A worker at a waste disposal site in Japan found $120,000 cash in a stream of pulverized rubbish, police said Wednesday.

"There were about a thousand 10,000 yen ($118) bills that came out of a pulverizer unscathed," said a spokesman at the Asaminami police department in Hiroshima prefecture, in the country's west.

Police appealed for help on Tuesday to find the thief who stole Christmas presents destined for sick children at London's world-famous Great Ormond Street Hospital.

The wrapped presents, which included portable DVD players, DVDs, Nintendo consoles, games and toys, were provided by the hospital's charity fund and were intended for children being treated in the intensive care unit.

If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are about to descend on Earth, it seems one might be riding in from South Korea on an invisible steed to the tune of "Gangnam Style".

South Korean social networks and websites have been buzzing in recent days over a prediction attributed to the 16th century French seer Nostradamus, that suggests the singer Psy is not the smiling, benign 34-year-old rapper he appears.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer's snout has been immortalized in movies, books and song.

But until now, no-one has offered a scientific explanation for the glow that allows the world's most famous antlered herbivore to guide Santa's sleigh through the night before Christmas.

Japan's presumptive premier Shinzo Abe got his U.S. leaders mixed up Tuesday, when he told business chiefs he had been speaking to "President Bush" after a phone call from Barack Obama.

The gaffe came in one of Abe's first speaking engagements since his landslide victory in weekend polls that saw his Liberal Democratic Party returned to power.

A Swedish woman who kept human skulls and bones in her apartment was sentenced Monday to probation and ordered to undergo psychiatric care after being convicted of "disturbing the peace of the dead."

The prosecution had argued that the 37 year-old woman, who has a history of unemployment and substance abuse, used the bones "for various sexual activities", but charges of necrophilia were dismissed by the Gutenberg district court.

Two ailing middle-aged elephants that French officials wanted to put down have been given a Christmas reprieve after an appeal to President Francois Hollande and an Internet campaign to save them.

Baby and Nepal, who both have tuberculosis, had been deemed a threat to other animals at their zoo in the city of Lyon as well as to human visitors since the disease is highly contagious.

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Since it arrived in Brazil 15 months ago, the website has attracted one million lusty Brazilians, turning this South American country of 194 million people into one of the biggest markets for the Canadian company.

With firefighter kits for girls and baby dolls for boys, toys are breaking out of the gender ghetto this Christmas thanks to retailers willing to brush aside some hard-to-shift stereotypes.

The latest to chip away at the toy apartheid, French supermarket Super-U, has printed a holiday season catalogue showing boys cradling dolls and girls piloting remote-controlled cars, billed as a first for the country.

Sri Lanka on Sunday unveiled new guidelines encouraging devotees to donate low-sugar, healthier food to the country's Buddhist monks after warnings that half of them risk developing diabetes.

Sri Lanka's monks eat food containing on average 12 teaspoons of sugar a day, but it should be reduced to a maximum of eight, while salt intake must also come down sharply, the health ministry said.