A heroic pig who survived more than a month buried under rubble after the 2008 earthquake in China's Sichuan province has been successfully cloned, according to a report Sunday.

Scientists in the southern city of Shenzhen performed the experiment on Zhu Jianqiang, or "Strong-Willed Pig", and produced six offspring with DNA identical to their dad, who was hailed as a national hero following his harrowing ordeal, the Sunday Morning Post reported.

Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, owner of two leading British newspapers, punched a man in the face during a television debate on the financial crisis to be aired on Sunday.

A clip posted on the NTV television channel's website shows Lebedev, a former KGB agent who has made a fortune in banking, landed a right jab to the face of ex-real estate baron Sergei Polonsky.

Italian police on Friday said they discovered a fake university in the north of the country where around 10 students were paying around 7,000 Euros ($9,600) for a worthless, unrecognized degree.

The university in Verona called "Carolus Magnus" (Charlemagne) was founded in 2005 in Rome by several people that belonged to a cultural association, which later transferred its headquarters to Verona, police said in a statement.

Which wine goes best with mealworms and crickets? The annual contest at a North Carolina museum may help answer the question.

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences is hosting its annual BugFest Critter Cook-off on Friday. It's the official kickoff to BugFest 2011.

Talk about a tough professor.

Trinity College in Dublin was spoofed Thursday when an unknown prankster posted an academic profile of its newest English lecturer: a certain Conan T. Barbarian, complete with Hollywood mug shot of a shirtless, sword-clad Arnold Schwarzenegger in his maiden film role.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Friday made light of the sex scandals surrounding Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, saying critics were simply jealous of his sexual prowess.

"However much they nag Signor Berlusconi for his special attitude to the beautiful sex, and by the way they nag him mainly because of jealousy, he has shown himself as a responsible statesman," Putin said at an international investment forum in Sochi, quoted by the state RIA Novosti news agency.

A 78-year-old Bulgarian man started off the new school year on Thursday like hundreds of children a fraction of his age ... in first grade.

Apostol Stoyanov from the central village of Popovtsi never got a chance to attend school when he was a kid and decided to enroll in first grade this year, at the age of 78, the state BTA news agency reported citing school officials.

A South African court has blocked the government from buying 11 million female condoms from China, saying they are too small, a newspaper reported Friday.

The finance ministry had awarded a contract to a firm called Siqamba Medical, which planned to buy the Phoenurse condoms from China, the Beeld newspaper said.

Women in the southern Philippines brought peace to their strife-torn village by threatening to withhold sex if their men kept fighting, the U.N. refugee agency reported Friday.

The "sex strike" in rural Dado village on the often lawless southern island of Mindanao in July helped end tensions and bring some prosperity to the 102 families living there, said UNHCR national officer Rico Salcedo.

Bulgarian schools, where strict discipline reigned until the fall of communism, are starting to reintroduce decency rules as clothes grow skimpier and teenagers increasingly make out in hallways.

"Students must not exhibit intimate behavior during lessons, nor in the school," according to the regulations of one Sofia high school, cited by the daily 24 hours Thursday on the first day of the new school year.