Since his owner died two months ago, Tommy the dog has not missed a single mass in the small church in southern Italy where his mistress's funeral was held, Italian media said Wednesday.

When the bells of the Santa Maria Assunta church begin to toll each afternoon in San Donaci near Brindisi, the 12-year-old German Shepherd sets off from the village to get himself a front row seat next to the altar, Il Messaggero newspaper said.

Animal disease officials in Taiwan Wednesday said they had confiscated more than 400 dried dog penises, testicles and various internal organs in a raid on an illegal slaughterhouse.

The Animal Disease Control Center said a total of 435 penises were discovered in a fridge along with the other body parts, while 12 fresh dog corpses were also found in the raid at the slaughterhouse in western Yunlin county on Tuesday.

Officials scrambled Tuesday to get 18 human heads off to their final destination, a crematorium, after they were seized by U.S. customs inspectors before Christmas at Chicago's main O'Hare airport.

The heads, each tagged with a name plus place and cause of death, had originated in the United States for use at a research facility in Rome, spokeswoman Mary Paleologos of the Cook County medical examiner's office said.

A Swedish cleaning lady on Tuesday commandeered an empty Stockholm commuter train, which careered off the tracks when it reached the end of the line and smashed into a block of flats, police said.

The woman's condition was "serious but stable", Stockholm police spokesman Lars Bystroem said. She was detained on suspicion of destroying public property, a crime punishable by up to eight years in jail.

Dozens of tourists set off through Indonesia's malaria-infested jungles and potholed roads on three-wheelers as part of a rally to raise funds for forest conservation, organizers said Monday.

The 26 three-wheelers -- with wimpy 250cc engines, five-liter fuel tanks and little capacity to climb slopes -- began a two-week adventure Sunday over some 2,000 miles of mostly unlit roads between Sumatra and Bali islands.

Bank robbers have pulled off a brazen heist in the German capital after digging a 30 meter-long (100-foot) tunnel leading into the bank's vault, police said Monday.

Once inside the Berliner Volksbank branch in the southwestern district of Steglitz they cracked open safety deposit boxes and managed to get away with an undisclosed amount, a police spokeswoman said.

President Barack Obama on Monday dismissed the perception that he is aloof and disdains the backslapping bonhomie a U.S. leader sometimes requires to drive his priorities through Congress.

Obama put his often polarizing differences with Republicans down to politics rather than personal antipathy, arguing that though he had enjoyed a round of golf with House Speaker John Boehner, it had not helped get things done.

Hong Kong's lawyers were Tuesday embroiled in a legal wrangle with a difference -- over whether solicitors should be allowed to don horse-hair wigs traditionally worn by barristers in court, according to reports.

While only barristers and judges are currently allowed to wear the curled, 17th century-style wigs, the city's Law Society says solicitors should be able to wear them during certain hearings, the South China Morning post reported.

Russia's defense minister expressed horror on Monday that soldiers were still wrapping cloths around their feet instead of wearing socks, and vowed the historic practice must end this year.

"I would like to give an order that in 2013, at least by the end of the year, we forget the word 'foot cloths'," a grim-faced Sergei Shoigu told military top brass at a televised meeting.

Some 50,000 CDs of Christmas carols sent to households in Germany by a children's charity actually contained the words to pro-Nazi songs sung by the Hitler Youth movement, German public radio NDR reported Sunday.

Spokesman for the SOS Children's Villages charity, Roger Damm, told NDR the CDs could have been hacked by a far-right group.