Israel's central bank is replacing millions of torn and dirty shekel bills in Gaza as the unusable money has caused a cash crisis in the Palestinian territory. Armored trucks of the Bank of Israel picked up three million unusable shekel bills from banks in Gaza on Tuesday. They will return the same amount in new banknotes Friday despite intermittent rocket attacks on Israeli land by Hamas militants. The replacement money will be the second batch Israel will send to Gaza in two weeks amid a fragile ceasefire with Hamas.

Egyptian border guards have unearthed approximately 500 kilograms of TNT near the border with the Gaza Strip, officials said. According to the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, the TNT was hidden in 10 sacks near the Rafah border crossing.

Hundreds of Liberian women refugees have been arrested after going nude to protest plans by the Ghanaian government to send them West for resettlement with $100 instead of the $1,000 they are demanding. "When women strip themselves naked and stand by a major highway, that is not a peaceful demonstration," Interior Minister Kwamena Bartels told the BBC's Network Africa program.

orld-popular cartoon characters The Smurfs are now 50 years old and Belgians have prepared a big birthday bash starting early this week. The celebration will cover key European cities including Paris and Berlin. The Smurfs, the diminutive blue-colored forest dwellers, were created by late Belgian cartoonist Pierre Culliford, fondly called 'Peyo,' through a comic strip in the late 1950s-back then, they were still called Schtroumpf. In the early 1980s, Smurfs debuted on US television and became hugely popular worldwide since then.

Men's clothing company Kale Miles announced the availability of a belt with an $18,000 price tag. The staggering cost of what is nothing but a strip of leather comes from the seven- to eight-ounce buckle, made entirely of platinum - a compound that, as of Friday, was determined to be priced at about $1,560 per ounce.