"Her name was Jeanne.... A brunette, nothing special. But I must find her at any cost."

At 93, Nikolai Vasenin, a former Red Army soldier and Gulag prisoner who fought for the French Resistance in World War II, is searching for the love he says he lost 60 years ago in France.

Police in eastern Indonesia arrested 17 local supporters of France's football team, mistaking their hoisted French flag for a bold separatist statement, police said Wednesday.

The men, illegal gold miners on Pulau Buru in the Muluku Islands chain, raised the French flag in the street ahead of a World Cup qualifier match between France and Spain last week.

Norwegian schools have moved exams that clashed with Justin Bieber's concerts in the country, fearing some fans would rather cut class than miss out on an evening with the Canadian heart throb.

"We find it regrettable, but we preferred to move forward the Norwegian exams to avoid problems," Roar Aasen, the headmaster of an upper secondary school in Aalesund on Norway's west coast, told AFP.

Three thousand miles from his native Lyon, Frenchman Claude Abry is living his dream in the Middle East, where he once cooked for royalty and has now traded his chef's toque for helmets and Harley-Davidsons.

"After my family, I have two loves in life: cooking and riding motorcycles," Abry, 43, told Agence France Presse at his Harley dealership outside the Jordanian capital, Amman -- a challenging project in a country where bikes were banned for more than two decades for reasons of "public safety".

A Japanese woman who lived with her brother's mummified body for years tried to dispose of his corpse with household rubbish when she finally realized he was dead, police and reports said Wednesday.

The woman, 49, said she discovered the desiccated cadaver of Masao Tadano as she and another sister tried to move house last November, a police officer told Agence France Presse.

Police in Nepal's capital Kathmandu have launched a campaign to round up cows roaming the streets, blaming the sacred animals for car accidents and traffic jams.

"The stray cows and oxen have been a big nuisance in Kathmandu streets. They not only cause accidents, but also make the streets untidy," Pawan Giri, spokesman for the Kathmandu Metropolitan Traffic Police, told Agence France Presse.

YouTube is shutting down, Twitter users have to pay for the use of vowels, and the new Google Nose search engine will bring a whiff of wet dog or daisies right to your computer or smartphone.

Smells fishy? These Internet giants went all-out to try and bamboozle their users with April Fool's gags on the most mischievous day of the year.

Short people hoping to join the long arm of the law in the Philippines will be left disappointed after President Benigno Aquino vetoed a bill removing height requirements for police on Monday.

Parliament had passed a bill repealing minimum height requirements for the police, fire service and jail guards, but the president felt that some jobs required people of a certain stature, his spokeswoman Abigail Valte said.

An entire troupe of performing fleas has fallen victim to the freezing temperatures currently gripping Germany.

Flea circus director Robert Birk says he was shocked to find all of his 300 fleas dead inside their transport box Wednesday morning.

A man broke into the Paris natural history museum early Saturday and used a chainsaw to hack off the tusk of an elephant that belonged to King Louis XIV of France, officials said.

Police arrested the man in a nearby street as he was making his escape and recovered the three-kilogram (seven-pound) tusk, museum workers said.