Stand on any block around lunchtime near Amazon.com's downtown Seattle headquarters and there are two common sights: people walking their dogs and people buying lunch at food trucks.

The scene offers a window into Seattle's infatuations with dogs (and cats), which outnumber children here, and the maturing roaming food truck market.

It's only fitting that solar panels that will help with the power needs of Walt Disney World are shaped like the famous ears of the mouse that started the Disney enterprise.

Officials with Disney World, Duke Energy and Disney's private government on Tuesday flipped on the switch to a Mickey Mouse-shaped solar facility located on 22 acres near the Epcot theme park.

It may be the smallest-denominated Australian dollar banknote, but a new design for the Aus$5 bill attracted an outsized amount of criticism when it was unveiled Tuesday, with detractors calling it "hideous" and "like vomit".

China has banned three passengers from major airlines for "uncivilized behavior", state media reported Monday, as the country seeks to instill manners in its increasingly well-traveled populace.

The three were blacklisted for hitting a checkpoint security officer with a can of milk, attacking airline personnel over a flight delay, and refusing to switch off a tablet PC during a landing, the China Daily newspaper said.

German police brought in a bomb squad and evacuated a gambling hall when they heard a strange noise emanating from a garbage can, but declared a false alarm after the source of the humming sound turned out to be a sex toy.

It started with a few kittens. But nearly a quarter century later, a California woman has transformed her 4,000-square-foot (370-sq. meter) home into what's believed to be the largest no-cage cat sanctuary and adoption center in the U.S.

An estimated 24,000 cats have been saved by the sanctuary, which houses up to 1,000 felines at any given time. Lynea Lattanzio set up Cat House on the Kings after finding out that many nearby shelters euthanize cats who aren't adopted.

For many aspiring Chinese, living in a chateau would be a dream come true. But bourgeois apartments with foreign names are the latest victims of a wide-ranging crackdown on "Western values" by Communist authorities.

A state-run newspaper lashed out Tuesday at the widespread adoption of foreign names in China.

An unlikely royal intervention into Britain's European referendum debate was among the April Fools' stories foxing the world's newspaper readers Friday -- but for U.S. internet giant Google, the joke was on them.

April Fools is no laughing matter, China's official news service said Friday, bashing the Western tradition of opening spring with a gag as un-Chinese. 

The official news agency Xinhua's stiffly worded post on micro-blog Weibo declared: "Today is the West's so-called 'April Fools'".

The Cypriot ex-wife of an Egyptian accused of hijacking a plane in a bid to see her has said their marriage was hell and he had shown no interest in her or their children since they separated.