A cartoon video which recounts the unrest in the Middle East using the characters in the popular Angry Birds game and the children's story Three Little Pigs is racking up the views on YouTube.

The video, which has been posted on the YouTube channel of a Russian named Egor Zhgun, had been viewed more than 236,000 times on the video-sharing site as of Wednesday afternoon.

Tradition dies hard in the French Pyrenees, but winegrowers are shrugging aside Gallic pride to bottle their wine in plastic to meet a demand for lighter, unbreakable bottles.

"Plastic bottles are difficult for me," said Pascal Fernandez, a winegrower from the Pepieux cooperative in the Languedoc. "In the French culture, a glass bottle with a natural cork is engraved in our genes."

A 12-year old Dutch schoolgirl gave birth to a baby girl during a school trip, local health services said Tuesday.

"Neither the girl nor her family had realized she was pregnant, and there were no external signs to show it," a spokesman for the health services said, adding he did not know how many months pregnant the girl had been.

A 13-year-old Russian boy found a message in a bottle on a beach and was reunited with its German author, who wrote the note 24 years ago, tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda reported Wednesday.

Daniil Korotkikh found the beer bottle earlier this month when walking on the beach near Kaliningrad and his father translated the note inside, which was dated September 7, 1987, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.

An obese Ohio man had to be cut from a chair he had been sitting in for two years after his body became fused to it, local media reported.

Police told WTRF news that the man's skin had become fused to the seat of the chair, which was covered in urine, feces and maggots.

It may not be the Mona Lisa, but an old, empty milk carton and other trash we toss away can also tell an interesting story about our culture, our history and ourselves, according to a new exhibit in Stockholm called "Garbage".

"We are ethnologists and we are interested in how people live, and we found it interesting to look into how they act when it comes to garbage," says Christina Matsson, who heads up the Nordiska museum in central Stockholm that recently opened a whole exhibit on the topic.

A South Korean court Tuesday passed an 18-month prison term on a baker who posted a doctored photo of a loaf containing a dead rat in an attempt to taint the reputation of a rival shop.

The 35-year-old baker, using an alias, had claimed on a popular website that he found the rodent in a loaf that he bought from a leading bakery franchise just before last Christmas.

A Russian who jumped from the seventh floor of his apartment building while heavily drunk miraculously survived by getting tangled in trees on the way down, RIA Novosti agency said Monday.

The man aged about 50 was noticed by his neighbors when he was lodged in the branches on the level of the third floor of the building in Novosibirsk, a large city in Siberia, said Dmitry Chepukhalin, a representative in the local rescue service.

When 80-year-old Indian widow Kanwri Devi Surana suffered a mild heart attack last year, she pledged to fast herself to death in a religious practice known as "santhara".

Her distraught family says she gave up food and then water, and passed away in Kolkata 62 days after making her vow.

For the nearly 40,000 followers of his Twitter feed, Andy Carvin is providing a unique window into the turmoil in the Middle East.

For a media industry facing its own ferment, Carvin, who works online for National Public Radio (NPR), is offering a glimpse into journalism's future, using the Web to report the historic events in a fresh and innovative way.