When he became Turkey's head of state in August after over a decade as prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised to be an active president.

But few could have imagined this would extend to personally policing Turkey's anti-smoking legislation on a busy Istanbul street.

Beijing authorities have banned people from burning the clothes of dead relatives -- a traditional funerary rite to ensure they can dress in the afterlife -- as an anti-pollution measure for an international summit, state-run media said Tuesday.

The move comes days ahead of the opening of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, when Chinese President Xi Jinping will host leaders from the United States, Russia and Japan among others.

Children armed with whistles will soon be patrolling villages in central India to try to shame those defecating in the open, a report said Sunday.

Madhya Pradesh state government is expected soon to launch the unusual sanitation initiative, in which schoolchildren will blow their whistles loudly when they spot someone squatting in the open instead of using a toilet.

Shepherds guided a flock of 2,000 sheep through Madrid's streets on Sunday in defense of ancient grazing, droving and migration rights increasingly threatened by urban sprawl and modern agricultural practices.

Tourists and city-dwellers were surprised to see the capital's traffic cut to permit the bleating, bell-clanking parade to pass the city's most emblematic locations.

Two Chinese officials bought corpses from grave robbers to meet government cremation quotas, local media reported, as Beijing pushes to enforce its controversial and highly sensitive burial policies.

The officials from Guangdong province bought the bodies from a man who stole more than 20 in night-time raids on graveyards, the official news agency Xinhua said, citing Chinese media.

A man who taxied his light plane down a street in Australia and parked it at a pub while he went inside for a beer was being questioned Monday by police, who were not amused.

Locals in Newman, Western Australia, were stunned when they saw the wingless Beechcraft two-seater aircraft chugging down the main drag of the mining town in the Pilbara region, before pulling up at the local watering hole.

Daredevil Nik Wallenda wowed the world with back-to-back walks on a tightrope between Chicago skyscrapers without a safety net or a harness, performing one of them blindfolded, as a crowd gasped and cheered.

"I feel incredible," Wallenda said at a news conference afterward Sunday night.

If some workplace problems happen because employees are only human, one New York City government worker got in trouble for virtually the opposite.

He was suspended for 20 days without pay partly for answering an information-technology help line "in a robotic voice." The city Civil Service Commission upheld the suspension this month.

Bloody zombies lumbered alongside superheroes, cowboys shared the road with villains and marchers in hazardous-materials garb evoked the Ebola crisis as the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade made its freewheeling way through downtown Manhattan on Friday.

Creativity was on display and current events were on marchers' minds as a costumed crowd of thousands flowed up Sixth Avenue on a windy Halloween night.

For a Hungarian animal shelter, Halloween is less about pumpkins, witches and ghosts, but keeping black cats out of the hands of Satanists.

"Unfortunately cats here are prized by Satanists who want to use them in seances and sacrifical rituals around Halloween," Kinga Schneider, head of the Noah's Ark Foundation in Budapest, told AFP.