From demanding parents to Japan's temples to the tinkle... Here's your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world.
Only in India
Indian parents can be notoriously demanding, none more so than a couple who are suing their son for nearly $650 000 for not giving them a grandchild.
Sanjeev and Sadhana Prasad from Haridwar say they exhausted themselves paying for their pilot son's education and his lavish wedding.
They coughed up $80 000 for the marriage and honeymoon abroad and $65 000 so he could learn to fly in the United States, only for him to return to India unemployed.
"My son has been married for six years but they are still not planning a baby," the couple said in their court petition.
To make matters worse, he won't move in with them as tradition demands.
"At least if we have a grandchild to spend time with, our pain will become bearable," pleaded the Prasads.
Quidditch players, who run around a field with a stick between their legs, say they want to be taken seriously.
The game, which comes from the "Harry Potter" books, is holding its European championships in Ireland in July as it bids to be accepted as a "high intensity sport".
French player Tiphaine Pasquereau insists is more than just pretending to be flying on a broomstick and demands great skill and verve.
Japanese authorities are investigating how schoolgirls were given hand sanitiser to drink during a 5 000-metre (16 400-foot) walking race.
Organisers in Yamanashi mistakenly poured the sanitiser into cups at drinks stations, with one student collapsing after swigging the industrial alcohol. Two others were also taken to hospital.
Embarrassing as that was, it was nothing on the red faces in the Japanese town of Abu where officials mistakenly sent a resident $360 000 in pandemic aid.
Officials immediately visited the person and were promised the money would be returned.
But later the recipient said they had "moved the money" and were now "unable to return it".
To Rome where the organisers of its big tennis tournament seemed to have pulled off a major coup in getting Peng Shuai, the Chinese star who disappeared after accusing a senior politician of abusing her, back on the court.
But as media began asking questions, the organisers had to admit they had confused her with her namesake Zhang Shuai, who is ranked 40th in the world.
And finally, back to the land of the heated toilet seat, where cult German director Wim Wenders is in raptures over Japan's latest contribution to human happiness - brilliantly designed public lavatories.
The maker of "Buena Vista Social Club" is shooting a film called "The Tokyo Toilet" about top architects transforming 17 urban loos into works of art, including one with see-through cubicles that turn opaque when the door is locked.
Wenders is convinced his story is universal "because a toilet is a place where everybody is the same", an intimate and "precious" space where we all are truly human.