Jocko Besne, father of hundreds of thousands of the world's most productive dairy cattle, has died in France of natural causes aged 27, the farming cooperative which raised him said.

Jocko was the sire -- literally in at least 161,888 and perhaps as many as 400,000 cases -- of the Prim'Holstein race of cattle, the main French strain of the black and white Holstein or Friesian breed of milk-producing cows.

Street lights have been turned off in a Sicilian town after local authorities failed to pay a million-euro bill for power supplies, Italian news websites reported on Tuesday.

Local residents of Monreale near Palermo -- a popular tourist destination because of its famous Norman cathedral -- have been forced to use flashlights in the evenings and some are warning of the risk of a spike in crime.

A woman accused of stabbing her 6-year-old daughter to death with scissors told police she had been taking a weight-loss product, had trouble sleeping for several days and felt an "evil" presence before the attack.

"Did I kill my daughter? Is she dead?'" Danielle Yvonne Slaughter asked police after police found her on Sunday, naked, bloody and running barefoot through Las Vegas, according to court documents released Tuesday.

Police recently cited a city club for allowing violent mosh pit dancing and vowed a crackdown on what they called "dangerous behavior" and a "public safety hazard."

The Boston Herald (http://bit.ly/wNguyU) reports that police cited the House of Blues for a license violation because of a mosh pit that broke out during a Feb. 21 show by Flogging Molly.

Two boys trying to smoke cigarettes started a blaze which destroyed parts of a 14th century castle in eastern Slovakia at the weekend, police said Tuesday.

"Two boys, aged 11 and 12, were trying to light up a cigarette and because of their careless use of matches the grass at the castle hill caught fire," police spokeswoman Jana Mesarova said.

Communists mourned Tuesday as developers moved in to demolish a bathhouse in the northwestern Russian city of Saint Petersburg which Lenin is said to have frequented.

The Communists of Petersburg and the Leningrad Region called for an investigation after developers bulldozed the 19th-century Udelniye bathhouse where the Bolshevik leader soaped up on the eve of the 1917 revolution.

As Myanmar opens up to the world, one cooking school is giving wannabe chefs a chance to shine in the bustling kitchens of Yangon as the city prepares for an influx of foreign visitors.

Trainees at the Shwe Sa Bwe, or "Golden Table", cookery school are learning how to whip up a gazpacho soup, flip crepes and perfectly grill juicy chunks of chicken -- all on the menu du jour for paying guests.

Russia's scandal-hit police force was reeling from a new controversy Monday after a man died in detention of a ruptured intestine after allegedly being raped by officers with a champagne bottle.

Sergei Nazarov, 52, a resident of the city of Kazan in the mostly Muslim central region of Tatarstan, complained of abdominal pain after being detained by police on suspicion of theft on Friday.

An eight-year-old Indonesian boy who smokes two packets of cigarettes a day has highlighted the government's failure to regulate the tobacco industry, the country's Child Protection Commission said Monday.

After food, cigarettes account for the second-largest household expenditure in the Southeast Asian country of 240 million people, nearly half of whom still live on less than two dollars a day.

An elderly gorilla that lives at a U.S. zoo has a new companion: a bunny named Panda.

The Erie Zoo's gorilla, Samantha, has been without a full-time friend since the death of Rudy, a male gorilla, in 2005.