Odd & Interesting

A tiff over Taco Tuesday is heating up, with Taco Bell asking U.S. regulators to force a Wyoming-based fast-food chain to abandon its longstanding claim to “Taco Tuesday” as a trademark.

A city in northern Michigan has a new Mother’s Day memory: A 350-pound bear was in a tree for hours, watched by dozens of people, before it fell asleep and dropped onto mattresses below.

The firing of two employees at a religious school in western New York is fanning the culture wars roiling parts of the United States.

A man has been indicted by a grand jury on charges of stealing a pair of ruby red slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz,” federal prosecutors in North Dakota say.

One of Kenya’s oldest wild lions has been killed by herders and the government has expressed concern as six more lions were speared at another village on Saturday, bringing to 10 the number killed last week alone.

A university professor broke a record for the longest time living underwater without depressurization this weekend at a Florida Keys lodge for scuba divers. University of South Florida professor Joseph Dituri spent his 74th day underwater Saturday in a Key Largo lodge for scuba divers.

Guinness World Records says the world’s oldest dog recently celebrated his 31st birthday.

Scientists for the first time have caught a star in the act of swallowing a planet. And it’s not just a nibble or bite, but one big gulp.

Authorities in a central New Jersey town say they are no longer noodling over the mystery of how hundreds of pounds of pasta were dumped near a stream.

When Julia and Robert Jones discovered that a judge from the Akron Municipal Court in Ohio would be officiating “Star Wars”-themed weddings on May the Fourth, the couple felt the Force calling them to commit to the ceremony.

He is a senior at 16. His grade point average is 4.98. Even before graduating from high school, he has earned 27 college credits and, perhaps the most impressive numbers of all, he has scholarship offers from around 130 colleges and universities that, as of Thursday, totaled more than $9 million.

The final curtain came down Sunday on New York’s production of “The Phantom of the Opera,” ending Broadway’s longest-running show with thunderous standing ovations, champagne toasts and gold and silver confetti bursting from its famous chandelier.

A spacecraft around Mars has sent back the most detailed photos yet of the red planet's little moon.

German officials seized cooked bats and nearly a ton of unrefrigerated fish after police stopped a van that had entered the country from Belgium, authorities said Wednesday.

A 13-year-old boy had to be freed from a claw machine after he climbed inside hoping to score a prize, according to an official at a North Carolina amusement park.

The “giant pothole” that Arnold Schwarzenegger filled on a street in his Los Angeles neighborhood was actually a trench dug for utility work. The Los Angeles Department of Public Works says Southern California Gas Co. had covered the trench with temporary asphalt after pipeline work in January.

A pilot in South Africa made a hasty emergency landing after discovering a highly venomous cobra hiding under his seat.

So this moose walks into a medical building...

Meet Percy, the police rabbit. Yes, that’s fur real.

New Mexico produced more than 53,000 tons of its most famous crop during the last growing season, meaning more chile peppers found their way into salsas and onto dinner plates than the previous year.

The classic image of Tyrannosaurus rex flashing giant teeth might be wrong.

German weekly Der Spiegel is reporting that Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II asked her hosts for a gift of two horses during her state visit to Germany in 1978.

An explosion at a chocolate factory in Pennsylvania Friday killed three people and left four missing, but authorities say one person was found alive in the rubble.

Two Cuban migrants used a motorized hang glider to fly the approximately 90 miles from the communist island to Key West, Florida.

You can see right through this little aquarium fish from Thailand: Its skin is almost completely transparent. But when the light hits it just right, its body flickers with shimmering rainbow colors.