On Saturday, Poland's Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski called a news briefing in a Warsaw park to urge the citizens of the country to feed ducks with the approach of winter. The PM was expected to make an announcement on the future of the ruling coalition government, instead he presented a yellow duck as the campaign mascot of his Law and Justice(PiS) party ahead of November's local elections.

Tickets for the world's first tourist space flight planned for 2008 have been snapped up by celebrities and royalty. The commercial spaceline said that tickets were sold to its first 150 passengers at $200,000 per ticket. Some of the takers were former soap star Victoria Principal, designer Philippe Starck, and a unidentified senior member of a royal family have all bought tickets for the world's first tourist space flights planned for 2008. Meanwhile, Bryan Singer, the director of "Superman Returns," has also signed up.

Serving an unusual punishment for not doing a good job, Kyrgyzstan's President has banned top officials in his Central Asian state from taking holidays until later this year. The nation has been plagued by violence and crime since President Kurmanbek Bakiyev came to power in a revolution last year. "I'll take measures if I find out that even one of the ministers has gone on holidays before December," Bakiyev told top government officials during a meeting on Monday, according to a statement on the presidential Web site.

After saying that the reason he failed a philosophy exam was because his teacher was rarely in class, a student has successfully sued the French state. Jerome Charasse, whose uncle Michel Charasse served as budget minister under late President Francois Mitterrand, only scored a 6 out of 20 on a philosophy exam. He had scored pretty well on the rest of his baccalaureate high school exams.

A 63-year-old Chinese man died while having sex with a prostitute in Budget Hotel of Geylang area, a newspaper reported on Wednesday. The hotel staff said, the man registered his name as Tan Hock Soon in the hotel book, and took a woman in her 30s, to a room.