A Russian writer was questioned by Moscow police after he depicted a sexual encounter between Stalin and Kruschev.
Sainsbury's are to sell purple carrots - the vegetables original colour. Orange carrots didn't appear until the 1800's.
A French councillor was paid £50,000 for a 12-page report which revealed that mosquitoes have spindly bodies and suck blood.
Scientists at Cambridge have discovered that the average Briton spends £62 per year on chocolate - because it tastes nice.
A depressed holidaymaker jumped off the roof of a nine-storey hotel in Alba Adriatica, Italy, only to land in the pool and survive.
A man with a collapsed lung who had waited 20 days in a Manchester hospital for a National Health Service operation paid £6,000 to go private. He was operated on the next day - by the surgeon he had been waiting for on the NHS.
Young Wall Street executives are being sent on a course to learn how to use a napkin and to hold a knife.
A woman was fined £42 for kissing the cheek of her boyfriend while he was driving in Rome.
A man convicted of murder escaped from a German jail in a cardboard box. He had been given the box to assemble as part of his prison work.
A man accused of murdering a judge escaped from prison as he awaited trial in Costa Rica, but was eaten by a crocodile as he tried to swim a river to safety.
A farmer in Iowa has bred cows less than three feet tall and is selling them as pets at £600 each.
Six people were arrested at a golf tournament in California after police discovered that tents set up around the course were occupied by prostitutes and the contestants were allowed to visit them during their round.
A German holidaymaker out birdwatching at a hunting lodge in Namibia was shot dead by a guide who mistook him for a baboon. As soon as he realised his mistake the guide put his gun to his head and killed himself.
The Ivar Aasen museum in Norway is advertising for a hacker after inheriting a vast collection of books and periodicals. The librarian cataloguing the bequest died after entering 11,000 items into a database - and no one knows the password.
A woman in Lyons, France was jailed for stealing an ambulance which was collecting a patient near her house. She said she was late for work.
Robbers smashed showcases in a Paris jewellers in front of customers - then fled after using a vacuum cleaner to suck up hundreds of diamonds.
Mourners flocked to the Bangkok funeral of Thailand's renowned orang-utan, Mike. The ape's mate Susa - they "married" alongside four human couples in 1996 - wore black.
A girl appeared in court accused of smuggling £1 million worth of heroin into Manchester Airport. She is aged 13.
Punters in a casino in Indianapolis play noughts and crosses against 15 trained chickens for a £3,000 prize. No one has beaten them yet.
A man in New Mexico was arrested after he telephoned the owners to ask how the stereo system worked.
A man tried to murder his ex-girlfriend by waving a radioactive isotope that he had stolen from work over food in her Berlin flat. A court was told that it cost £500,000 to decontaminate the flat.
A rector's wife in Melton Mowbray who left her husband for a married vicar only to return home, changed her mind yet again and went back to the vicar.
A prisoner broke out of a Scottish jail to steal 3,000 cigarettes from a petrol station then climbed back to return to his cell. His cache was discovered when another prisoner tipped off guards.
Climbers from Japan and South Korea cleared two tons of rubbish from the South Col valley on Everest, including oxygen bottles dated 1952. They also buried two bodies.
Sri Lankan Airlines "lost" its chief executive when his own staff put him on the wrong plane at Columbo.
A bride in Portugal vanished while the groom waited at the altar. She was later spotted in Lisbon - and charged with the theft of £95,000 worth of wedding presents.
Prostitutes in Germany tried to drum up new business by holding an open day at brothels. "We want people to get a realistic idea of what our career is actually like", said one.