A Chinese truck driver was fined 2.7 million yuan -- 100 years' average income for city dwellers -- and jailed for three years after his overloaded vehicle caused a bridge to collapse, reports said Thursday.

Zhang Wenjun's sand-laden lorry weighed 160 tonnes when he tried to cross a concrete bridge in Huairou on the outskirts of Beijing and the structure gave way, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

A Nepalese woman, excited to be voting for the first time, told Wednesday how she went into labor and gave birth at a polling station during elections in the Himalayan nation.

Parbati Bhandari told AFP she was so keen to take part in polls on Tuesday to elect a constituent assembly that she walked 30 minutes to a polling station just six days before her due date.

A Chinese rice trader who shot to fame last year over a bogus claim that he had purchased a U.S. bank was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison on conviction of falsifying invoices to evade taxes.

An Intermediate Court in the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou issued the verdict against Lin Chunping, saying he had evaded several millions of dollars in taxes through writing false invoices between September 2011 and May 2012.

A piece of Parisian history will go under the hammer next week with the sale of a 15-step section of the Eiffel Tower's original spiral staircase.

The iron steps, which once connected the tower's second and third levels, will be auctioned on Monday as part of a sale of Art Deco furniture by auction house Artcurial in the French capital.

Cleaners working on a commercial plane in eastern India have found 24 gold bars worth more than $1 million stuffed into a toilet compartment, officials said Wednesday.

India, which rivals China as the world's biggest gold consumer, has witnessed a spike in smuggling after import duties were hiked three times this year to try to dampen demand for the precious metal.

A college professor who played a supersized video game on the side of a Philadelphia skyscraper now holds a Guinness world record for the feat.

Drexel University professor Frank Lee recreated the classic Atari game Pong on the 29-story Cira Centre last spring.

Selfie is the 2013 word of the year, Oxford Dictionaries announced Tuesday, edging out some stiff competition from twerk.

Usage of the word has increased 17,000 percent over the past 12 months, said Oxford Dictionaries, which publishes the mammoth Oxford English Dictionary (OED), styled as the definitive record of the English language.

A New Zealand man has been cleared of raping his estranged wife while pretending to be her young lover in a case partially inspired by the novel "Fifty Shades of Grey", a report said Tuesday.

The man was facing two counts of rape and four of unlawful sexual connection after having sex with the woman twice last year, with his identity hidden by a balaclava and sunglasses on both occasions, Fairfax New Zealand reported.

Norwegian fish farming giant Marine Harvest has promised a 60-euro reward on Monday for any recaptured salmon after a violent storm over the weekend allowed thousands to escape.

The unusual move comes after western Norway was whipped by strong winds, causing damage to the huge submerged cage in which 127,000 of the fish are kept by the world's largest salmon producer.

Pope Francis on Sunday advised Catholics to take a special dose of spiritual medicine, offering some 20,000 boxes of "mercy" -- containing rosaries -- to pilgrims in St Peter's Square.

"I now want to suggest a medicine. 'What?' you ask, 'the pope is now a pharmacist?'" Francis said, shaking a box resembling a pack of tablets, after reciting the traditional Sunday Angelus prayer from a window overlooking the square.