A monkey stopped morning commuters in their tracks at one Tokyo’s busiest subway stations this week, as it curiously peered down at them from its perch atop the departures and arrivals board.

Monday marked the third time a monkey has been spotted in the capital this month — surprising, because the beasts usually live in the mountains and hills outside Tokyo, more than a two-hour train ride away from the city center.

Surprised commuters snapped cell phone pictures of the simian, while about 30 police officers scrambled to rope off the area.

They held up green nets and tarps, trying to coax the animal down from the overheard electronic board.

The monkey jumped over the officers’ heads, leaped into the crowd and scampered out fo the station, with police in hot pursuit.

In the end, the monkey got away. But it was enough to make Japanese media go bananas.

Reporters looked for the animal throughout Shibuya, an entertainment district most familiar to Western audiences as one of two locations where the movie “Lost in Translation” was filmed.

Bloggers posted their cell phone videos online, with comments such as, “Poor little guy looks scared to death.”

A monkey was spotted in metropolitan Tokyo’s Koganei city on August 12 and in Setagaya on Monday.

Officials do not know whether it is the same sightseeing simian wandering around Tokyo.

Japanese law requires a license to keep a monkey as a pet. A check of license holders in Tokyo revealed that no one had reported a monkey missing, a city spokeswoman said.

Officials are hoping people will call in additional sightings. They worry that while the animal looks cute, it could pose a danger to commuters — as all wild animals might.

A 27-year-old Egyptian woman gave birth to septuplets early Saturday in the coastal city of Alexandria, family members and the hospital director said.

Ghazala Khamis was in good condition after having a blood transfusion during her Caesarean section due to bleeding, said Emad Darwish, director of the El-Shatbi Hospital where she gave birth.

The newborns, four boys and three girls, weigh between 3.2 pounds and 6.17 pounds and are in stable condition, Darwish said. They have been placed in incubators in four different hospitals that have special premature baby units, he said.

“This is a very rare pregnancy — something I have never witnessed over my past 33 years in this profession,” Darwish told The Associated Press by phone from the hospital.

Darwish decided to carry out the Caesarean section at the end of Khamis’ eighth month of pregnancy due to the pressure on her kidneys. He said Khamis, who already has three daughters, took fertility drugs in an effort to have a son.

Khamis, the wife of a farmer in the northern Egyptian province of Beheira, was admitted to the hospital two months earlier, Darwish said.
“From the initial checkup, I say that none of the babies have any sort of deformities or incomplete organs,” Darwish said.

The woman’s brother, Khamis Khamis, said even though his sister was trying to conceive more children so she could have a son, the family was astonished when they found out she would give birth to multiple babies.

“We thought about an abortion, but then we felt it’s religiously forbidden. So we said ‘Let God’s will prevail,’” he told the AP by phone.

Egypt’s health minister announced that the seven babies will receive free milk and diapers for two years, the brother added.

A man with a black hood pours water on the face of a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit strapped to a table: no, it’s not Guantanamo Bay naval base, but New York’s Coney Island amusement park.

The scene using robotic dolls is an installation built by artist Steve Powers to criticize waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique the United States has admitted using on terrorism suspects, but that rights group say is torture.

“Waterboard Thrill Ride” beckons a sign along with cartoon character “SpongeBob SquarePants” who appears tied down and exclaiming: “It don’t Gitmo better!”

The public can peek through window bars and feed a dollar into the slot to bring the robotic dolls into action, one more attraction in the beachfront amusement park in the New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.

“Anyone can see this is painful from 50 feet away,” said Powers, who had previously been painting signs and storefronts in the area. “I wanted people to understand the psychological ramifications of this.”

Marion Tracey, 57, from New Jersey, said she found the installation disturbing. It made her think of her father who had nightmares after returning from World War II. “In all wars, horrible things happen,” she said. “I’d rather not see it.”

Alex Soto, 23, said he thought it was a good thing for people to learn about waterboarding, but he added: “It is pretty twisted.”

The world’s oldest recorded joke has been traced back to 1900 BC and suggests toilet humor was as popular with the ancients as it is today.

It is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

It heads the world’s oldest top 10 joke list published by the University of Wolverhampton Thursday.

A 1600 BC gag about a pharaoh, said to be King Snofru, comes second — “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”

The oldest British joke dates back to the 10th Century and reveals the bawdy face of the Anglo-Saxons — “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.”

