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.

With her crisp uniform, immaculate makeup and hair swept up, Mew looks like any other air hostess, but she's one of a handful of Thai transsexuals blazing a trail in the skies.

Fledgling Thailand-based carrier PC Air has hired four transgender cabin crew in a highly publicized recruitment drive that has divided opinion over whether the move is in the spirit of equality or exploitation.

Ten people were killed when the soil caved in on them as they were illegally digging for ancient treasures under a house in a central Egyptian village, police officials told Agence France Presse on Monday.

The 10, including four brothers, were buried alive when the walls of the dig collapsed in the village of Arab al-Manasra, north of the historic city of Luxor.

Rich Chinese pigeon fanciers are offering tens of thousands of Euros to buy Belgian champions, to the despair of local pigeon-lovers unable to compete in such sky-high auction bids.

Pigeon-breeding is an old Chinese passion, even though long-distance pigeon-racing has never caught on the way it has in northern Europe.

The brother of an actress who starred in popular British soap opera was on Saturday charged with her murder, police said, four days after her headless body was found in a London canal.

Tony McCluskie, 35, was charged with killing his 29-year-old sister Gemma McCluskie, who disappeared last week, Scotland Yard said in a statement, adding that he would appear in court on Monday.

A boastful Ferrari driver who put film on the Internet of his supercar doing three times the speed limit in Japan was facing possible jail Saturday, after disapproving YouTube viewers called police.

The 50-year-old doctor uploaded a six-minute video showing him driving his Ferrari 458 Italia through Fukuoka, in southern Japan, at 84 kilometers (52 miles) an hour over the limit, police said.

Eight young women whose mothers are sex workers were married in a so-called "village of prostitutes" in India on Sunday under a plan to save them from being pushed into the world's oldest profession.

The event, held in the village of Vadia in the western state of Gujarat, was organized by Vicharta Samuday Samarthan Manch(VSSM), a non-profit group which works with marginalized nomadic communities.