Deep rifts opened in Moammar Gadhafi's regime, with Libyan government officials at home and abroad resigning, air force pilots defecting and a bloody crackdown on protest in the capital of Tripoli, where cars and buildings were burned. Gadhafi went on state TV early Tuesday to attempt to show he was still in charge.

World leaders have expressed outrage at the "vicious forms of repression" used against the demonstrators.

Ink-jet printing technology has inspired scientists to look for ways to build sheets of skin that could one day be used for grafts in burn victims, experts said Sunday.

One technique involves a portable bioprinter that could be carried to wounded soldiers on the battlefield where it would scan the injury, take cells from the patient and print a section of compatible skin.

Russia's opposition activists invited Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to switch places with jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky Sunday by hanging a giant banner across from the Kremlin.

The banner, measuring about eight by 12 meters hung from a bridge in central Moscow. "Time to change," said the caption below a photograph of a freed Khodorkovsky alongside one with Putin pictured in a cage.

A Philippine priest has threatened to deny burial rights in cases where mourners at funerals are caught gambling, a tradition exploited by gaming syndicates who mount "fake" wakes.

Father Valentine Dimoc of the Saint Mary Magdalene Parish said authorities in the northern town of Lagawe had already passed an ordinance banning gambling at funeral wakes, but local officials and police were failing to enforce it.

Long renowned for pioneering extreme sports such as bungee-jumping and heli-skiing, New Zealanders are now pushing culinary boundaries by serving up shots of horse semen to iron-stomached food lovers.

The equine delicacy will be on the menu at the annual Wildfoods Festival in the South Island town of Hokitika next month, along with other gastronomic delights such as raw scorpions, chocolate-covered beetles and deep-fried grubs.

Ancient Britons used scooped-out human skulls as drinking cups in a mysterious ritual that also involved eating some of the flesh inside, scientists said Thursday.

The 14,700-year-old skulls, belonging to two adults and a child aged about three, were found in a cave in Cheddar Gorge, southwest England, the Natural History Museum in London said.

A Tajik national has been arrested in a Russian airport with 800 grams of heroin that he was transporting in his stomach, the customs service for Saint Petersburg region said Wednesday.

"A 20-year-old Tajik who arrived from Dushanbe was detained in Pulkovo airport. Doctors found 84 capsules containing 800 grams of heroin in his stomach," a spokesman for the northwestern customs office told Agence France Presse.

An edgy public radio show has revealed what it purports to be the secret recipe for Coca Cola -- a formula which has become the stuff of legend after decades of careful marketing by one of the world's most recognizable brands.

The recipe is supposedly kept in a locked vault, and Coke at one point had an advertising campaign about the two top executives who knew the secret and couldn't fly on the same plane or the formula could be lost forever.

Seven amorous but exhausted couples smooched their way to a new world record in Thailand on Monday with the longest continuous kiss lasting more than 32 hours -- and kept going.

The contestants broke the previous world record of 32 hours seven minutes and 14 seconds set in Germany and were vying to become the last ones locking lips for a prize of about $3,250 cash and a diamond ring, organizers said.

Heidi, Germany's beloved cross-eyed opossum, is taking a page from Paul the Octopus' playbook: the marsupial will attempt to pick this year's Oscar winners.

Leipzig Zoo Director Joerg Junghold told Germany's RTL television on Friday that Heidi will be appearing on the "Jimmy Kimmel Show" alongside the Oscars on Feb. 27.