An Afghan bomb disposal expert defied all the training manuals and safety protocols to take life into his own hands. He bravely defused this suicide bomber's explosive vest, with it still attached to the man.

A US man who threw a mouse onto a pile of burning leaves could only watch in horror as it ran into his house and set the building ablaze.

A Bollywood star is facing a storm of controversy over the sex of his unborn child. India's Health Ministry has launched an investigation into media reports that the actor Shah Rukh Khan and his wife are expecting a boy through a surrogate mother. Sex determination tests are banned in India, and elsewhere in Asia, due to a traditional preference for sons.

We're guessing this is going to end up on a lot of "world's most dangerous ski runs" lists. But probably for a different reason than any of the other entries.

Firefighters in China rescued a newborn from a sewage pipe Saturday afternoon. Officials say the baby was still inside the placenta, but the unbilical cord was cut. Residents had told officials they could hear a baby crying from inside the pipes. That's when rescue crews sawed open the pipes and carried the pipe to the hospital with the baby inside. When they reached the hospital they opened the pipe to find the infant - ALIVE. The baby is in stable condition.

The two great mysteries the earth solved

MY MOTHER fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

Cleveland police have found, inside the house where he is alleged to have kept at least three young women captive for ten years, a 2004 letter written by Ariel Castro, 19 Action News' Scott Taylor reports. "I don't know why I kept looking for another," Castro writes in the letter.

New Zealand released an updated list of its legally forbidden baby names this week, sparking some controversy among people who apparently think “4real” and “Lucifer” should not be banned, or maybe just that the state shouldn’t be in the business of saying what you can or can’t name your own children.

Parish's announcements

A supermarket chain has withdrawn bags of nuts - after failing to declare they may contain peanuts.

A town in Colorado is looking into a proposal that would require that every home have at least one assault-style rifle, similar to the Bushmaster AR-15 used to slaughter 20 elementary school children in Connecticut last year.

It started with more than 1,000—the number of new hotels that opened worldwide in the last year and made it onto our radar. We whittled that down to 200-plus, in 57 countries, to which we sent 36 reporters (anonymously, of course). Their mission? To identify the very best. Their verdict? 154 places you'll want to go to right away, including 62 under $300.

"Tu-154m of the Republic of Poland" (042010) - this is model referring to the Smolensk disaster at 10 April 2010. 1:144 scale model, in the display case measuring 50x40x6 [centimetres]. You can build your own version of the crashed plane.

As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself.

Unilateral hand clenching increases neuronal activity in the frontal lobe of the contralateral hemisphere. Such hand clenching is also associated with increased experiencing of a given hemisphere’s “mode of processing.” Together, these findings suggest that unilateral hand clenching can be used to test hypotheses concerning the specializations of the cerebral hemispheres during memory encoding and retrieval.

A Florida man saved his six-year-old son on Friday by punching an alligator into submission after the beast clamped onto the child’s right arm.

At least 31 people have been killed and more than 200 others wounded in a series of early-morning explosions in cities across Iraq, officials say.

The dead babies. The exploited women. The racism. The numerous governmental failures. It is thoroughly newsworthy.

Gullible bargain hunters at Argentina's largest bazaar are forking out hundreds of dollars for what they think are gorgeous toy poodles, only to discover that their cute pooch is in fact a 'Brazilian rat' pumped up on steroids.