The number of caesarean deliveries rose sharply in China this week as mothers rushed to give birth before the deadline for school enrollment, state media and local governments said Thursday.

August 31 is the cut-off day marking the legal age children can enter school in China, meaning those born after that date must wait another year to begin their schooling.

There was no sign of Dracula, but students in Transylvania did get a visit from dozens of bats that flapped through their classroom.

The students at Csiky Gergely high school in the western Romanian city of Arad were about to take an exam Friday morning when they found bats flying around the room. Others appeared to be sleeping with their wings spread out on the floor.

A four-meter-long python wallowing at the bottom of a swimming pool in a Malaysian private club sent bathers running, a report and staff at the club said Thursday.

A woman who dived into the pool spotted the enormous snake resting under a steel ladder on Tuesday, national news agency Bernama reported.

Iranian publishers are complaining that cost-saving plans to print Qurans in China are yielding embarrassing results: A slew of typos.

The head of Iran's Quran oversight office says some of the Chinese-printed versions of Islam's holy book are littered with spelling errors.

The bachelor president of the Philippines is lamenting that his love life is like Coke — it's gone from regular to zero.

Fifty-one-year-old President Benigno Aquino III poked fun at himself while addressing members of the Philippine community in Beijing during his state visit to China. Like a standup comedian, he opened up by broaching one of the most mundane questions people often ask him.

The tooth fairy in disguise? No, just a simple tooth thief.

A man dressed in a black leather hat and a dark coat on Wednesday ran off with an eight-foot (2.5 meter) whale tooth from a museum in the Norwegian city Stavanger.

Bonn, the former West German capital, has introduced a parking meter for prostitutes, a first in Germany, in order to tax those who just work the streets, a city spokeswoman said Wednesday.

"We expect to get some 200,000 Euros ($288,000) per year from the meter," Isabelle Klotz told Agence France Presse.

Tens of thousands of revelers splattered each other with 120 tons of squashed tomatoes Wednesday in a gigantic annual food fight known in Spain as the Tomatina.

The streets ran red with slippery juice as nearly 40,000 people, many stripped to the waist and drunk with sangria, pelted each other in the Plaza Mayor square and nearby streets of Bunol, eastern Spain.

The impoverished ex-Soviet republic of Tajikistan on Tuesday unveiled what is being billed as the world's tallest flagpole in a ceremony marking its 20th anniversary of independence.

"A thousand years on, the Tajik people have regained the independence and statehood they had sought all these years," Tajik President Emomali Rahmon said in a grand ceremony broadcast on all four state television channels.

American actress Daryl Hannah has been arrested in front of the White House along with other environmental protesters who oppose a planned oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The sit-in Tuesday involved dozens protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. It would go through six states to refineries in Texas.