Three people are being held in connection with the theft of paintings worth at least 100 million dollars from a Paris gallery last year, but the works are still missing, a legal official said Saturday.

The three, a woman suspected of taking part in the theft and two people suspected of handling stolen goods, were arrested and charged over the robbery of the five paintings, by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Ferdinand Leger and Amedeo Modigliani, and placed in custody on September 16, the official said.

Dutch police in The Hague on Saturday said they had uncovered 7,000 cannabis plants at a business premises south of the city center.

"Police officers found the plantation in Rijswijk shortly before noon after an anonymous tip-off," spokeswoman Chantal Marges told Agence France Presse.

Authorities in the southern U.S. state of Alabama are studying how to implement one city's proposal for first-time, non-violent offenders to choose between church or jail.

The Restore Our Community program, or Operation ROC, launched by police in the city of Bay Minette, is currently under legal review.

The wife of a British lawmaker was found guilty of burglary on Friday after being caught on CCTV stealing a kitten from the home of her husband's lover.

Christine Hemming, 53, had denied the charge, claiming she could not remember taking the four-month-old tabby cat named Beauty when she went to deliver her husband's post on September 29 last year.

An angry community leader banned from speaking out at a city council meeting in eastern Ukraine bit off part of a security guard's little finger on Friday, a correspondent said.

The city council in the eastern Ukrainian city of Lugansk some 800 kilometers (500 miles) east of the capital Kiev was meeting to hear a proposal to move a popular food market from the city center to the outskirts, when Mikhail Pashchuk, who is against the move, demanded to speak out.

The world's biggest food company Nestle is seeking to conquer the dog food market with special advertising targeted at men's best friend.

"Nestle Purina has created the first-ever television commercial especially for dogs," it said in a statement.

A deeply unpopular money-saving measure was relaxed on Friday when the British government promised councils new funding to restore weekly rubbish collections in England.

A £250 million ($390 million, 290 million euro) fund will allow local authorities to switch from fortnightly to weekly bin rounds.

In the ultimate accolade for the world's mad scientists, spoof Nobel prizes were awarded Thursday for studies into beetle sex, turtles yawning, the desperation of people dying to urinate and other daffy investigations.

The annual Ig Nobel prizes, now in their 21st year, were given at Harvard University in front of 1,200 spectators, with real Nobel Prize winners handing out the honors.

Bloggers in the United States are seizing upon a couple of exploding toilets in a federal building to make light of Washington's many political woes.

Two federal employees were hurt when a backup of air pressure caused by faulty plumbing caused two toilets to blow up at the General Services Administration's regional headquarters on Monday.

While holiday-makers sought shelter from sweltering summer heat in the Italian southern city of Palermo, one man was claiming overtime for shifting snow, the Repubblica newspaper said Thursday.

Salvatore Di Grazia claimed, and received, overtime payment for shifting snow off the streets of the island's sunny capital throughout the summer.