A South Korean court Tuesday passed an 18-month prison term on a baker who posted a doctored photo of a loaf containing a dead rat in an attempt to taint the reputation of a rival shop.

The 35-year-old baker, using an alias, had claimed on a popular website that he found the rodent in a loaf that he bought from a leading bakery franchise just before last Christmas.

A Russian who jumped from the seventh floor of his apartment building while heavily drunk miraculously survived by getting tangled in trees on the way down, RIA Novosti agency said Monday.

The man aged about 50 was noticed by his neighbors when he was lodged in the branches on the level of the third floor of the building in Novosibirsk, a large city in Siberia, said Dmitry Chepukhalin, a representative in the local rescue service.

When 80-year-old Indian widow Kanwri Devi Surana suffered a mild heart attack last year, she pledged to fast herself to death in a religious practice known as "santhara".

Her distraught family says she gave up food and then water, and passed away in Kolkata 62 days after making her vow.

For the nearly 40,000 followers of his Twitter feed, Andy Carvin is providing a unique window into the turmoil in the Middle East.

For a media industry facing its own ferment, Carvin, who works online for National Public Radio (NPR), is offering a glimpse into journalism's future, using the Web to report the historic events in a fresh and innovative way.

A Chinese farmer is insisting that a sheep gave birth to a puppy that has wool like a lamb's, but mouth, nose, eyes, paws and tail like a dog's.

"I was herding the sheep, and saw a sheep licking her newborn lamb on the grassland. The lamb was still wet," the Daily Mail quoted farmer Liu Naiying as saying.

U.S. aviation authorities Thursday suspended an air traffic controller suspected of falling asleep on the job and forcing two planes to land without guidance at Washington's Reagan National airport.

The pilots of the American Airlines Boeing 737 flight from Miami and the United Airlines Airbus 320 from Chicago, carrying a total of 165 passengers and crew, tried frantically to contact the control tower, but to no avail.

Marriage in Morocco has an increasingly changing face these days as young men and women in search of lifetime partners head for the souk, in this case a "cyber" marriage souk.

In a country where many marriages are still arranged, a click of a computer mouse will take the Internaut to Soukzouaj, a free site where thousands of lonely hearted young Moroccans look for their soul mates

By her own admission, Annia Ciezadlo is "always, always hungry."

A journalist who spent years covering the Middle East, she once scuttled along the floor to stir a pot of pasta as bullets whizzed by her window in Beirut. She braved the streets of Baghdad for a taste of masquf, roasted fish she describes as "a giant, edible fishy halo."

Philippine police have rescued 80 Filipino women from a suspected human trafficking syndicate that was planning to send them to be maids in Malaysia and the Middle East, including Lebanon.

Police Superintendent Celso Bael said they stopped the women, who pretended to be tourists, from boarding a chartered flight from the southern city of Zamboanga to Malaysia on Thursday.

The kidnapping of seven Estonians brought back fears about the resumption of abductions that were common during the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war amid reports that the men could have been snatched to be used as a bargaining chip for a Palestinian recently arrested in Ukraine.

The Estonian tourists cycling in the eastern Bekaa Valley were kidnapped on Wednesday by armed men.