“Jokes have varied over the years, with some taking the question and answer format while others are witty proverbs or riddles,” said the report’s writer Dr Paul McDonald, senior lecturer at the university.

“What they all share however, is a willingness to deal with taboos and a degree of rebellion. Modern puns, Essex girl jokes and toilet humor can all be traced back to the very earliest jokes identified in this research.”

The study was commissioned by television channel Dave. The top 10 oldest jokes can be viewed at www.dave-tv.co.uk.

A 73-year-old Dutch man was astonished to learn from police that the begonias he had lovingly tended on his doorstep concealed a secret marijuana plantation.

“Police officers suddenly noticed marijuana plants sprouting from his begonias,” a police spokeswoman in The Hague said on Friday.

The Hague pensioner promised to destroy the marijuana plants, which he believes were planted by local youngsters, while preserving his begonias.

Earlier this month the Dutch government set up a task force to crack down on marijuana cultivation in the country.

Growing marijuana is illegal in the Netherlands, but sales of it and other cannabis-related soft drugs in coffee shops have been tolerated for decades.

Zimbabwe’s troubled central bank introduced new $100 billion banknotes Saturday in a desperate bid to ease the recurrent cash shortages plaguing the inflation-ravaged economy.

The new bills, officially come into circulation Monday but they on already on the foreign currency dealers market Saturday.

As high as they are, though, the new bills still aren’t enough to buy a loaf of bread. They can only buy four oranges.

Once-prosperous Zimbabwe has seen an unprecedented economic meltdown since its independence from Great Britain in 1980, with the official inflation rate now at 2.2 million percent.

Thomas Hickman drove through New Mexico, police say, until his Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo ran out of gas. Then the 55-year-old North Richland Hills man walked into a field, tied helium balloons to a gun, covered his mouth with duct tape, and shot himself in the back of the head, according to New Mexico State Police.

That determination is a far leap from what authorities first suspected when Mr. Hickman’s body was discovered March 15 near Santa Rosa, N.M., about 100 miles east of Albuquerque. Authorities initially thought the Red Lobster executive had been kidnapped and slain.
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A New York man who says he was denied a seat on a five-hour JetBlue flight and was instead told to “hang out” in the plane’s bathroom has sued the airline for $2 million, saying he suffered “extreme humiliation.”

When Gokhan Mutlu arrived to check in for a JetBlue flight from San Diego to New York in February he was told the flight was full, according to the lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court.

But Mutlu was allowed to board after a JetBlue flight attendant agreed to give up her seat and travel in an airline employee “jump seat.” It was not clear in the lawsuit whether the flight attendant was working.

However 90 minutes into the flight, the pilot told Mutlu the flight attendant was uncomfortable and he would have to give up his seat and “hang out” in the bathroom for the remainder of the flight, the lawsuit said.

The pilot “became angry at (Mutlu’s) reluctance” and said Mutlu “should be grateful for being onboard,” the lawsuit said. When Mutlu volunteered to sit in the “jump seat,” he was told it was reserved for airline personnel.

At one point, the airplane experienced turbulence and Mutlu sat on the toilet seat without a seat belt, causing him “tremendous fear,” the lawsuit said.

JetBlue was not immediately available for comment.

A drunken 78-year-old Swede stole a dinghy after a night out in the Danish town of Helsingor and tried to row back to Sweden, but fell asleep halfway, Danish police said.

When the man discovered he lacked the necessary funds to pay for the ferry from Helsingor to Helsingborg in Sweden on Saturday, he decided to row the three miles across the strait of Oresund that separates the two.

He quickly grew tired and, trusting fortune and the currents to see him safely home, took a snooze at the bottom of the boat, where Danish police later found him out at sea, still asleep.

The strait is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Police said the owner of the dinghy had decided not to press charges.

Police in Australia have charged a man for drink driving in a motorized wheelchair after he was found to be six times over the legal alcohol limit, local media reported on Monday.

Police in the tropical northern Queensland city of Cairns said the man had a blood alcohol reading of 0.31, and was so drunk he was asleep at the controls of his motorized wheelchair in a turning lane of a major highway.

“It beggars belief,” Police Inspector Bob Walters told the Cairns Post newspaper, adding wheelchairs, bicycles, horses and skateboards were all considered to be vehicles under the state’s road laws.

“It’s unlawful, it is unacceptable and people should realize it could lead to a fatality,” he said.

Other motorists on the four-lane highway had to swerve to avoid the wheelchair, police said.