Tens of thousands of people packed Pamplona's streets Wednesday for a drunken kick-off to Spain's best-known fiesta: the nine-day San Fermin bull-running festival.

Swilling gallons of beer and sangria, Spaniards and foreigners jammed into the main Plaza del Ayuntamiento to hear the traditional shout from a City Hall balcony: "Viva San Fermin".

A Tiffany diamond bangle stuffed in a sock was among hundreds of items retrieved from Christchurch hotels abandoned during February's earthquake and now returned to their owners, reports said Wednesday.

Other pieces of abandoned luggage included thousands of dollars in foreign banknotes hidden in a fake soft drink can and a rare Steiff teddy bear belonging to an Australian child.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's 15-year-old son on Tuesday joined his father as a global leader -- by claiming the world record for speed typing on an iPad.

Eduard Saakashvili achieved a world record for typing the English alphabet on an iPad in 5.26 seconds -- an improvement of 1.05 seconds on the previous record set by British teenager Charlie Joseph McDonnell in 2010.

The pimps and prostitutes of Yeongdeungpo start the day as if preparing for a siege, stocking their brothels with flammable liquid and gas containers. Large, red-lettered signs warn police that they're willing to die to protect their livelihoods.

"We can turn on the gas and light the flames," said a 47-year-old pimp who would only give her surname Sohn. "We know that we don't have much chance of winning ... but we're ready to die fighting."

A 13-year-old Belgian boy and his mother who made off with armfuls of toy Smurfs have been nabbed with the haul of small blue heroes dreamt up by a Belgian comic-book author, police said Monday.

Staged weeks ahead of the worldwide release of the much-awaited Hollywood movie on Peyo's Smurfs, the heist took place Friday in a supermarket outside Ghent.

Joey "Jaws" Chestnut put away 62 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes on Monday to win a U.S. gorging contest worthy of ancient Rome, earning the coveted mustard-yellow belt for the fifth consecutive time.

A fabled stop on the world's puzzlingly fascinating competitive eating tour, "Nathan's Famous" hot dog parlor in New York's suitably cheesy Coney Island hosts the exercise in sheer gluttony each Independence Day holiday.

Australians, renowned for their sporting prowess in cricket and rugby, now want to win a world cup for running around on broomsticks -- otherwise known as Quidditch.

In J.K Rowling's hugely successful Harry Potter books and films, Quidditch is a semi-contact sport played by wizards and witches -- as popular in their world as football or cricket is in real life.

Indian gay rights activists voiced shock and outrage Tuesday over public comments by the health minister who said that homosexuality was a "disease" brought to the country by foreigners.

Speaking at a national meeting Monday of district and mayoral leaders on HIV/AIDS prevention, Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad stated that homosexuality was "unnatural and not good for India."

Anti-landmine activists in western Uganda were stunned to discover a primary school using an unexploded mortar bomb as a bell, the group's coordinator told Agence France Presse on Monday.

"It was a big shock. When we arrived at the school we even found one of the students striking it," Wilson Bwambale, coordinator of Anti-Mines Network Rwenzori, said.

Hackers broke into an official Twitter account operated by Fox News early Monday and posted a series of tweets that claimed President Barack Obama had been assassinated.

The Twitter feed for Fox News' political news -- @FoxNewspolitics -- sent out a series of "malicious and false tweets," starting around 2:00 am, Fox News confirmed in a statement. The posts had not been taken down hours later.