Up on a brightly lit Moscow stage a clown loudly welcomes the stars of today's show -- 20 highly trained cats.

Packing out the auditorium with excited children and adults, the feline performers are the main attraction at the world-famous and unique cat theater.

A tea kettle which some think resembles Adolf Hitler has soared in price to over $200 on eBay, after it sold out online following protests over a billboard promoting the otherwise innocent product.

Pictures went viral of the Michael Graves Bells and Whistles Stainless Steel Tea Kettle, which in the eyes of some resembles the German Nazi leader giving his infamous Sieg Heil salute.

German police are warning rail travelers to be wary when using Deutsche Bahn's automatic ticket machines because criminals attempting to break into them may have left them filled with explosive gas.

Hesse state police spokesman Udo Buehler says since April criminals have successfully blown open 10 ticket machines by taping closed all holes, filling them with gas and igniting it. They then steal the money and blank train tickets.

For centuries, there's been no official French word for the sloppy Gallic export "to French kiss" — though that certainly hasn't stopped any citizen from doing so.

Now the oversight has been rectified.

Some Austrian firefighters didn't have to leave their station to deal with a recent alarm. The blaze came to them instead.

Fireman Roland Brandl says that colleagues were doing chores at the station in the town of Pregarten Wednesday when a car sped in with flames shooting from beneath it.

It had all the makings of a routine bust: an anonymous tipoff to the cops, a raid on a hideout, a triumphant Interior Ministry tweet. The loot? Roll after roll of toilet paper.

The government said police had found 2,450 bales of toilet paper in a working class neighborhood called Antimano, west of Caracas, thanks to an anonymous phone call to a police tipoff line.

Indonesian mosques have been ordered to cut down on their use of loudspeakers, an Islamic group said Wednesday, a move that may provide some relief to millions who live near the places of worship.

There are some 800,000 mosques in Indonesia, which has the world's biggest Muslim population, and many use speakers to blast out the call to prayer as well as fiery Koranic verses, often at high volumes in the early hours.

Mexicans love their televisions and telenovelas, so when thousands of TVs went blank after the city of Tijuana switched from analog to digital broadcasting, some people got off their couches to protest.

The Pacific coast city, which lies at the border with California, went fully digital late Tuesday but 14,000 homes had yet to get the converter boxes needed to continue watching broadcast channels.

Losing is never easy, but for one unlucky contestant in Canada's Miss Universe competition the bad news came 24 hours later -- after she'd been crowned the winner.

Red-faced organizers admitted on Wednesday that a typo led to a counting error that resulted in Denise Garrido, 26, being wrongly named the victor at Saturday's event. She was stripped of her sash and crown the next day.

Fed up with people ridiculing its name, Bland Shire in Australia wants to cash in on it by hooking up with Dull in Scotland and the American town of Boring.

Long considered a dreary destination due to its name, Bland's tourism committee is exploring promoting the area by establishing sister relationships with other towns with odd names.