Faced with searing heat, no air conditioning and a ban on wearing shorts to work, a male civil servant in Rio swapped his trousers for his wife's skirt.

Andre Amaral Silva, 41, decided to take sartorial action as the thermometer Tuesday hit 40.8 (105.4 Fahrenheit) and picked out a long black skirt from his wife's wardrobe.

Jamaica's beloved bobsled team had to raise money just to get to Russia.

Now they've arrived at the Sochi Games — but without their equipment.

Police responding to reports of screaming coming from a home in Maine didn't find a victim of domestic violence as they feared. Instead, they found an amorous pig.

State police say a woman called last week after hearing what she believed to be a fight coming from a neighbor's home in the town of China. The caller said she heard screaming and thought there was a domestic assault.

You never know what might fall out of some old albums that cost 50 cents each at a yard sale. Like Marvin Gaye's passport -- which could be worth $20,000 to collectors today.

Issued in October 1964, the expired US passport depicts a smiling Gaye -- then 25, born in Washington on April 2, 1939, six feet (1.8 meters) tall, with brown hair and brown eyes -- along with his authentic signature.

Three waitresses at an Illinois restaurant say they could only stare in disbelief when a woman over the weekend handed them each a $5,000 check.

The owner of the Boone County Family Restaurant in Caledonia, Matt Nebiu, said business was slow Saturday when the customer handed checks to 25-year-old Amy Sabani, 23-year-old Sarah Seckinger and 28-year-old Amber Kariolich.

British football fans: Your cups runneth over.

Prime Minister David Cameron has stepped in to overrule a government department that said bars couldn't stay open late during England's opening match against Italy at the World Cup in Brazil.

Wearing a helmet, balaclava and bullet-proof jacket, a Ukrainian anti-government protester professed his love through a megaphone, got down on one knee and proposed to his girlfriend as his comrades lit smoke flares.

"Fighting changes people. I see it in myself and I see it in my comrades," the young man said near the Ukrainian opposition's barricaded tent city in the capital Kiev.

Two Iowa couples decided to tie the knot at this weekend's bacon festival at the state fairgrounds in Des Moines.

Tricia Snider and Tom Watson were the first to wed Saturday at the Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival, the Des Moines Register reported (http://dmreg.co/1gEc994 ). Craig and April Rouch got married a short while later.

In a colorful annual ritual of dubious accuracy, the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil emerged from his burrow Sunday and saw his shadow, thus predicting six more weeks of winter.

The Pennsylvania rodent is the most famous of the furry weather forecasters for "Groundhog Day," an event with early roots in German folklore -- and rather more in U.S. media showbiz.

Protesters in Kiev have come up with a novel way to torment riot police -- blasting non-stop news from an opposition television channel projected onto a giant white sheet behind their barricade.

The screen has been set up between two poles on the edge of a giant protest camp in central Kiev -- just a few dozen meters (yards) from lines of riot police defending government buildings.