The pet at the end of the leash is tiny, chubby and wears a little sweater as it is paraded down a Mexico City street by its owner. 

But look closer: this is no poodle or chihuahua -- it's a mini-pig, the new pet craze in the capital, where growing numbers are opting for porcine companions over canines.

U.S. President Barack Obama said running against Donald Trump would have been "fun," in light-hearted remarks published Tuesday that appeared to ridicule the Republican frontrunner's White House campaign.

Obama made the comments in a wide-ranging interview with the men's lifestyle magazine GQ in which the president addresses everything from his passion for basketball to the number of cigarettes he has smoked since arriving at the White House ("zero in the last five years").

Thieves in China stole urns filled with ashes from a cemetery in a bid to extort ransoms from relatives of the deceased, state media said Monday.

The ghoulish scheme was revealed after a woman surnamed Liu was told her late husband's tomb had been ransacked and found his ashes missing, the Xinhua news agency said.

For more than a century visitors have marveled at the Hermitage Museum's precious collections, and for just as long dozens of cats have prowled the Saint Petersburg palace's sprawling cellars.

The felines has one main task -- to root out unwanted guests: rodents. The 70-odd brigade have their claws so deep into the history of Russia's largest museum -- and one of the world's oldest -- that there is even a special feline unit dedicated to their welfare.

Google playfully posted a photo of a motorcycle cop pulling over one of it self-driving cars on Thursday for riding along at a cautious pace.

"Driving too slowly?" the self driving car team asked rhetorically in a message that accompanied a picture on its Google+ social network page.

Life is about to get a little easier for Indonesians who use motorbike taxis to weave through Jakarta's notorious traffic-choked streets -- a new ride-hailing app is promising to ban smelly drivers.

UberJEK, the latest in a series of smartphone-based motorbike taxi-booking services in the metropolis, has pledged to only hire drivers who pass a "body odour test" as it goes on a recruiting drive before starting operations next year.

A man in Japan who hid in a drain for five hours, allegedly to snap photos up women's skirts, was given away when passers-by spotted his hair sticking out of a grate, police and reports said.

Yasuomi Hirai, 28, allegedly squeezed himself in a section of a gutter 28 centimeters (11 inches) wide, with his head under a piece of iron grating, a police spokesman said Wednesday.

A French village priest who smashed a statue of Jesus in his church has blamed the stress and fatigue of his job for an act which shocked his congregation.

Jean-Jacques Le Roy, 55, a priest in Plestin-les-Greves in Brittany, shouted out "one less!" as he threw the statue to the ground last Thursday during a visit by a sacred art commission.

Always envious? Got a non-existent social life and struggle to concentrate? All this might be down to Facebook if you believe a study showing those who go a week without using the social network feel happier than others.

Carried out by the Happiness Research Institute, the study involved a sample of 1,095 people in Denmark who were divided into two groups, half of whom continued using Facebook while the others stopped. 

Wearing a particular brand of sneakers or a certain haircut can be a fatal style decision in Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras -- three Central American nations struggling with a vicious gang pandemic.

Looks that would be ordinary elsewhere have been appropriated by the criminal gangs as their signs on the streets, where armed turf battles have made these countries some of the deadliest places in the world, outside of actual war zones.