Chinese Internet users have deluged the microblog of the Russian embassy in Beijing with thousands of abusive comments within days of its opening, just ahead of a visit to Moscow by China's new president Xi Jinping.

The Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949 when its forces finally triumphed in the country's long civil war, and for a time it was closely allied with its ideological counterpart in the Soviet Union.

A self-styled "poet climber" on Thursday managed to sidestep security, climb on to a roof adjacent to the U.S. embassy building in Paris and spend two hours there before being helped down by fire fighters.

Herve Couasnon, whose previous stunts have included sneaking into France's National Assembly and a nuclear power station, told Agence France Presse by phone from the roof that he wanted to meet Barack Obama, give the president his CV and talk peace -- a reference to Obama's ongoing Middle East trip.

One of the Vatican's main Twitter accounts and the website of its communications office were running stories about Batman on Thursday with the headline "Holy Switcheroo!" — raising concerns they might have been hacked.

But two Vatican officials said the site hadn't been hacked, and that the reason for the unusual posting was an "internal system failure" due to a non-native English speaker posting the story on the website.

A Taiwanese fugitive who knew no English has been arrested because police were curious about the word "Wanted" printed on his T-shirt, officers said Thursday.

The man, identified only by his surname Wu and wanted on drug abuse charges, was arrested last week at Huwei, a town in the southern country of Yunlin, a police spokesman told Agence France Presse.

Oxford University students have lodged a protest about the "hugely unjust" sacking of a librarian who failed to stop about 30 students performing the Harlem Shake in a college library.

They claim that Calypso Nash, a graduate student of St Hilda's College, had nothing to do with the filming of the Internet dance craze last month but just happened to be there at the time.

Britain's prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum said Wednesday it had been forced to cancel a concert by "grind metal" band Napalm Death because of fears that the music will quite literally bring the house down.

The British band had been scheduled to play a daring concert at the museum on Friday through a ceramic sculpture which -- if all had gone to plan -- would have exploded under the force of their music.

Chinese netizens praised the U.S. Treasury chief Thursday for eating a cheap dumpling lunch after meeting new President Xi Jinping, comparing his modest bill to the lavish spending habits of domestic officials.

Jacob Lew met Xi in the grandeur of Beijing's Great Hall of the People on Tuesday, and later had lunch with two colleagues at the Bao Yuan Dumpling House near the U.S. Embassy, where the bill came to 109 yuan ($17.50).

Britain's fertility and embryology regulator says it has found broad public support for in vitro fertilization techniques to allow the creation of babies with DNA from three people for couples who might otherwise face the risk of passing on certain genetic diseases.

The group began a public consultation at the government's request last year.

South African opposition leader Helen Zille said she has been bitten by a rat outside her home in Cape Town.

"The weirdest thing just happened. I went to fetch the newspapers at the gate when a rat darted out, and bit me on my toe!" the head of the Democratic Alliance, the main opposition group, said on Twitter.

Supermarkets across New Zealand stocked up with Marmite for the first time in more than a year Wednesday, as a shortage of the salty spread caused by the Christchurch earthquake came to an end.

In a culinary crisis dubbed "Marmageddon", the country's only Marmite factory closed after sustaining damage in the February 2011 Christchurch quake, halting production of the thick, black concoction.