Headlines of 2004

* Humming sex toy shuts Australian airport.

* Taiwanese man tries to convert lions to Jesus, gets bitten.

*Talking toilet orders German men to sit down.

* Chinese get busy signal on Beijing suicide line.

*Canadian guide dog barred for only answering its master’s commands in French.

* Japanese boy writes apology in blood for dozing in class.

* German police arrested a flasher who stumbled over his dropped trousers during an aborted attempt to flee.

* A British train conductor stamped and carefully returned the ticket of a slumbering passenger without realizing the man was dead.

* A South African radio reporter went a little more live than he anticipated when he was mugged on air for his mobile phone while transmitting from a local squatter settlement.

* A Norwegian court acquitted a man accused of raping a sleeping woman after he said he was also asleep at the time.

* A Malaysian man shot his wife dead after he mistook her for a monkey picking fruit behind their house.

* A Spaniard tried to have his wife charged with domestic abuse because she refused to have sex with him on five consecutive nights.

* Zambian man hanged himself in shame after his wife rushed into their house to investigate a noise and found him having sex with a chicken. The chicken was slaughtered afterwards.