Taiwan's police said Tuesday they have launched an investigation into a report that gamblers are betting tens of millions of dollars on the life expectancy of terminally ill cancer patients.

The investigation comes after Taipei-based Next magazine claimed that gamblers -- including the families and doctors of cancer sufferers -- in the central city of Taichung are placing bets as high as Tw$1.0 billion ($34.5 million) on when patients will die.

The latest addition to America's ever-growing list of craft beers gives new meaning to the time-honored idea of feeding leftovers to the dog.

Dawg Grog, a non-alcoholic mock brew for canines, is the brainchild of Daniel Keeton, 32, who perfected it over the past year with a little help from his seven-year-old American Staffordshire terrier Lola Jane.

The little loved U.S. Congress, fresh off its fiscal cliff budget crisis, is now less popular than cockroaches and lice, a survey released Tuesday found.

The Public Policy Polling survey of 830 Americans from January 3-6 revealed that Congress had hit new lows in the eyes of the same U.S. voters who sent representatives to work there.

Seven Malaysians who escaped police custody this week did so by temporarily blinding a guard with chilli powder hidden in one of the escapee's underpants, police and press reports said Wednesday.

The escape Monday of the seven men -- whom police have called "dangerous criminals" -- has prompted a large-scale manhunt in the northern Malaysian state of Penang.

A Roman Catholic priest in the Netherlands is to put on display the names and photographs of parish members trying to leave the Church in a bid to get them to stay.

"This is a large parish, and I don't known everyone: by putting up the photos I thought someone might recognize someone they know who they could try to make stay in the Church," priest Harm Schilder told Agence France Presse on Tuesday.

Fact and fiction blurred this week when a real-life astronaut boldly went where no man has gone before and conversed from orbit via Twitter with the crew of television's "Star Trek: Enterprise."

It started with a message from actor William Shatner, who starred as Captain Kirk in the cult sci-fi series, asking the commander of the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield: "Are you tweeting from space?"

Honduran President Porfirio Lobo said Monday that a pre-Christmas party at the country's embassy in Colombia that included prostitutes was a "sad incident."

At the foreign minister's request, ambassador Carlos Rodriguez resigned Saturday after his bodyguard hosted a bash at the Bogota mission on December 20 with prostitutes and alcohol. The diplomat said he was not at the party.

It went undetected for five years on Wikipedia, but now a seemingly meticulous entry about a 17th century conflict between colonial Portugal and India's Maratha empire has been outed as a hoax.

"The Bicholim Conflict" of 1640-41, described in detail in the online piece assessed as a "good article", has been unearthed not as an episode of Goan history, but a tale by a mischievous user.

Two socially-aware Berlin women with a culinary flair have given "leftovers for dinner" a fresh twist by organizing communal suppers conjured up from unsold food foraged from markets.

By getting creative with whatever fresh and preferably organic unwanted produce they lay their hands on, Sarah Mewes and Sandra Teitge set up Dinner Exchange in the German capital to stoke awareness about food wastage.

An Australian toddler had a lucky escape after being attacked by a python which wrapped itself around the sleeping child's arm and then began constricting and biting the infant.

Snake handler Tex Tillis said the two-year-old girl's mother woke at 3:00 am on Saturday to find the 1.85 meter (six foot) reptile attached to her child as they lay in bed in Lismore, about 600 kilometers (370 miles) north of Sydney.