Milan: "Elderly retired school teacher seeks family willing to adopt grandfather. Will pay." Thus ran the weekend advertisment in the classified columns if the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera placed by lonely Giorgio Angelozzi, aged 79.
And it worked. By yesterday having tugged on heart strings across family-loving Italy, the former classics teacher, who lives alone outside Rome with seven cats since his wife died in 1992, had received dozens of replies from across the country.
"So many families want to adopt me as their grandfather," said Angelozzi who promised €500 a month to the family who took him in. Among those who responded was much-loved Roman popular music singer Antonello Venditti, one of Angelozzi's former students.
"I was not expecting so much warmth, so much interest in my story," Angelozzi told Corriere yesterday. "But remember that my problem is one that affects so many elderly people in Italy."
Berlin: An Andean spectacled bear escaped from its enclosure in Berlin zoo on Sunday and roamed around a children's playground - the second breakout since June, when a gorilla leapt over its fence, the zoo's deputy director said yesterday.
"There was no panic among visitors and no real danger, when Juan hauled himself over a wall and made for the carousel," said Heiner Kloes. "But I was alarmed at how some fathers were too busy filming the bear to check where their children were.
"Spectacled bears eat both vegetables and meat, but children tend not to be on their menu," Kloes said.
Nairobi: A Kenyan court has charged a woman whose husband, an evangelical pastor, claims to make infertile women pregnant, with baby-snatching.
Mary Juma Deya was arrested 13 days ago, accused of stealing a baby girl from a maternity hospital in the capital Nairobi. Her husband Gilbert Deya, a London-based preacher, says he can exorcise demons from women who are unable to conceive naturally by praying for them.
The "miracle babies" scandal grabbed headlines in Kenya after police found 11 children aged between five months and 12-years-old living with 56-year-old Eddah Odera and her husband.
Odera said she conceived the children without having sexual intercourse with her husband after Deya's wife prayed for her.
Both Oderas were charged yesterday with harbouring an abducted teenage boy.
Istanbul: Turkey's government wants to make adultery a crime, the justice minister was quoted as saying yesterday - a proposal that has outraged the main opposition and women's groups. Although the legislation would also apply to men, a previous adultery law abolished six years ago was used mainly against women.
The ruling Justice and Development Party wants to include the adultery ban in an overhaul of the penal code, promised as part of reforms aimed at meeting EU criteria.
Johannesburg: Around 80 men were caught with their pants down at a men-only nightclub when detectives burst in on a late-night drug raid. Inspector Dennis Adriao said yesterday that four men at The Factory nightclub in New Doornfontein were arrested in the early hours of Sunday after drugs were discovered stashed in their socks and shoes, which most patrons were still wearing.
"Men had to pay at the entrance and leave their clothes at the door. Police were tipped off there would be drugs, but they got a bit of a shock because they didn't know it was a nudist night," he said.