A woman put hot sauce in her adopted 7-year-old son's mouth not to punish the Russian boy for lying but to come up with sensational footage to get on the "Dr. Phil" self-help TV show, a prosecutor argued Monday.

Jessica Beagley, 36, recorded the punishment on Oct. 21, 2010 for a show segment titled "Mommy Confessions," said prosecutor Cynthia Franklin. The Anchorage woman faces misdemeanor child abuse charges stemming from the footage.

Three suspected Mexican drug smugglers have found out the hard way that unlike their boat, marijuana floats.

Mexican marines say they rescued three suspected smugglers whose boat was sinking on the Pacific Ocean and then arrested them after finding bales of marijuana floating around the vessel.

Iraqis are used to severe electricity shortages, but residents of the central holy city of Karbala have a new kind of power problem: an electricity tower in the middle of a street.

Authorities opened a new street in the Sayed Jowda area of Karbala in mid-July but left the electricity tower, which dates to the 1980s, in place, forcing motorists to drive around it.

Chinese diners are flocking to a restaurant in Beijing whose house specialty is pig intestine in soup after U.S. Vice President Joe Biden lunched there last week, The Global Times reported on Monday.

Biden took time out from official talks in the Chinese capital to eat at the small, family-run eatery in downtown Beijing, earning plaudits from netizens and headlines in China's state-run newspapers praising his "noodle diplomacy".

A red-faced restaurant owner in southern Germany admitted Sunday she had turned away Sweden's king and queen when they asked for a table after failing to recognize them.

Nadine Schellenberger of Zum Gueldenen Stern, a half-timbered inn and pub founded in the 16th century in the center of the southwestern town of Ladenburg, said the royals stopped in while she was hosting a wedding party.

Sit back and enjoy readings of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde or Henrik Ibsen, sip a glass of wine -- oh, and gaze upon the readers themselves: they're naked.

That combination of delights is on offer once a month in New York thanks to the enterprising group Naked Girls Reading.

Swiss food giant Nestle said Friday that it has a treat in store for dogs keen for an ice-cream to cool down in the summer heat.

Its so-called Frosty Paws ice-cream, are "specially formulated for dogs, who are lactose intolerant and cannot digest dairy products such as regular ice-cream properly," said Nestle in a statement.

The native town of an Italian laborer who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre museum in Paris 100 years ago on Sunday in the art world's most famous heist will honor him with a play that portrays him as a patriot.

"We believe Peruggia was a patriot," said Simone Toffanin, director of the play entitled "The Trial of Vincenzo Peruggia" -- part of a summer theater festival in the town of Dumenza north of Milan near the shores of picturesque Lago Maggiore.

Woot! The online expression of enthusiasm is now in the dictionary. So are textspeak, sexting — and, less happily, cyberbullying.

They are among 400 new entries in the 12th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, published this month.

Stray cats rounded up in a remote west China city are being used to catch rodents that have infested surrounding pasture lands.

Some 150 strays — dubbed by Chinese media as the "cat army" — were turned loose on the range lands outside Bole city in May to fight what the government calls a plague of rats. The state-run Xinhua News Agency says that the cats were brought in, along with tons of poisonous rat pellets.