Woot! The online expression of enthusiasm is now in the dictionary. So are textspeak, sexting — and, less happily, cyberbullying.

They are among 400 new entries in the 12th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, published this month.

Stray cats rounded up in a remote west China city are being used to catch rodents that have infested surrounding pasture lands.

Some 150 strays — dubbed by Chinese media as the "cat army" — were turned loose on the range lands outside Bole city in May to fight what the government calls a plague of rats. The state-run Xinhua News Agency says that the cats were brought in, along with tons of poisonous rat pellets.

The King is dead, but the burger lives on.

Burger King Corp. on Friday said it is retiring "The King" mascot, a man with an oversized plastic head and creepy smile who in recent years has been shown in ads peeping into people's windows and popping up next to them in bed.

A 61-year-old U.S. man says he lost his job as a lifeguard when he refused to wear skimpy swim trunks for the annual swim test.

Roy Lester tells the New York Daily News (http://nydn.us/oFL3E0 ) he was forced out of the job after 40 years in 2007 when he wanted to take the swim test in biking shorts instead of the tiny swim trunks.

A runaway cow named Yvonne is on the loose in Germany and the manhunt — or moohunt — for the Bavarian bovine has captivated the country.

The freedom-loving cow ran away from a small farm in May and has managed to hide successfully in the forests of southern Germany ever since.

Every Friday night for 23 years, Zeli Rossi has traded his bed in Brazil's southeastern state of Minas Gerais for a coffin.

Rossi tells the G1 news website that his weekly sleeping habit became public last month when his 14-year-old grandson wrote a story about him for his school's newspaper.

Standing on the side of a road in a hectic north African capital may not be what most people would consider the ideal place to eat boiled snails.

Diners inclined to try 'escargots' may think of it as a dish best prepared by an expert chef and reserved for special occasions, like a visit to a French restaurant.

An airport official smuggled a hive of bees on to a plane, panicking passengers when they escaped mid-flight in one of a series of lapses at the provincial Blagoveshchensk facility, reports said Thursday.

The bees made a break for freedom during a flight to Moscow from the far eastern city after they were illegally stashed in a box in a coat locker in business class, a spokesman for the Yakutia airline told AFP.

British airline Virgin Atlantic said Wednesday it is putting warnings on weepy films shown during flights because of concerns that emotional passengers might burst into tears.

The "weepy warnings" will initially appear on the Hollywood romantic dramas "Water for Elephants" and "Just Go With It", flashing up at the start to advise passengers that the movie has the potential to prompt tears.

Jurors on Wednesday saw a videotape of a woman squirting hot sauce in the mouth of her adopted son and then making him stand in a cold shower in a case that caused a public uproar in Russia after the video aired on the "Dr. Phil" show.

Jessica Beagley is charged with misdemeanor child abuse. Beagley's lawyer said she was punishing the 7-year-old boy from Russia because he misbehaved in school and then lied about it.