Cathay Pacific has said two of its employees caught in a set of Internet photos apparently engaging in oral sex on board an aircraft have left the company.

The Hong Kong carrier launched an investigation last week after photos emerged of a woman in a red outfit resembling the Cathay cabin crew uniform performing oral sex on a man, reportedly her boyfriend, on board an aircraft.

Thai authorities have rescued more than a thousand dogs, which were found stuffed into tiny cages and being smuggled out of the country to be cooked and eaten in Vietnam, officials said Saturday.

Police intercepted four trucks stacked high with crates packed with the animals in an operation on Thursday evening in Nakhon Phanom province in northeastern Thailand near the border with Laos.

A group of Canadian technology workers won a CAN$7 million ($7.1 million) lottery this week on the same day they lost their jobs at an Ottawa manufacturing plant.

The 18 workers won the Lotto 6/49 prize on Wednesday, the same day their company, Smart Technologies, announced massive layoffs, starting in September, a company official told Agence France Presse.

An overcrowded prison in northeastern Brazil has added a new layer of security against escapes: two geese.

Sobral prison warden Wellington Picanco tells the G1 news website the geese make a lot of noise when they sense "strange movements."

Thousands of rangers and volunteers have climbed into treetop huts near reservoirs and watering holes in Sri Lanka to carry out the island nation's first full count of its dwindling wild elephant population.

The government says the three-day census through Saturday is aimed at devising a plan to protect the elephants. But several conservation groups have boycotted the count, accusing the government of using it as a "smoke screen" for capturing and domesticating the best young animals for use in temples, tourism and labor.

A famed Austrian museum has fired an employee for washing his hands and face with his urine.

Alfred Zoppelt says he was fired after 23 years of working as an attendant at the Belvedere, a castle in Vienna with a major art collection. He says his adherence to urine therapy was previously "never a problem."

First he pulled a knife — and when that didn't work a would-be robber persuaded his victim to hand over money with a sob story.

An Austrian police official said Thursday that a woman last month refused demands by a knife-wielding man to give him 400 euros ($570) from an ATM — but she then handed over 90 euros ($130) out of pity after he put away his weapon, took off his mask and told her that he was homeless and broke.

Costa Rica women have scheduled the country's first "Slut Walk" to protest a call by senior Catholic clerics for women to stop imitating men and to dress modestly, an organizer said Wednesday.

Montserrat Sagot, a university professor and feminist leader, said that protesters will rally on Sunday outside San Jose's Metropolitan Cathedral.

A French organic farmer has forked out 3,000 euros (2,100 dollars) for a series of billboard advertisements that denounce the evils of advertising.

Twenty-five of the giant ads went up this week across the southwestern town of Agen showing a human brain stuffed with advertising images and carrying the slogan "Advertising is manipulating you - React!"

A "sea crazy" Australian helicopter pilot was arrested on the tiny Pacific outpost of Nauru after illegally landing on the island in search of sweets and soft drinks, a report said Thursday.

The 24-year-old's helicopter was impounded and he was locked up after parking on a beach near Nauru's main supermarket while he bought some chocolates and soda, a spokesman for the island's government said.