Funny old world: the week's offbeat news

From a doubly lucky lottery winner to the dangers of boring budget meetings. Your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world:

The gamble of a lifetime paid off for an Italian lottery winner when she promised to pay a refuse company the cost of finding her dumped one-million-euro winning ticket.

The woman from the southern Puglia region took her ticket to a shop to check if she had won, but the machine said it was "non-payable" because retailers can pay out only small wins.

Thinking it useless, the ticket was binned. It was only when she got home that a family member told her her numbers had come up and she was a millionaire.

She rang the shop only to discover that the rubbish had been collected.

Refuse company boss Roberto Nicola Toscano managed to identify the bin lorry and stopped it in time.

But with potentially dangerous material also on board, it had to go to a specialist company to do the search. Workers spent more than a day going through the rubbish, finding various tickets and stubs.

"Amongst them was the stub we were looking for, which was miraculously still in one piece," Toscano told AFP.

With the job done at the taxpayers' expense, he said the woman had to sign a promise to "cover all of the additional costs" -- a gamble that paid off handsomely.

An Australian politician had a lot of explaining to do after being accused of texting a sex worker during a budget meeting to complain that "(expletive) my job is boring. Wanna swap".

Mark Parton, who leads the opposition Liberal Party in the Australian Capital Territory, initially dismissed the complaint as a "smear" before denying that the salty text was sent to a sex worker.

"There's a hell of a lot of private messages that are sent from a hell of a lot of people in the context of sitting days and hearings," he said, insisting that he was still "holding the government to account".

An official complaint against him has since been dismissed.

"Most people's perception of budget estimates hearings is that they're pretty boring," Parton said in a spirited front up. "I've got an off-the-cuff larrikin communication style," an Australian slang term for a cheeky chappie.

A Greek man has been arrested for keeping his dead father in a freezer for two and a half years so he could keep collecting his pension.

Police discovered the body in a basement of a former hotel in Mystras in the Peloponnese after the 55-year-old, whose father died of natural causes, told them that he had moved to the capital Athens.

Three big US food producers are under the yoke after being accused of fixing the price of eggs.

They have been forced to donate 53 million eggs to American food banks and pay $3.3 million after 17 states sued them for allegedly plotting to inflate prices.

"It is unconscionable that these businesses colluded against hard-working New Yorkers to raise the price of eggs just to line their own pockets," said New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Officials scrambled when the average price of a dozen eggs hit a staggering $8.47 (7.35 euros) in the Big Apple.