A man suffered life-threatening burns Monday after a portaloo he was using exploded apparently after he lit a cigarette.

The victim, who was taking part in a joint Australia-United States military exercise at the time, was rushed to hospital with burns to his head, face, arms, chest and airways after the incident at Rockhampton airport.

A 13-year-old boy has been charged with drink driving after police pulled him over for his erratic behavior on the road, authorities said Sunday.

New South Wales police said they spotted a car driving strangely late on Saturday at a holiday park near the north coast town of Kempsey.

A lion was reunited with his longtime partner Friday at a Brasilia zoo after becoming so depressed by their separation that he stopped eating, Brazilian media reported.

Dengo the lion was sedated and his journey from Niteroi's ZooNit to a facility in Brasilia began with a herculean effort by eight men to load him out of his cage. He traveled to the Brazilian capital in an Air Force plane, O Globo newspaper said.

A poll in Venezuela says President Hugo Chavez's public approval rating remains at 50 percent and has not significantly varied since his cancer diagnosis.

The Caracas polling firm Datanalisis surveyed 1,300 people earlier this month, giving the poll a margin error of about 2.5 percentage points.

Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama is giving up his political duties as plans a shift to democracy. But one model he doesn't want to emulate is the British constitutional monarchy.

"A ceremonial role? I don't like it, to be like the British sort of queen," the Dalai Lama told Rolling Stone magazine in an interview.

A teenage girl whose forceful bundling into a BMW in the south of France sparked a nationwide appeal for witnesses was the victim of a traditional Chechen pre-marriage kidnapping, it emerged Friday.

Witnesses had told how on Sunday three people in a BMW had snatched the previously unidentified girl, aged 16 or 17, as she left a park with a companion who appeared to be involved in the abduction.

Foreign journalists on Friday spoke of their distress after being asked to remove their bras for a security check before being allowed into the offices of Israel's prime minister.

The three women were told by security personnel to undress and take off their bras for x-ray in two separate incidents at the Jerusalem offices of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this week.

As jackets go it looks far from fashionable, but its Japanese maker cannot meet sky-rocketing demand for "air conditioned" coats with built-in fans.

Kuchofuku Co. Ltd -- whose name literally means "air-conditioned clothing" -- has seen orders soar amid power shortages in Japan after the devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Bangladeshi police said Thursday they were investigating the case of a man forced to parade naked through his village with a brick tied to his penis as punishment for kidnapping and marrying a minor.

The punishment was meted out Saturday to the 30-year-old man by the local council in a village 30 kilometers (18 miles) south of Dhaka.

A senior Russian police officer dubbed "the pissing policeman" after a video of him urinating in the office corridor became an Internet sensation has quit, officials said Thursday.

Tens of thousands of people have watched the video posted on YouTube of how the police officer, dressed only in a pair of underpants and socks, calmly walks out of an office and relieves himself in the corridor.