Most 100-year-olds don't mark the milestone birthday with a news conference in a piano bar. Then again, Irving Fields isn't most 100-year-olds.

Fields is one of New York City's oldest lounge performers and still plays piano four nights a week at Nino's Tuscany restaurant in Manhattan. Even though he gets around more slowly than he once did, he has no plans to stop playing and recording albums.

Venezuelans are facing the prospect of a heat wave without their favorite beer, the latest indignity in a country that has seen shortages of everything from disposable diapers to light bulbs.

Cerveceria Polar, which distributes 80 percent of the beer in the socialist South American country, began shutting down breweries this week because of a lack of barley, hops and other raw materials, and has halted deliveries to Caracas liquor stores.

Uganda's top court on Thursday banned the practice of refunding bride price — normally livestock given by the groom to his bride's family — when a marriage ends in divorce.

The Supreme Court agreed with activists that the practice undermines the dignity of women but it upheld the practice of paying bride price.

A wallet lost 70 years ago by an American soldier in Austria during World War II was returned to its rightful owner thanks to a doctor who discovered the item in his late grandfather's farmhouse.

Josef Ruckhofer told AFP on Thursday he had been renovating the house near the city of Salzburg when he stumbled across the leather wallet under a wooden plank in June.

It is a safari with a twist: two private Czech mining companies have joined forces to take tourists on trips to see long-necked excavators and coal beds, instead of giraffes and lush wilderness.

"We are standing at the edge of a mine that was opened in 1901," guide and former miner Josef Gerthner told a group as they snapped pictures of monster excavators in the distance on a hot summer day.

The pilot of a Swedish domestic flight used an ax to pry open a toilet door after a drunk passenger locked himself just before landing, Swedish police said Thursday.

The passenger, who was on board Nextjet's flight from Stockholm to the northern town of Ornskoldsvik on Wednesday evening, locked himself in the bathroom just 10 minutes before landing.

Was it Brazil's caipirinha cocktail or did the head of the International Olympic Committee skip a major news conference in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday because of jet lag? 

IOC President Thomas Bach failed to appear at the chief media event marking the one-year countdown to the 2016 Rio Olympics -- and initially officials gave no explanation. 

A man who claimed to be Tarzan has been arrested after he allegedly climbed a tree and tried to get into the monkey exhibit at a Southern California zoo.

A zookeeper called 911 Tuesday morning to report that a shirtless man plastered in mud had climbed about 20 feet into a tree at the bird exhibit at the Santa Ana Zoo.

A disoriented whale that turned up at a bustling Buenos Aires marina has nearly found its way back to the sea but is still stuck in fresh water, an official said Wednesday.

"It's at the mouth of the River Plate, in the area we call the ante-port. It's almost on its way. It's just one small step from swimming out to sea," a city hall spokesman told Agence France Presse.

The Belgian capital's emblematic Manneken Pis statue of a little boy taking a very public leak, beloved by millions of tourists, is getting a thorough examination to prove whether he is the real deal.

The small statue standing about 60 centimetres (23 inches) tall in a fountain in the heart of Brussels has suffered many indignities since he was first put up in the early 1600s, prompting the authorities to replace it with a replica in the 1960s.