A massive sinkhole opened up inside the National Corvette Museum and swallowed eight cars Wednesday in the U.S. state of Kentucky.

Museum officials said they got a call at 5:44 am from their security company because the motion detectors had gone off.

Couples looking to enjoy a romantic Valentine's Day at one Chinese cinema will be out of luck this Friday, thwarted by singles who bought up all the odd-numbered seats.

According to the Shanghai Morning Post, a group of Internet users reserved every other seat at a Valentine's night showing of "Beijing Love Story" at a movie theater in the city's Xintiandi shopping complex.

Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has scrapped a state award named after the mother of the late president in the latest reform to his predecessor's bizarre rule, Neutral Turkmenistan newspaper reported Tuesday.

The isolated energy-rich Central Asian country was led for two decades by Saparmurat Niyazov, who renamed months and days of the week after himself and family members.

Five Michael Jackson fans won symbolic damages of one euro each Tuesday as a French court agreed they had suffered "emotional damage" from the pop star's death.

Played out in a court in the city of Orleans, the unusual case saw 34 fans suing Jackson's doctor Conrad Murray, who was jailed in 2011 over the singer's death from an overdose, for the suffering they endured.

Grey-haired and grinning, two dozen couples hold champagne flutes at a Warsaw ceremony in their honor. They survived 50 years of marriage and in Poland, that is reason enough for a presidential medal.

"To qualify, you have to put in over 18,000 solid days of work. Other medals require less, so it really is a considerable feat to have spent the last half century together," Warsaw mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz says at this month's event.

The fraudulent composer dubbed "Japan's Beethoven" said Wednesday he was "deeply ashamed" about his nearly two decades of deception, but insisted that he did used to be deaf.

Mamoru Samuragochi said his impairment had improved in recent times, but when he first paid part-time music school teacher Takashi Niigaki to pen works in his name, he had been unable to hear.

Parents in the Mexican state of Sonora will no longer be allowed to name their children "Facebook," ''Rambo" or 59 other now banned given names.

The names have been found at least once in state registries. And the list could grow because officials are still checking the state's 132 newborn registries, Sonora state Civil Registry director Cristina Ramirez said Tuesday.

As a career diplomat he would be expected to be able to converse in several foreign languages but it's doubtful that Nigerian Pidgin English would be one of them.

Yet the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria took to the airwaves to speak in the vernacular about the most pressing issues between the two nations, from gay rights and presidential elections to visa rules.

The world's wealthiest man Bill Gates would still pick up a $100 bill on the street, but he has no tips about how to get by on less than $100,000 a year.

Oh, and the 58-year-old Microsoft co-founder says he can still leap over a chair, if it is a small one.

A French museum employee is in hot water after being unable to resist the temptation of sitting in a 200-year-old folding chair once filled by the "derriere" of Napoleon.

The red leather that had held up the French emperor through numerous campaigns gave way and the cinema director-style chair's wooden structure was also damaged, officials at the Museum of Fine Arts in Napoleon's birthplace, Ajaccio on the island of Corsica, admitted on Monday.