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.

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.