They say you can't beat City Hall, but Paris authorities who once took a dim view of the thousands of "love locks" adorning the bridges of the Seine River have had a change of heart.

"We are letting the phenomenon be, looking at it with benevolence," City Hall spokesman Damien Steffan told Agence France Presse with a Gallic shrug. "It's not a problem for us."

The U.S. population reached a number dear to mathematicians on Tuesday: 314,159,265 or pi times 100 million.

"So go out and celebrate this American pi," quipped the U.S. Census Bureau's chief demographer, Howard Hogan, in a statement marking the milestone.

The largest Burmese python ever found in Florida has been caught in the Everglades, scientists said Tuesday, and it contained 87 eggs -- also thought to be a record.

"This thing is monstrous, it's about a foot wide," Kenneth Krysko, the herpetology collection manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History, said of the 17-foot-7-inch (5.35-meter) creature.

Stepping into the vacuum this Friday, a brand new private space venture from the Netherlands called Mars One aims to send four astronauts on a one-way journey to Mars in just 11 years time, NBC reported.

Founded by Dutch entrepreneur and researcher Bas Lansdorp, who previously headed up an alternative energy company, Mars One says it will establish a colony on Mars by 2023, according to the Mars One website.

Authorities in Germany were hunting high and low Monday for a kangaroo that escaped from his animal park with the unwitting help of a fox and a wild boar, a zoo official said Monday.

Three kangaroos named Skippy, Jack and Mick on Saturday night bounded through a hole in the fence of their enclosure made by a helpful fox, Michael Hoffmann, deputy head of the animal park near Frankfurt, told Agence France Presse.

A baby boy was born by Caesarian section on Monday, the product of a successful smuggling attempt by a Palestinian prisoner who managed to sneak out a sperm sample to his wife.

Baby Muhannad was born in a Nablus hospital to Dallal Ziben, a 32-year-old mother-of-two from a village in the northern West Bank, whose husband Ammar is currently serving 32 life sentences in an Israeli prison.

A British couple has claimed a record 190-million-euro (£149 million, $235 million) prize in the EuroMillions lottery, officials announced on Monday.

Britain's National Lottery said the couple was from Suffolk in southeast England.

A top Taiwanese museum has been fined for preventing a woman from breastfeeding, the first such case since a law was enacted to protect the right to breastfeed in public, authorities said Tuesday.

The director and an employee of the National Palace Museum were each fined Tw$6,000 ($200) for violating the public breastfeeding law passed in 2010, said the Taipei city health department.

A baby boy was born by Caesarian section on Monday, the product of a successful smuggling attempt by a Palestinian prisoner who managed to sneak out a sperm sample to his wife.

Baby Muhannad was born in a Nablus hospital to Dallal Ziben, a 32-year-old mother-of-two from a village in the northern West Bank, whose husband Ammar is currently serving 32 life sentences in an Israeli prison.

Bystanders in New York whipped out cellphones to film the shooting by police of a man allegedly threatening them with a knife in the tourism magnet of Times Square.

Saturday's confrontation between the man and police was all caught by passersby, who, although apparently horrified, ran to get a better look -- until the encounter ended in a hail of bullets.