A gaffe-prone Indonesian minister has backed the idea of state-run cannabis farms in a country that imposes the death penalty for people caught trafficking the drug.

State Enterprises Minister Dahlan Iskan, whose slogan is "manufacturing hope", said he warmed to the idea after a pharmacist told him about cannabis's medicinal effects.

A massive, partly fossilized egg laid by a now-extinct elephant bird has sold for more than double its estimate at a London auction.

Christie's auction house said Wednesday that the foot-long, nearly nine-inches in diameter egg fetched 66,675 pounds ($101,813). It had been valued at 20,000 to 30,000 pounds pre-sale, and was sold to an anonymous buyer over the telephone after about 10 minutes of competitive bidding.

U.S. President Barack Obama has a unique strategy for keeping his daughters from getting tattoos: threatening to get the same design, along with his wife, and turning it into a family YouTube moment.

"What we've said to the girls is: 'If you guys ever decide that you're going to get a tattoo, then mommy and me will get the exact same tattoo, in the same place," Obama explained on NBC's "Today" show on Wednesday.

If at first you don't succeed, wipe the slobber off and try again.

Just ask 4-year-old pup Huckleberry, who was crowned Monday as this year's "Beautiful Bulldog."

The roving coralgrouper, a predator fish of the tropical reef, uses sign language to advise fellow hunters of hiding prey, according to a study published on Tuesday.

It is the first time that a fish has been known to make "referential gestures," or specific signs that alert a partner to an object of mutual interest, it said.

Police in northern India said Wednesday they had arrested a 47-year-old man for selling his newborn grandson to a local businessman in a deal that was struck on Facebook.

Feroz Khan, a resident of Ludhiana city in the northern state of Punjab 300 kilometers (200 miles) from New Delhi, had allegedly kidnapped his grandson shortly after he was born earlier this month.

You can learn a lot from a zombie.

At least that's what a University of Michigan professor hopes her 31 graduate students took away from Tuesday's bizarre, albeit bloody, "zombie apocalypse." The classroom exercise was designed to get School of Public Health students thinking about what the appropriate response should be during a disaster.

It's a wonder they move at all -- the big old Chevrolets and other American jalopies from the 1950s and 60s that ply the potholed streets of Cuba.

Now, ingenious Cubans have rigged them to run on propane and Cuban police are cracking down, out of fear there are "rolling bombs" on the country's roads, the official newspaper Granma reported Tuesday.

Paris company that rents out luxury cars is pursuing former Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade over 350,000 euros ($456,000) in allegedly unpaid bills, its owner told Agence France Presse on Monday.

Olivier Marqueze-Pouey, the owner of Accompagnement Service, says he met Wade in 2000 and established his small company on the back of an exclusive deal to provide the African leader with transport when he was visiting Paris.

Margaret Thatcher and Bobby Sands fought an epic battle three decades ago that left the Irish hunger-striker dead, but in their latest -- posthumous -- fight, neither side came out victorious when the city of Paris on Monday rejected plans to name streets after them.

An exasperated deputy mayor of the French capital, Pierre Schapira, threw out a bid by far-left councilors for a Rue Bobby Sands as well as the call by the right-wing UMP party to have a street named after the British ex-premier who died this month.