Shanghai has served up a "roasted" version of a Dutch artist's giant yellow duck, complete with drumsticks and crispy brown skin.

Florentijn Hofman's Rubber Duck installation gained rave reviews when a 16.5 metre-tall (54-feet) version arrived in Hong Kong this summer.

Japanese police have got to the bottom of a mysterious crime wave that saw 200 leather bicycle saddles vanish in a matter of months, reports say.

Joji Kondo, 35, confessed to police that he would steal the saddles and then sniff and lick them when he got home, the Sports Hochi reported on Sunday.

Fallen Chinese politician Bo Xilai attempted to counter accounts of his family's luxury lifestyle Monday by telling his corruption trial his underwear was five decades old.

Prosecutors at the hearings in Jinan have provided riveting details of private jet flights, French Riviera villas and rare animal meats enjoyed by Bo and his family, courtesy of wealthy businessmen.

A partner in a Swiss law firm who pleaded guilty to helping American clients evade tax offered up a 19th century painting worth $500,000 (375,000 euros) as bail, local media reported Sunday.

Tax lawyer Edgar Paltzer used French master Charles-Francois Daubigny's 1862 work "La gardeuse de chevres" (The goat herder) to pay part of his $2 million bail in New York, where he has been detained since April on tax fraud charges.

You may or may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but you can certainly try to get Fido to use an iPad.

New York dog trainer Anna Jane Grossman has done just that, with success -- although a lack of apps limits the possibilities.

At least one million cockroaches have escaped a farm in China where they were being bred for use in traditional medicine, a report said.

The cockroaches fled the facility in Dafeng, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, for surrounding cornfields earlier this month after an "unknown perpetrator" destroyed the plastic greenhouse where they were raised, the Modern Express newspaper said.

A woman has turned up alive nearly two weeks after her family held a funeral and burial for her.

Services for 50-year-old Sharolyn Jackson were held Aug. 3 in New Jersey.

Britain's Ministry of Defense racked up a £40,000 (29,000 euros) bill on telephone calls to the speaking clock despite a ban on employees using the service, official figures revealed on Friday.

The ministry introduced the ban on using the service, which has been running since 1936, in 2012 and urged employees to use free Internet sites in order to get the exact time.

A group of Italian lawmakers has written a joke protest to the United States over rumours that the new version of Monopoly will not have a jail -- perhaps mindful of Silvio Berlusconi's ability to dodge prison.

The seven MPs from the centre-left Democratic Party wrote a formal letter to U.S. ambassador to Rome John Phillips, even though the popular table game's producer Hasbro has said there will still be jail.

A teenager who wrote to Pope Francis got a shock when the Catholic leader called him up for a chat -- the latest example of the pontiff's down-to-earth approach.

Francis called up a journalist friend on the day of his election and even phoned a newspaper stand in Buenos Aires to cancel his subscription.