Venezuela's acting president Nicolas Maduro joked on Wednesday that late leftist president Hugo Chavez's recent death must have played into the selection of the first Latin American pope.

"We know that our commander has risen up there and is face to face with Christ," Maduro said, to an outburst of laughter at a political event, just over a week after Chavez died following 14 years in charge of Venezuela.

A "shagging diploma" given to youths at a Swedish Lutheran Church confirmation camp proved too much for parents who complained Wednesday that their 14-year-olds were too young for sex.

After attending a course entitled "Love and Sexuality", the teenagers in the southeastern town of Ronneby were given a certificate stating they were "qualified for sex".

An Estonian man has returned a library book 69 years late, partly blaming a World War II aerial bombing that damaged the library for the late return.

Ivika Turkson of the Tallinn Central Library says that last week the man in his mid-80s returned the overdue book — which was checked out on March 7, 1944, while Estonia was occupied by Nazi Germany — along with an apology and an offer to pay a late fee.

A British man hailed as a hero for wrestling a shark away from an Australian beach said Tuesday he had been sacked after it emerged that he was on sick leave at the time.

Paul Marshallsea, a 62-year-old charity worker from Wales, won praise in January when he ran into the sea near Brisbane to grapple with the 1.8 meter (6-foot) shark, fearing it would attack paddling children.

This gives new meaning to punching in at work: doctors at a Brazilian hospital covered for absentee colleagues by using fake silicone fingers with their prints to fool biometric machines.

Globo television showed footage of a doctor touching her finger to the device, then using two fake digits to do the same for colleagues, and taking delivery of slips of paper indicating they had in fact clocked in to work.

The son of Australia's richest person, Gina Rinehart, sought a Aus$15 million (U.S.$15.4 million) "sorry payment" from his mother for how had she treated him over the years, a report said Wednesday.

Iron ore billionaire Rinehart is embroiled in a legal battle with two of her four children, including son John Hancock, over control of a family trust reportedly worth Aus$4 billion.

The cardinals locked away to choose the next pope will be served plain but wholesome food -- and nothing so delicious that they will want to drag out their deliberations, an Italian newspaper reported on its website on Tuesday.

The nuns who will cook for the 115 cardinals during the papal conclave at their Casa Santa Marta residence "are already preparing meals of soup, spaghetti, small meat kebabs and boiled vegetables", the Corriere della Sera reported.

A mating pair of pandas have wasted no time in getting intimate, a Japanese zoo said Tuesday, coupling on their first evening together and then again the next morning.

The female Shin Shin and her companion Ri Ri were put in a private enclosure on Monday evening after keepers at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo noticed they were ready to mate.

Cardinals entering the Vatican on Tuesday ahead of a conclave to elect the next pope took to Twitter to say goodbye to their online flock before they are cut off from the outside world.

"Last tweet before conclave: May Our Father hear and answer with love and mercy all prayers and sacrifices offered for fruitful outcome. God bless!" South African cardinal Wilfrid Napier told his thousands of followers.

His half brother may be the most powerful man in the world but that stardust seemed not to rub off on Malik Obama as he failed miserably to win a county gubernatorial seat in Kenya's recently concluded polls.

Obama, 54, who shares a father with United States President Barack Obama, won just 2,792 votes -- some 140,000 behind the final winner -- in his bid to claim the seat for his home area in western Kenya.