television showed footage of a doctor touching her finger to the device, then using two fake digits to do the same for colleagues, and taking delivery of slips of paper indicating they had in fact clocked in to work.

The son of Australia's richest person, Gina Rinehart, sought a Aus$15 million (U.S.$15.4 million) "sorry payment" from his mother for how had she treated him over the years, a report said Wednesday.

Iron ore billionaire Rinehart is embroiled in a legal battle with two of her four children, including son John Hancock, over control of a family trust reportedly worth Aus$4 billion.

The cardinals locked away to choose the next pope will be served plain but wholesome food -- and nothing so delicious that they will want to drag out their deliberations, an Italian newspaper reported on its website on Tuesday.

The nuns who will cook for the 115 cardinals during the papal conclave at their Casa Santa Marta residence "are already preparing meals of soup, spaghetti, small meat kebabs and boiled vegetables", the Corriere della Sera reported.

A mating pair of pandas have wasted no time in getting intimate, a Japanese zoo said Tuesday, coupling on their first evening together and then again the next morning.

The female Shin Shin and her companion Ri Ri were put in a private enclosure on Monday evening after keepers at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo noticed they were ready to mate.

Cardinals entering the Vatican on Tuesday ahead of a conclave to elect the next pope took to Twitter to say goodbye to their online flock before they are cut off from the outside world.

"Last tweet before conclave: May Our Father hear and answer with love and mercy all prayers and sacrifices offered for fruitful outcome. God bless!" South African cardinal Wilfrid Napier told his thousands of followers.

His half brother may be the most powerful man in the world but that stardust seemed not to rub off on Malik Obama as he failed miserably to win a county gubernatorial seat in Kenya's recently concluded polls.

Obama, 54, who shares a father with United States President Barack Obama, won just 2,792 votes -- some 140,000 behind the final winner -- in his bid to claim the seat for his home area in western Kenya.

The "world's best restaurant" said Saturday it would reimburse dozens of diners who came down with a nasty case of food poisoning after savouring its delights.

The two-Michelin-star Noma restaurant said it would alternatively offer them a free meal if they dared to return to the eatery in the Danish capital Copenhagen.

Scores of nude cyclists rolled through Brazil's financial and industrial hub Saturday to call attention to the bare facts: this city is dangerous for bikers, and short on dedicated bike lanes.

Some demonstrators did a Full Monty ride while others opted for a relatively demure topless protest that was carried out in some other Brazilian cities, like Porto Alegre, and in Peru's capital, Lima.

A top Bulgarian cleric on Sunday failed to sell his gold Rolex to pay the electricity bill of his cash-strapped church as there were no takers for the watch in the EU's poorest country.

Metropolitan Nikolay of the southern city of Plovdiv decided to sell the watch late last month to pay the almost 3,000-leva (1,538-euro/ $2,000) power bill of the Saint Marina church.

Polish doctors say a 25-year-old man has undergone a three-hour operation to remove a screwdriver lodged about five centimeters (two inches) into his head.

Dr. Jan Kochanowicz, one of the doctors who treated the man in the Polish city of Bialystok, said the man apparently fell and lost consciousness, but does not remember that.