A debt-ridden Japanese city is offering to rename itself after the highest bidder, an official said Thursday.

The city in the western prefecture of Osaka -- currently called Izumisano -- owes its creditors well over 100 billion yen ($1.25 billion), the official said, adding the presence of nearby Kansai International Airport was partly to blame.

A Spanish man, in a coma for 23 years, has died, just over a year after his family finally won compensation following decades of litigation over the operation that left him in a vegetative state, his lawyer said Tuesday.

Antonio Meno had been in a vegetative state since a cosmetic surgery operation on his nose in 1989 when he was 21.

Japanese mobile phone users made a quarter of a million years' worth of calls last year, the government said on Wednesday.

A total of 59.17 billion calls were made from cellphones in the 12 months to April 1, 2012, with conversations lasting 2.27 billion hours, a communications ministry official said. The figure is equivalent to 259,132 years.

A yoga studio in Washington said Tuesday it will give free classes to anyone who casts his or her ballot in next week's U.S. elections.

Flow Yoga Center said it was throwing open the doors to its Astanga Mysore, Pilates, Prana Flow and Vinyasa Flow classes next Tuesday "to help our United States re-unite again."

Monkeys are just like the vast majority of human beings when it comes to sex -- when they go ape, they want privacy.

Among long-tailed macaques, the urge for hanky-panky was dampened when they were watched by other monkeys, according to an unusual experiment reported in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

A headteacher in the Georgian city of Rustavi has found an unusual way to get children's early education off the ground -- by transforming an aeroplane into a kindergarten.

Gari Chapidze bought the old but fully functional Yakovlev Yak-42 from Georgian Airways and refurbished its interior with educational equipment, games and toys but left the cockpit instruments intact so they could be used as play tools.

A 120-kilogram (265-pound) wild boar attacked and injured four people Monday in Berlin, the German capital's police force said.

The boar bit a 74-year-old man on the back and leg, knocked a 74-year-old woman to the ground and bit a 24-year-old woman on the legs before she took shelter in a parked car, police said in a statement.

A road crash may have actually saved the life of a taxi driver in Germany, authorities said Monday.

The 50-year-old choked on a sweet and lost control of his cab during a coughing fit while on a job in the western city of Wuppertal on Sunday, police said.

A German court threw out Monday a complaint by a pilot who felt he was being discriminated against by airline Lufthansa in being forced to wear a cap while on duty, while his women colleagues were not.

A labor court in Cologne found there was no sexual discrimination on Lufthansa's part in enforcing a rule that male pilots had to wear caps in all public areas of airports, while female pilots were not obliged to.

Zookeepers in northern Japan are racing against nature to catch a fugitive flamingo before it freezes or migrates south for the winter.

Bird experts have tried to net the escapee on the lake it has made home using captive flamingos as bait, and have even donned diving gear to sneak up on the pink-feathered bird from underwater.