With jaws of steel that have earned him the nickname "Coconut Peeler," Andres Gardin, at the tender age of 64, is hell-bent on gnawing his way into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Sure, lots of gents his age might be thinking about retirement or whiling away time at the bar.

With a pumpkin for a drum, carrots for flutes and turnips for trumpets, musicians from Vienna transformed the fresh goods in a Madrid market into honking, whistling instruments on Monday.

Visiting members of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra marked the centenary of the San Miguel market in the center of the Spanish capital by taking saws and drills to its vegetables, coring and boring holes in them to make wind instruments.

A school pupil was arrested in China for hiring hitmen who killed his father and sister because of the pressure they put on him to study, reports said Monday, highlighting educational stress in the country.

The teenager was detained in the central province of Henan following the death of his father Gao Tianfeng -- a senior court official -- and his 20-year-old sister, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing local police.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will seek alternate sleeping arrangements when traveling after receiving a sky-high bill for installing a customized bed on a recent flight to London, officials close to the Israeli leader said.

Netanyahu found himself facing a public uproar on Sunday after Channel 10 TV reported over the weekend that he had spent $127,000 in public funds on a special sleeping cabin for the five-hour flight to attend Margaret Thatcher's funeral last month.

The U.N. has new weapons to fight hunger, boost nutrition and reduce pollution, and they might be crawling or flying near you right now: edible insects.

The Food and Agriculture Organization on Monday hailed the likes of grasshoppers, ants and other members of the insect world as an underutilized food for people, livestock and pets.

A transsexual woman in Hong Kong won a groundbreaking court appeal Monday allowing her to marry her boyfriend and forcing the government to re-write the city's marriage laws.

The woman in her 30s, known in the Court of Final Appeal as "W" under anonymity rules, successfully overturned earlier verdicts that said marriage is only allowed between couples who were of the opposite sex at birth.

British billionaire Richard Branson strutted his stuff as an AirAsia flight attendant Sunday -- complete with fishnet stockings and figure-hugging red pencil skirt.

His star turn on the flight from Australia's Perth to the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur came after he lost a Grand Prix bet with the Malaysian budget carrier's founder.

More than 300 people paraded in a conga line in central Havana Saturday to the beat of drums and trumpets in a government-sponsored protest against homophobia.

"We must change consciousness," said Mariela Castro, the daughter of President Raul Castro, who convened the parade as the head of a national center for sex education.

Maybe the devil made her do it. A fake Manhattan soothsayer pleaded guilty to using her powers to persuade a client to fork over more than $650,000.

Janet Miller, 39, claimed she was able to see that her victim needed protection from being cheated, the Manhattan district attorney's office said Friday.

A Slovak street performer dressed in white papal vestments has been detained and fined by the police in Rome for bearing too close a resemblance to the late John Paul II, the police said on Friday.

"The problem was that he looked a lot like Karol Wojtyla. He was detained for usurpation of title which is a misdemeanour," a police spokeswoman told Agence France Presse.