The Melis siblings on the island of Sardinia are officially the world's oldest with nine brothers and sisters clocking up a total of 818 years between them, Italian newspapers reported on Tuesday.

The oldest sibling, Consolata, is 104 and has nine children, 24 grand-children and 25 great-grandchildren, the reports said, adding that the longevity of the Melis had been recognized as a Guinness World Record.

Forget soaring fuel prices and concerns about the environment, Germans are suckers for horsepower and the trend is to buy cars with ever bigger engines, a new study showed on Tuesday.

In the first seven months of 2012, the average horsepower of the engines of new cars sold in Germany stood at 138 hp, up from a previous record of 135 hp seen in 2011 and 130 hp in 2010, according to the CAR-Center Automotive Research at the university of Duisburg-Essen.

A small South Korean bar has been ordered to pay damages to France-based fashion house Chanel for using its name, a court spokesman said Tuesday.

The Seoul Central District Court ordered the Chanel Business Club located in the southern suburbs of Seoul to pay 10 million won ($8,800) in compensation, he said.

Faced with a bloody conflict that has gripped their country for the past 17 months, many Syrians have opted for humor as a weapon to mock both Bashar Assad's regime and their own daily struggles.

"Dear defectors, the Syrian revolution is taking place in Syria, not in Turkey," read banners at several protests, mocking defectors who have chosen to keep their distance from the battlefield after fleeing north across the border.

A baby girl, who was in the back of a car stolen from outside a shop in the United Arab Emirates, was reunited with her parents after a frantic seven-hour search, The National newspaper reported on Monday.

The month-old girl, Lailas, was in a white Toyota Prado when it was stolen in the Santsaiya 6 area of Sharjah, not far from commercial hub Dubai, late on Saturday, after her parents left the car's engine running while they nipped into the shop, the report said.

Families waiting for San Francisco's cable cars on a recent morning couldn't help but notice Kenny the Clown, who wore a curly rainbow wig as he twisted brightly colored balloons into animal shapes for visitors, blasting Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" from an iPad at his feet.

Little did the clown know that the tablet doubling as his stereo would turn out to have been stolen from the home of the late Steve Jobs.

A Finnish teenager has smashed the world record -- and probably his phone -- in this year's annual mobile-phone throwing contest in Finland.

Eighteen-year-old Ere Karjalainen launched a phone the "amazing" distance of 101.46 meters (332 feet 10 inches), Finnish public television network YLE said after Saturday's event.

Add corn and they're scandalized. Shallots are a sacrilege. Green beans and potatoes, unacceptable.

Meet the defense committee for France's Salade Nicoise -- possibly the world's most ubiquitous salad dish after Caesar salad -- that purists are tired of seeing tossed the "wrong" way.

Two Chinese pandas in a French zoo are chilling out in the current summer heat wave with the help of honey and apple ice creams.

With temperatures set to touch 40 degrees Celsius (104F) in central France this weekend, Yuan Zi and Huan Huan have been enjoying the home-made treats as a supplement to their normal bamboo-based diet.

A 24-year-old construction worker survived after a 6-foot metal bar fell from above and pierced his head, doctors said Friday.

Luiz Alexandre Essinger, chief of staff at Rio de Janeiro's Miguel Couto Hospital, said doctors successfully withdrew the iron bar from Eduardo Leite's skull during a five-hour surgery.