A hen produced a live chick in a freak birth at a poultry farm in central Sri Lanka, a veterinary surgeon said Friday.

The vet in charge of the town of Welimada, P. R. Yapa, said the egg appeared to have incubated inside the hen for 21 days and the hen died when it gave birth to the chick.

An eight-year-old Indonesian boy who smoked more than a pack a day from age four has kicked the habit, a child-welfare commission said Thursday.

The boy, Ilham, has put on two kilograms (4.4 pounds), since going into treatment with the independent Child Protection Commission a month ago, said its chairman, Arist Merdeka Sirait.

A U.S. promoter hopes to break a world record by parading at least 700 costumed dogs, mostly Chihuahuas, down a city street on the Cinco de Mayo holiday.

Mark Valentine says the Kansas City parade will introduce Chihuahuas to their cultural heritage while helping a no-kill shelter.

A Japanese policeman has been arrested for licking a woman's hair in a restaurant, police said Thursday.

Fellow officers detained forensics specialist Tatsuya Ichikawa, 50, at a fast food joint after he was spotted tonguing the locks of an unsuspecting 25-year-old woman in Shizuoka prefecture, central Japan.

Sweden's culture minister on Wednesday apologized for her participation in a ceremony involving a cake depicting a nude African woman that sparked cries of racism.

The controversial cake was prepared to mark the 75th anniversary of the National Organization of Swedish artists, attended by culture minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth.

A 300-year-old drawing of a flying fish that nearly scuttled Isaac Newton's world-changing opus on modern physics will be showcased in the Royal Society's online picture library, launched Thursday.

The engraving was first published in 1686 in a lavishly-illustrated book "A History of Fishes," by John Ray and Francis Willughby, the prestigious British academy of sciences said.

Rampaging elephants are terrorizing Mozambican villages near the Zimbabwe border, attacking people, trampling crops and scaring children, state-run newspaper Noticias reported Wednesday.

"We are using traditional ways to try to scare the animals, but all in vain, because whenever we do something, the monsters disappear for a few days, and when they come back there is no peace," local farmer Joseph Maithe told the paper.

Austere furniture for austere times was the message from this week's Milan design fair, where the aesthetics of the sober 1940s and 1950s prevailed and extravagance gave way to functionality.

"Design needs to take into account a significant economic crisis which has led to a re-interpretation to make products more functional while avoiding provocations," architect Marco Romanelli, a fair organizer, told Agence France Presse.

An Italian museum on Tuesday began burning its collection of contemporary artworks in a singular protest against harsh budget cuts that have left many cultural institutions out of pocket.

The Casoria Contemporary Art Museum near Naples held a bonfire in its grounds for the first torching of a painting by French artist Severine Bourguignon, who was in favor of the protest and followed it on Skype.

Briton Sarah Outen is no stranger to adventure, but when she rows out from a small port in Japan this week she will be on her own -- all the way until she reaches Canada.

Outen's solo voyage across the Pacific, in a rowboat packed with the latest gadgetry, is probably the most challenging leg in her ambitious project to circle the globe by boat and bike.