The Paris Ritz closes Wednesday for a two-year face-lift to bring the city's best known luxury hotel into the 21st century and keep its mega-rich clientele coming back in an ever more competitive market.

The renovation comes after the five-star hotel, which neighbors the famed jewelers of Paris' Place Vendome but has not had a refit since 1979, failed to win France's coveted "palace" designation marking a top luxury destination.

Zimbabwe's prisons are often condemned for squalid overcrowding but a thief begged a magistrate to lock him up permanently, saying life was better behind bars, state media reported Tuesday.

Repeat offender Lovemore Manyika, 22, pleaded for life imprisonment in a note during mitigation after he was convicted for housebreaking.

A Stradivarius violin -- possibly worth several million euros -- was handed in at a Swiss lost-property office after a hapless musician left it on a train, police said Monday.

The owner had lent the precious instrument to a musician friend who took it on a train on Friday but forgot it when he got off at Bern, police said.

A gang of thieves dressed as knights and armed with a sword and an axe robbed the organizers of a medieval festival in northeast France Monday and made off with 20,000 euros ($25,000), police said.

The theft took place in the early hours of Monday as organizers were counting revenues from the festival in Bitche, near France's border with Germany, a spokesman for regional police in Lorraine said.

Hong Kong on Monday hailed the success of a birth control program for the city's wild monkeys, saying the primates' numbers have dropped 15 percent over four years.

Officials said the latest monkey census showed the population stood at 1,965 last year, down from 2,320 in 2008 -- a year after the city started fertility controls for the primates using methods including vasectomies.

A worker at Santiago's Metropolitan Zoo was mauled Sunday by a white tiger that escaped from its cage and was later shot dead by zoo staff, officials said.

Jose Silva, who has worked at the zoo for 25 years, was rushed to a hospital with serious wounds including a grave shoulder injury, local media reported.

The New York Times, which famously insists on the accuracy of its reports, was red faced Sunday after being fooled by a hoax online editorial posted under the name of ex-boss Bill Keller.

The editorial, titled "WikiLeaks, a Post Postscript," was purportedly published over the weekend by the Times and in every way appears to be the real thing from Keller, who until last September was the paper's executive editor.

The 33 Chilean miners famously rescued from underground nearly two years ago will create a line of memorabilia branded "The Miracle 33" to be sold in the country's airports, a report said Sunday.

"We'll make all kinds of products like mugs, sweatshirts, t-shirts and medals, so that tourists remember us," the first miner to write a message confirming his team was alive in the reservoir, Jose Ojeda, told Chilean newspaper El Mercurio.

More than 2,000 musicians strummed ukuleles in a Japanese port city Saturday to set a new world record for the largest ever ensemble of the Hawaiian guitar.

Their effort was recognized by Guinness World Records officials who listened to them play "Aloha Mahalo A Hui Ho", a song written by Hawaiian-born former sumo wrestler Konishiki, in Yokohama, southwest of Tokyo.

A Pakistani Hindu's conversion to Islam live on television during a prime-time Ramadan chat show has sparked criticism on behalf of religious minorities in the overwhelmingly Muslim country.

In just five minutes, the 20-year-old introduced as Sunil officially changed his religion under a cleric's guidance.