Politicians have done many things over the years to win votes, but none more so than British lawmaker Nadine Dorries, who spent 12 days in the Australian jungle eating ostrich anus on national television.

The feisty 55-year-old has been catapulted into the public eye by her appearance on "I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here", a reality TV show where C-list celebrities compete to outdo each other at a string of stomach-churning tasks.

British intelligence officials are baffled by a secret World War II message that was discovered on the leg of a dead pigeon, they admitted on Friday.

The message, consisting of 27 hand-written blocks of five letters, was attached to a pigeon skeleton that was found by retired probation officer David Martin when he was renovating his house in Surrey, southeast England.

Sweden's largest toy chain said Friday that its toys are "gender neutral" after picturing boys holding baby dolls and banishing girls from the dolls pages of its Christmas catalogue.

"For several years, we have found that the gender debate has grown so strong in the Swedish market that we ... have had to adjust," Jan Nyberg, director of sales at Top Toy, franchise-holder for U.S. toy chain Toys R Us, told the TT news agency Friday.

Self-confessed geeks in Japan who might ordinarily be too shy to ask someone on a date are trying a new kind of matchmaking: wearing cartoon character masks.

In a small town north of Tokyo, 15 men and an equal number of women donned plastic masks of Doraemon, Mickey Mouse and other fictional creations to try to find a date on Friday.

A naked man brought parts of central London to a standstill on Friday after he installed himself on a statue near Prime Minister David Cameron's office for nearly three hours.

He braved the November cold and gawking crowds to straddle the monument to Prince George, a 19th century military chief and one-time Duke of Cambridge, adopting various poses including balancing precariously on the prince's head.

A Sri Lankan court Friday fined a Russian couple around 1.2 million rupees ($9,230) for illegally collecting endangered orchids and other exotic flora, obstructing wildlife officials and attacking a cameraman.

A magistrate at Ratnapura, just outside the highly protected Sinharaja rainforest region, found the couple guilty of holding 345 exotic plants representing 32 species on an endangered list.

Britain's state-run postal service Royal Mail will take legal action against the owners of dogs that attack its staff and will consider suspending deliveries to their homes, it announced Friday.

The Royal Mail said its postmen and women had suffered more than 3,000 attacks in the year to April, while the Communication Workers Union, which represents 134,000 postal workers, said the figure was closer to 5,000.

A postcard mailed nearly 70 years ago has finally arrived at the former upstate New York home of the couple who sent it.

The postcard was sent July 4, 1943, from Rockford, Illinois, to sisters Pauline and Theresa Leisenring in Elmira.

A 72-year-old Chinese man who became an Internet sensation after his granddaughter used him as a cross-dressing model to promote her clothing store was delighted at his new-found fame, she said.

Lu Qing, who lives in southern China's Guangdong province, posted pictures of her grandfather dressed in an array of pink skirts, red tights and fur-lined women's jackets to promote her online fashion outlet Yuekou.

Queen Elizabeth II may be more used to palaces and state carriages but the British monarch nonetheless enjoyed a spin in a motorhome on Thursday, calling it a "real home from home."

The sovereign, 86, and her 91-year-old husband Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, rode 200 meters in an Approach SE 760 model at the Bailey of Bristol factory in the southwest English city.