The Black Widow of eating contests has scarfed down 183 chicken wings in 12 minutes to break her own world record set last year in Buffalo, New York.

Sonya Thomas took home first place Sunday at the 10th annual National Buffalo Wings Festival. She beat eating marvel Joey "Jaws" Chestnut, who came in second with 174 wings.

In the 21st century, parenthood and paranoia often walk hand in hand.

For some, the blessed event is followed by high-tech surveillance, a monitoring system that tracks the baby's breathing rhythms and relays infrared images from the nursery. The next investment might be a nanny cam, to keep watch on the child's hired caregivers. Toddlers and grade schoolers can be equipped with GPS devices enabling a parent to know their location should something go awry.

Rabbi Arele Harel offers an unconventional solution for Orthodox Jewish gay men who want to raise a conventional family: He fixes them up with Orthodox lesbians.

His matchmaking service, which has just gone online, has met criticism on opposing fronts. Orthodox Jewish rabbis say Harel should be doing more to encourage gays and lesbians to try to change their sexual orientation. Liberal religious gay groups see Harel's approach as a ploy to suppress homosexuality.

Philippine Catholic priests are appealing to over 100 pilgrims who attended last month's World Youth Day in Spain to come home, fearing they used the festival as a ruse to live abroad illegally.

Pope Benedict XVI brought the event in Madrid to a close on August 21, but fewer than 300 of the 427 Filipino delegates have returned, said Father Noel Osial, head of Manila's Don Bosco Catholic congregation.

A snake bite left the victim seriously hurt, but the injured party isn't whom you'd expect.

Police say a python underwent emergency surgery after a man allegedly bit the creature twice.

The Bavaria cow named Yvonne who escaped from a farm in May, went on the run and earned a hefty bounty on her head has been caught, the Bild daily newspaper reported on its website Thursday.

Yvonne was found in Eigelsberg in the Bavarian Alps some six kilometers (3.7 miles) from the farm where she escaped, the paper said, quoting local government sources.

The number of caesarean deliveries rose sharply in China this week as mothers rushed to give birth before the deadline for school enrollment, state media and local governments said Thursday.

August 31 is the cut-off day marking the legal age children can enter school in China, meaning those born after that date must wait another year to begin their schooling.

There was no sign of Dracula, but students in Transylvania did get a visit from dozens of bats that flapped through their classroom.

The students at Csiky Gergely high school in the western Romanian city of Arad were about to take an exam Friday morning when they found bats flying around the room. Others appeared to be sleeping with their wings spread out on the floor.

A four-meter-long python wallowing at the bottom of a swimming pool in a Malaysian private club sent bathers running, a report and staff at the club said Thursday.

A woman who dived into the pool spotted the enormous snake resting under a steel ladder on Tuesday, national news agency Bernama reported.

Iranian publishers are complaining that cost-saving plans to print Qurans in China are yielding embarrassing results: A slew of typos.

The head of Iran's Quran oversight office says some of the Chinese-printed versions of Islam's holy book are littered with spelling errors.