A substitute teacher from California was found to be the only heir to a fortune of gold coins discovered by a cleaning crew in the home of a reclusive cousin who quietly stashed away a treasure of more than $7 million before he died this year.

A court hearing in Carson City is scheduled Tuesday, when a judge is expected to certify first cousin Arlene Magdanz as the lone heir to the treasure valued at $7.4 million found in the home of Walter Samaszko Jr., Carson City Clerk-Recorder Alan Glover told the Nevada Appeal.

Russian rescuers saved two circus elephants on a Siberian highway when their wooden van caught fire amid freezing temperatures, police said Friday.

The elephants' wooden truck caught fire on Thursday evening in Siberia's Novosibirsk region. A petrol-powered heater in the van most likely set fire to their straw, police said, publishing photographs of the blackened vehicle.

A Sicilian priest stunned his congregation by announcing during a mass that he would soon be a father and was quitting to marry his partner, Italian media reported Friday.

"It's my last mass. I am in love with a woman and in a few months I will be a father," Vito Lombardo, 33, told his flock in the city of Trapani in northwestern Sicily, local newspapers said.

Expect some serious discipline at Harvard University's newest club -- the first bondage and sado-masochism hotspot to win official campus approval.

Harvard College Munch, as the group is named, promises to give the student body a chance to beat misconceptions about S&M by providing "accurate understandings of alternative sexualities and kink."

In the battle for Christmas, Microsoft has scored a win over Google as the official maps partner for Santa and his reindeer.

Microsoft announced this week it had sealed a partnership with the Pentagon's North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which monitors the skies over Canada and the United States, for the holiday season.

China's one-child rule has numerous critics, but perhaps none have so emphatically defied the policy as a couple who have accumulated four boys and four girls -- some born to two surrogate mothers.

Authorities are calculating how high a fine to impose on the family, described as "rich merchants" in the southern province of Guangdong, state media said on Friday, estimating that it could reach 10 times their annual income.

A 94-year-old man who cashed in his funeral savings to use as an election deposit was out canvassing for votes Friday, just two days ahead of Japan's general election.

Ryokichi Kawashima is the oldest candidate in the race for the lower house this Sunday and says he felt he had to get involved in politics to stop the younger generation making such a mess of things.

The world's highest mountain should not be hard to spot but American space agency NASA has admitted it mistook a summit in India for Mount Everest, which straddles the border of Nepal and China.

The agency said on its website that Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko's snap from the International Space Station, 230 miles (370 kilometers) above Earth, showed Everest lightly dusted with snow.

In a small Arctic town in Sweden, a construction crew bundled up in heavy parkas is bustling around a building site unlike any other: a massive ice hotel is taking shape.

Armed with thick gloves and safety helmets over fur-lined hats, the builders in the northern town of Jukkasjaervi assemble two-tonne blocks of ice as if they were a large set of Lego blocks, with the end result a giant igloo with several domes, vaulted ceilings and archways.

As people across the globe tremble in anticipation of next week's supposed Mayan-predicted apocalypse, one Chinese villager says he may have just what humanity needs: tsunami-proof survival pods.

Camouflage-clad former farmer and furniture maker Liu Qiyuan, 45, inspected his latest creation, a sphere several meters tall he calls "Noah's Ark", designed to withstand towering tsunamis and devastating earthquakes.