Edible ties were launched in Georgia on Tuesday in an ironic response to mockery of the ex-Soviet state's president, who famously gnawed on his necktie during the Georgia-Russia war in 2008.

Waiting for a television interview at the height of the war but unaware that the camera was already rolling, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili started chewing his tie nervously -- a clip regularly repeated by Russian media seeking to portray him as emotionally unstable.

A rattling good laugh with friends will help you deal with pain thanks to opiate-like chemicals that flood the brain, according to a British study released on Wednesday.

Researchers carried out lab experiments in which volunteers watched either comedy clips from "Mr. Bean" or "Friends," or non-humorous items such as golf or wildlife programs, while their resistance to mild pain was monitored.

Guide dogs and their handlers have always undergone intense training on dealing with distractions from squirrels to skateboarders. But today's guide dogs have a whole new generation of things to worry about: quiet cars, button-activated walk signals, stroller traffic on handicapped curb-cuts, and a greater likelihood of interacting with other dogs.

"It used to be you encountered other dogs mostly on sidewalks while you were going down the street," said Morgan Watkins, acting president and chief executive officer of Guide Dogs for the Blind, which has campuses in San Rafael, north of San Francisco, and in Boring, Oregon.

A man is suing the White Castle chain, claiming the booths in one of its hamburger restaurants are too small.

Martin Kessman says in the federal lawsuit filed last week that he was embarrassed in 2009 when he tried squeezing his 6-foot (1.83-meter), 290-pound (132-kilogram) frame into the seating at a White Castle in New York state. He says he slammed his knee into a metal post under the table and was in pain.

An urgent hunt was under way near the popular Thai beach resort of Pattaya on Tuesday after at least 20 crocodiles escaped from a flooded farm, a spokesman said.

The crocodiles at Million Years Stone Park, a zoo and reptile farm, are thought to have made a break for freedom Sunday when heavy rains caused a mudslide around an enclosure containing thousands of the creatures, said a spokesman for the farm, Suthawuth Temthab.

As a boy in Taiwan's countryside Wu Pao-chun often had to eat leftovers, but today he is a world-famous baker and a driving force in a culinary revolution sweeping the island.

Wu, 42, won the bread section in the prestigious Bakery Masters in Paris last year, to much fanfare back home, and now his loaves sell like hot cakes in a society more accustomed to steamed buns.

Police in Arizona have arrested 20 members of an American group called the "Goddess Temple" for allegedly offering sexual services online under the guise of religious healing.

Officers went undercover and are working to track down another 17 suspects, said Phoenix Police Sergeant Steve Martos, with more arrests expected soon.

Postal authorities in the Chinese capital Beijing have come up with a novel solution to a soaring divorce rate -- love letters sent with a seven-year delay.

The new service allows couples in the first flush of romance to post a letter their partner will only receive seven years later, the China Daily reported on Tuesday, saying that was when relationships often began to cool.

The U.S. space agency is offering schools and universities a special deal on astronaut cuisine and heat tiles from the now extinct space shuttles, just over 20 dollars a pack, NASA said Monday.

"The lightweight tiles protected the shuttles from extreme temperatures when the orbiters re-entered the Earth's atmosphere," NASA said in a statement.

Iran's state television has banned programs featuring provocative love stories or shirtless men in an apparent bow to hard-line Muslim clerics complaining about such scenes in foreign movies, Iranian newspapers reported Tuesday.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranian TV and movie productions have avoided scenes showing the close mixing of the genders, which is discouraged in Iran. Iranian actresses in domestic productions also appear in Islamic dress that covers them from head to toe.