Ma Htwe recalled the day of agony she suffered, more than five decades ago, when her face was etched with the intricate tattoo that still lines her papery skin like a spider's web.
"When they tattooed my eyelids I thought that they would disappear," she said, chewing pensively on betel nut. "I wanted to run away."

A self-proclaimed cannibal who slit his housemate's throat, partially severed his genitals and then drank his blood was found guilty of murder in Australia on Monday and jailed for life.
A Supreme Court jury convicted Robert Ian Logan, 23, of killing Ben Huntingford, 22, in their Queensland home in June 2006 and stabbing his pet dog, Butch, in a bloody attack likened by witnesses to an abattoir slaughter.

A woman miraculously survived Monday after her car plunged six stories from the top of a car park in Melbourne and became wedged between two buildings.
The driver, 41, was freed 40 minutes after her vehicle fell an estimated 30 meters (100 feet) and became stuck at ground level in a lane between the walls of the car park and another building.

Austrian authorities say they've arrested a man suspected of robbing a series of banks while wearing a Barack Obama mask.
Police say the 45-year-old German man is suspected of carrying out seven heists since 2008, the most recent on Thursday afternoon in the village of Fornach. He was taken into custody about 3 kilometers (2 miles) away a short time later after a police dog found a bag containing the mask, a weapon and the haul.

The mayor of a town in France has thrown a patriotic female statue out of his town hall because its breasts were too big, his aides said on Friday.
The terracotta bust of Marianne -- the traditional female embodiment of the French Republic in a Phrygian cap -- was an original work by a local artist, installed in 2007 at the town hall in Neuville-en-Ferrain, population 10,000.

Islamic scholars, at least in the Emirates, are divided on whether April Fools' Day is "haram," meaning banned by their religion, or not harmful.
"It is haram, considering (that) some jokes make many troubles," said an unnamed scholar at the fatwas, or religious edicts, center in the United Arab Emirates, quoted in The National, an English-language daily.

Russian investigators launched a probe Wednesday against a couple suspected of throwing their toddler into a trash chute from the sixth floor of an apartment building.
The two-year-old survived the fall down the narrow chute and neighbors discovered him on the trash heap of the apartment building in the northwestern city of Saint Petersburg on Tuesday after they heard him crying.

A video of a pair of diaper-clad babies seemingly engaged in an animated conversation in a home kitchen was a fast-spreading YouTube sensation.
The two-minute snippet of the lively exchange between twin brothers barely old enough to stand has been watched more than 2.2 million times since it was uploaded to the Google-owned video sharing website on Valentine's Day.

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."
