A pet parrot in India has been credited with helping catch the man who murdered its owner, a relative said Thursday.

The owner, a 55-year-old woman, was stabbed to death and her jewellery stolen at her home in the northern city of Agra on February 20.

Publisher of science journals Springer said Thursday it would scrap 16 papers from its archives after they were revealed to be computer-generated gibberish.

The fake papers had been submitted to conferences on computer science and engineering whose proceedings were published in specialized, subscription-only publications, Springer said.

The isolated and mainly desert Central Asian state of Turkmenistan will in July be the unlikely host of the perma-tanned and shades-wearing stars of windsurfing when it hosts a leg of the world windsurfing cup for the first time, state media said Friday.

The competition will take place from July 1-6 on the Caspian Sea in the resort of Avaza, which Turkmenistan has been seeking to expand greatly in the last years, the Neutral Turkmenistan daily reported.

Pungent smoke filled the room, obscuring the lights and leaving clothing and skin reeking. There was applause, shouts and laughter, and above all plenty of H. Upmann Sir Winstons — formidable 7-inch (17.8-centimeter) Cuban cigars.

More than 450 stogie aficionados took part in an unusual contest Thursday at Havana's annual marquee Cigar Festival: competing to see who could create the longest unbroken ash.

Police say they were called in to restore order in downtown Stockholm after Sweden's public employment service accidentally sent an email invitation for a recruitment event to 61,000 jobseekers instead of 1,000.

Police spokesman Ulf Lindgren says staff at the job center alerted police Wednesday after several thousand people showed up to an event where jobseekers would have a chance to meet with potential employers. He said many people were upset but no arrests were made.

A massive statue of Marilyn Monroe that has turned heads for two years in Palm Springs is headed east.

The Riverside Press-Enterprise (http://bit.ly/1c83Ctm ) says the 26-foot-tall, 34,000-pound statue will be transported in April from California to Hamilton, N.J., where it will be part of an exhibit honoring its designer, Seward Johnson.

The unkempt, hairy hipster look is driving a plastic surgery boom in New York, where baby-faced young men are flocking to doctors for beard transplants that can cost a whopping $8,000.

Facial surgeons with private practices in Manhattan and Florida say they have seen a phenomenal increase in demand in the last five years, and hipsters are leading the way.

When even their president is being caught sneaking around behind his partner's back, it is perhaps unsurprising to find the French topping a poll for infidelity, alongside the equally hot-blooded Italians.

More than one in two men -- 55 percent -- from France and Italy admitted to cheating on their partners, along with one in three women.

An embarrassed Hong Kong lawmaker has apologized after he was photographed looking at scantily-dressed pictures of models on his tablet computer during a budget speech at the Chinese city's parliament.

Pro-democracy politician Albert Ho was snapped flipping through multiple photos of bikini-clad ladies while finance minister John Tsang delivered a one-and-a-half-hour long budget speech on Wednesday.

When a New York woman went into labor, she left home to hail a cab for the hospital. But seconds later, she gave birth on a wintry Manhattan sidewalk.

Starting out as a true New Yorker in a hurry, the baby girl was in such a rush to enter the world that she couldn't wait for her mother Polly McCourt to get to the hospital on Monday afternoon.