The mayor of a town in France has thrown a patriotic female statue out of his town hall because its breasts were too big, his aides said on Friday.

The terracotta bust of Marianne -- the traditional female embodiment of the French Republic in a Phrygian cap -- was an original work by a local artist, installed in 2007 at the town hall in Neuville-en-Ferrain, population 10,000.

Islamic scholars, at least in the Emirates, are divided on whether April Fools' Day is "haram," meaning banned by their religion, or not harmful.

"It is haram, considering (that) some jokes make many troubles," said an unnamed scholar at the fatwas, or religious edicts, center in the United Arab Emirates, quoted in The National, an English-language daily.

Russian investigators launched a probe Wednesday against a couple suspected of throwing their toddler into a trash chute from the sixth floor of an apartment building.

The two-year-old survived the fall down the narrow chute and neighbors discovered him on the trash heap of the apartment building in the northwestern city of Saint Petersburg on Tuesday after they heard him crying.

A video of a pair of diaper-clad babies seemingly engaged in an animated conversation in a home kitchen was a fast-spreading YouTube sensation.

The two-minute snippet of the lively exchange between twin brothers barely old enough to stand has been watched more than 2.2 million times since it was uploaded to the Google-owned video sharing website on Valentine's Day.

A cartoon video which recounts the unrest in the Middle East using the characters in the popular Angry Birds game and the children's story Three Little Pigs is racking up the views on YouTube.

The video, which has been posted on the YouTube channel of a Russian named Egor Zhgun, had been viewed more than 236,000 times on the video-sharing site as of Wednesday afternoon.

Tradition dies hard in the French Pyrenees, but winegrowers are shrugging aside Gallic pride to bottle their wine in plastic to meet a demand for lighter, unbreakable bottles.

"Plastic bottles are difficult for me," said Pascal Fernandez, a winegrower from the Pepieux cooperative in the Languedoc. "In the French culture, a glass bottle with a natural cork is engraved in our genes."

A 12-year old Dutch schoolgirl gave birth to a baby girl during a school trip, local health services said Tuesday.

"Neither the girl nor her family had realized she was pregnant, and there were no external signs to show it," a spokesman for the health services said, adding he did not know how many months pregnant the girl had been.

A 13-year-old Russian boy found a message in a bottle on a beach and was reunited with its German author, who wrote the note 24 years ago, tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda reported Wednesday.

Daniil Korotkikh found the beer bottle earlier this month when walking on the beach near Kaliningrad and his father translated the note inside, which was dated September 7, 1987, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.

An obese Ohio man had to be cut from a chair he had been sitting in for two years after his body became fused to it, local media reported.

Police told WTRF news that the man's skin had become fused to the seat of the chair, which was covered in urine, feces and maggots.

It may not be the Mona Lisa, but an old, empty milk carton and other trash we toss away can also tell an interesting story about our culture, our history and ourselves, according to a new exhibit in Stockholm called "Garbage".

"We are ethnologists and we are interested in how people live, and we found it interesting to look into how they act when it comes to garbage," says Christina Matsson, who heads up the Nordiska museum in central Stockholm that recently opened a whole exhibit on the topic.