Russia on Thursday ignored established stars to choose a group of singing grandmothers from an obscure provincial village to represent the country at the 2012 Eurovision song contest.

The group, the Buranovskiye Babushki (Buranovo Grannies) from the far-flung Udmurtia region, won Russia's qualifying tournament for Eurovision in the early hours of Thursday with their cheerful folk-disco song "Party for Everybody".

A Canadian woman has launched a human rights complaint against the city of Ottawa for refusing to let her to park in front of her home in a historic district, a court spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Pamela Howson has alleged discrimination in a case before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal on the grounds of "family circumstances," said the spokeswoman.

A man accused of swindling X-ray charts from hospitals and clinics in Canada for their valuable silver content has been charged with fraud, Canada's capital police said Wednesday.

The Toronto resident was arrested 75 kilometers (46 miles) west of Ottawa with 30,000 X-rays in a rented truck after staff at one clinic became suspicious of his activities and alerted authorities, Staff Sergeant Kevin McCaffrey said.

Contracting a nasty stomach bug is par for the course when visiting new places but Queen Elizabeth II has developed a simple formula to stay well when abroad, a British lawmaker revealed Wednesday.

"I once asked a courtier how she did it. To which I received the characteristic reply: 'By not eating salads, shellfish and watermelon while travelling'," Peter Tapsell told the House of Commons.

Dogs seem to be as popular on a canvas these days as they are on a leash, with paintings of dogs drawing big bucks and big crowds.

At the annual "dogs only" art auction held after the Westminster Dog Show, two price records were broken this year, said Alan Fausel, vice president and director of fine art at Bonhams, the auction house that runs the event.

A bored Czech security guard got himself into an embarrassing situation while testing a pair of handcuffs, only to realize he didn't have the keys as the locks clicked shut, police said Wednesday.

"I handcuffed myself and I don't have the keys," Prague police spokesman Jan Danek said, quoting the guard with a private company in Prague, who called the police emergency line.

Technically they're "chocolate sandwich cookies," a baked concoction of sugar, vitamin-enriched flour, canola oil, high-fructose corn syrup and, at the bottom of the list of ingredients, chocolate.

But the Oreo cookie -- first baked in New York city 100 years ago Tuesday -- is much more than that. It's an American icon, the best-selling cookie in the nation, with plenty of fans around the world to boot.

A Japanese zoo has turned to rhythmical banging on traditional drums in a bid to encourage some enthusiasm for sex among lust-lacking alligators.

Zookeepers said Wednesday they hoped the low booming sound produced by large Japanese "taiko" drums would spur lethargic Chinese alligators to begin mating because of its similarity to the animals' natural pre-coital cry.

A man used an eye-catching way to attract people on Wednesday after he began to strip in Beirut’s Ain el-Mraisseh seafront in broad daylight.

Witnesses told Naharnet that the bare-chested man brought his shorts down on several occasions and showed his buttocks by forming a G-string with his underwear.

A Frenchman goes on trial Thursday for cutting his girlfriend's lover's penis off and flushing it down the toilet.

Blaise Fragione, 38, admits that in October 2008 he knocked out the victim, named only as "F.", with a blow to the head, severed most of his penis with a razor knife and threw it in the toilet.