At least five people who were served bleach-laced water at a Mister Donut store in Japan had to be treated by medics, the operator said Monday.

Duskin Co, a Japanese cleaning company that also operates the U.S. fast food franchise in the country, said one of its stores in Osaka served a diluted solution of bleach as drinking water on Friday.

A seal pup was found in a forest in eastern Sweden on Sunday almost six kilometers (four miles) from the closest body of open water, raising questions as to how it got there, Swedish media reported.

"A somewhat confused person called and said he was out walking in the woods where he had found a seal pup. I thought he was joking at first," Uppsala police inspector Henrik Pederson told news agency TT.

Pigs have long gotten a bad rap. The four-legged ungulates are considered so messy and stinky that they're synonymous with slovenliness: Eat too much and you're pigging out. Forget to clean up and your house is a pig pen. And when is a pig happiest?

That stigma is perhaps no greater than in New York City, where high-rises and apartments are hardly hospitable to pigs. The city's health code forbids keeping them as pets, forcing pig owners to operate in secret — or boldly take the risk an unhappy neighbor might squeal.

Catholics tired of fish on Friday can enjoy a Lent-friendly smorgasbord in Nicaragua, where soups made with iguana or armadillo are served with a healthy portion of bull testicles.

The delicacies violate local laws against eating such species during their breeding period, but are seen as a meat-free dish in the lead-up to Easter. They are also considered an aphrodisiac, and thus popular with older men.

Tokyo's cherry trees were in stunning full bloom on Friday, Japan's weather agency said, marking the second earliest blossoming in the capital on record.

The national weather service used Tokyo's central Yasukuni Shrine as a barometer to judge the peak of the season, which sees a riot of white and delicate pinks exploding in parks, temple grounds, schools and on streets.

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.