Google on Wednesday moved to reassure users that no animals were harmed in the making of its popular maps after a street view picture surfaced of a donkey lying on the side of a road.

The message put out Wednesday by the Internet giant was prompted by reaction to the picture, which gave the impression that a Google Maps car had run over a donkey on a dirt road while gathering Street View images in Botswana.

A plate of crispy battered shrimp, mushrooms, tomato and arugula tossed with spaghettini and a cream sauce took the cake Wednesday as the most calorie-rich chain restaurant dish in America.

Packing a whopping 3,120 calories, the Cheesecake Factory's Bistro Shrimp Pasta, which sells in Washington for $17.95, loomed large over other gut-busting menu items on this year's Xtreme Eating Awards list.

South Korean police said Thursday they had found the skeleton of a man in the southern port city of Busan about six years after he apparently committed suicide.

The man, identified only as Kim, was 49 when he apparently hung himself in the corner of a boiler room in the run-down building where he lived in 2006, a Busan police official told Agence France Presse.

Since his owner died two months ago, Tommy the dog has not missed a single mass in the small church in southern Italy where his mistress's funeral was held, Italian media said Wednesday.

When the bells of the Santa Maria Assunta church begin to toll each afternoon in San Donaci near Brindisi, the 12-year-old German Shepherd sets off from the village to get himself a front row seat next to the altar, Il Messaggero newspaper said.

Animal disease officials in Taiwan Wednesday said they had confiscated more than 400 dried dog penises, testicles and various internal organs in a raid on an illegal slaughterhouse.

The Animal Disease Control Center said a total of 435 penises were discovered in a fridge along with the other body parts, while 12 fresh dog corpses were also found in the raid at the slaughterhouse in western Yunlin county on Tuesday.

Officials scrambled Tuesday to get 18 human heads off to their final destination, a crematorium, after they were seized by U.S. customs inspectors before Christmas at Chicago's main O'Hare airport.

The heads, each tagged with a name plus place and cause of death, had originated in the United States for use at a research facility in Rome, spokeswoman Mary Paleologos of the Cook County medical examiner's office said.

A Swedish cleaning lady on Tuesday commandeered an empty Stockholm commuter train, which careered off the tracks when it reached the end of the line and smashed into a block of flats, police said.

The woman's condition was "serious but stable", Stockholm police spokesman Lars Bystroem said. She was detained on suspicion of destroying public property, a crime punishable by up to eight years in jail.

Dozens of tourists set off through Indonesia's malaria-infested jungles and potholed roads on three-wheelers as part of a rally to raise funds for forest conservation, organizers said Monday.

The 26 three-wheelers -- with wimpy 250cc engines, five-liter fuel tanks and little capacity to climb slopes -- began a two-week adventure Sunday over some 2,000 miles of mostly unlit roads between Sumatra and Bali islands.

Bank robbers have pulled off a brazen heist in the German capital after digging a 30 meter-long (100-foot) tunnel leading into the bank's vault, police said Monday.

Once inside the Berliner Volksbank branch in the southwestern district of Steglitz they cracked open safety deposit boxes and managed to get away with an undisclosed amount, a police spokeswoman said.

President Barack Obama on Monday dismissed the perception that he is aloof and disdains the backslapping bonhomie a U.S. leader sometimes requires to drive his priorities through Congress.

Obama put his often polarizing differences with Republicans down to politics rather than personal antipathy, arguing that though he had enjoyed a round of golf with House Speaker John Boehner, it had not helped get things done.