A Syrian merchant in his 40s shot dead his Russian wife in the embattled northern city of Aleppo because she supported President Bashar Assad's regime, the killer's cousin told AFP on Wednesday.

Clothes shop owner Mohammed on Tuesday evening used a pistol to shoot his wife dead after an argument in their home in the rebel-held district of Maysar in southwestern Aleppo, said Ahmed, a 30-year-old government employee.

Truffles, oysters, an aged side of beef or a three-star dinner by a top French chef: a mouthwatering line-up of festive delicacies were the star lots of an offbeat charity auction in Paris.

Dubbed "Fine Food", and held for the second year running by the auctioneer Artcurial for the benefit of the French Red Cross, the sale Tuesday night raised 57,015 euros ($75,714) for the charity's Paris soup kitchens and aid missions.

An 11-year-old boy has been charged with possessing a deadly weapon after bringing a gun to school, claiming he was worried about a massacre like Connecticut's, a schools' spokesman said Tuesday.

The boy brought a .22 caliber handgun into class Monday at the West Kearns Elementary School in the Salt Lake City suburb of Kearns, Utah, and allegedly threatened classmates with it before being reported.

A YouTube video of a golden eagle swooping down and lifting a toddler off the ground in Montreal could soar to Internet stardom as the latest episode of animals behaving strangely in Canada.

Coming just a week after a monkey wearing a sheepskin coat was found wandering around an IKEA parking lot in Toronto, the video shows the massive eagle -- with a roughly six-foot (two-meter) wing span, circling a public park.

A worker at a waste disposal site in Japan found $120,000 cash in a stream of pulverized rubbish, police said Wednesday.

"There were about a thousand 10,000 yen ($118) bills that came out of a pulverizer unscathed," said a spokesman at the Asaminami police department in Hiroshima prefecture, in the country's west.

Police appealed for help on Tuesday to find the thief who stole Christmas presents destined for sick children at London's world-famous Great Ormond Street Hospital.

The wrapped presents, which included portable DVD players, DVDs, Nintendo consoles, games and toys, were provided by the hospital's charity fund and were intended for children being treated in the intensive care unit.

If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are about to descend on Earth, it seems one might be riding in from South Korea on an invisible steed to the tune of "Gangnam Style".

South Korean social networks and websites have been buzzing in recent days over a prediction attributed to the 16th century French seer Nostradamus, that suggests the singer Psy is not the smiling, benign 34-year-old rapper he appears.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer's snout has been immortalized in movies, books and song.

But until now, no-one has offered a scientific explanation for the glow that allows the world's most famous antlered herbivore to guide Santa's sleigh through the night before Christmas.

Japan's presumptive premier Shinzo Abe got his U.S. leaders mixed up Tuesday, when he told business chiefs he had been speaking to "President Bush" after a phone call from Barack Obama.

The gaffe came in one of Abe's first speaking engagements since his landslide victory in weekend polls that saw his Liberal Democratic Party returned to power.

A Swedish woman who kept human skulls and bones in her apartment was sentenced Monday to probation and ordered to undergo psychiatric care after being convicted of "disturbing the peace of the dead."

The prosecution had argued that the 37 year-old woman, who has a history of unemployment and substance abuse, used the bones "for various sexual activities", but charges of necrophilia were dismissed by the Gutenberg district court.