Officials in the eastern US state of Maryland have come up with an innovative, cost-saving way to protect the environment: they use goats to mow the grass.

A New York comedian afraid of flying left Monday on a journey that will make him a frequent - almost permanent - flier.

A restaurant in China on Tuesday defended a controversial practice of killing chickens with snake bites, saying the resulting dish was healthy and kept the customers flooding in.

A Japanese man was carrying the bones of up to 100 people wrapped in bags in his van when he was stopped at a checkpoint in Manila, police in the Philippines capital said Tuesday.

Hotels on Mexico's Caribbean coast have started offering free vacations for three years to any tourist catching swine flu while on holiday there, in a bid to counter swine flu's blow to the industry.

Candidates ranging from "fish-spirited" divers to jaded journalists will find out later this week if they have made the final 11 for "the best job in the world" on Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

It's tough enough to find or even keep work in today's frazzled US economy, but one man has drawn inspiration from the biting recession and landed not one, but 50 jobs, across the country.

A German lawmaker proposed on Monday a novel and high-tech way of dealing with the menace of dog poo on the streets: DNA testing to identify the canine culprit and fine its owner.

Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff, accused of masterminding a massive investment fraud, has been handed an ethics lesson by thieves who stole a statue from his Florida mansion, and promptly returned it, according to local press.

A Greek appeal court has declared void a deal under which an alcoholic traded his apartment to a bar owner in return for free drink for the rest of his life, a newspaper reported Friday.