Australian electoral authorities are expecting so many candidates in the nation's upcoming polls they have ordered magnifying glasses to ensure every name on the meter-long ballot paper can be read, officials said Wednesday.

The Australian Electoral Commission said it would be providing magnifying glasses at polling places in the populous states of New South Wales and Victoria after a rush of party registrations prompted fears of a font downgrade to fit candidate names on.

Indonesian mosques must limit their use of loudspeakers to stop disrupting the lives of those who reside nearby, an official urged Wednesday at the start of the holy month of Ramadan.

The approximately 800,000 mosques in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country go into overdrive during Ramadan, noisily blasting out Koranic verses from the early hours.

The Nigeria Football Federation announced it has suspended all four teams involved in "scandalous scorelines" after two lower league clubs chasing promotion and needing to boost their goal difference won games by 79-0 and 67-0.

In the matches, played at the same time, Plateau United Feeders reportedly scored 72 of their goals in the second half to beat Akurba FC 79-0. Police Machine reportedly swept 61 goals past Babayaro FC in the second 45 minutes of their 67-0 game.

A Titan Arum, one of the world's largest, rarest and smelliest flowers, is in bloom in a Brussels hothouse for the third time in five years in a rare botanical feat for a plant that generally goes years without blooming.

Variously known as a "corpse flower" in Indonesia where first found, or "huge deformed penis" under its scientific name, "Amorphophallus titanum", the strange but spectacular specimen began to bloom Sunday in the national botanical gardens, the Jardin de Meise, on the outskirts of the Belgian capital.

An Italian mayor and his council members have decided to fight the economic crisis proactively, picking up paintbrushes and re-painting the walls of their offices themselves to spare the town budget.

They worked overtime and even chipped in for the material themselves.

Death Valley National Park has asked tourists not to test out the reputation of the world's hottest spot by frying eggs on the ground, citing a growing litter problem at the popular U.S. landmark.

"An employee's posting of frying an egg in a pan in Death Valley was intended to demonstrate how hot it can get here, with the recommendation that if you do this, use a pan or tin foil and properly dispose of the contents," the park said on its Facebook page last week.

A Japanese comedian was arrested Tuesday after allegedly staging an online auction of an acquaintance's valuable bicycles, then stealing them for sale to the highest bidder, reports said.

Nobushige Kaneshima, 39, is said to have snapped pictures of nine high-end bikes owned by a cycling magazine editor and posted them on to an Internet auction site.

The number of elderly people caught shoplifting in Japan's capital city has outstripped that of teenagers for the first time since records began, a report said.

A quarter of the people arrested on suspicion of the crime in Tokyo last year were at least 65 years old, figures showed, amid warnings of increasing isolation in the age group.

Talk about a traffic stopper: three pole dancers in central Poland have been honing their skills on street corners, throwing their legs around signposts to the surprise and delight of passersby.

Clad in black booty shorts and neon pink T-shirts on a recent afternoon in downtown Lodz, the barefoot and pony-tailed women checked the sidewalk for glass.

A Czech woman beat the odds this week in the Prague underground when she fell under an oncoming train but then crawled out from between carriages unscathed, police said Tuesday.

The young woman -- who appeared to be dozing on her feet -- fell off the platform into a deep groove between the subway rails, saving her from the impact of the undercarriage zooming by overhead.