A heat wave is threatening to take the bloom off one of the world's largest garden festivals, as more than one million colorful tulips in Canada's capital began wilting Tuesday.

More than 100 heat records were broken across the country, according the weather office, while Ottawa posted a near-record 27 degrees Celsius (80.6 Fahrenheit) just as the Canadian Tulip Festival was getting underway.

An Irish naturist was ticked off after his stroll in the hills of Provence in southern France caused consternation amongst the nuns at a local priory, police said Tuesday.

"We got several calls from one of the nuns of the Congregation of St-Jean who was quite concerned to see a completely undressed man walking around close to the priory," a spokesman for the local gendarmerie said.

A company that specializes in "Made in France" underwear has raised nearly 19,000 euros ($25,000) from enthusiastic investors banking on its next titillating creation -- sweet-smelling underpants for men.

The so-called "Indomitable" briefs will be manufactured by "Le Slip Francais", a company set up in 2011 by 27-year-old Guillaume Gibault, who decided to bank on a trend for all things made in France to sell underwear.

Three women dressed up as nuns were caught at a Colombian airport trying to smuggle cocaine taped to their bodies, police said Tuesday.

The women were caught Saturday after arriving on Colombia's Caribbean island of San Andres on a flight from Bogota.

The first words of the young Austrian woman who emerged in 2006 after eight years held captive in an underground bunker were eerily similar to those of Amanda Berry when she called police in Ohio on Monday.

"My name is Natascha Kampusch. You must have heard of my case," she told incredulous police more than 3,000 days since disappearing on her way to school.

A man in Russia's second city of Saint Petersburg climbed one of its lifting bridges before evading police by plunging into the water, in a death-defying stunt that stopped traffic, officials said Monday.

Police in the city said they have launched a probe as photos of the unidentified daredevil, holding a red flare and hanging from the top of the bridge as it swung upwards, went viral on the internet.

A Chinese city is using dogs to predict earthquakes, an official said Tuesday, after state-run media reported that neighbors were complaining of nightly false alarms -- in the form of barking.

China is regularly hit by seismic tremors. Around 200 people were left dead or missing by a quake in Sichuan province last month, and hundreds of thousands have been killed in major disasters in the past.

The heavy metal-loving governor of Indonesian capital Jakarta has surrendered a guitar that was a gift from U.S. band Metallica to anti-corruption authorities, an official said Tuesday.

A beaming Joko Widodo appeared on TV last week strumming the maroon bass guitar gifted to him by Metallica's Robert Trujillo, which was autographed and bore the words "Giving Back!.. Keep Playin' That Cool Funky Bass!".

The United States on Monday gave back to Mongolia the remains of a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus skeleton stolen from the Gobi desert and sold at auction in New York.

The nearly complete skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus bataar, a cousin of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex, had been put up for sale and went for $1.05 million last year before U.S. authorities intervened at Mongolia's request.

Silence for the queen, please.

A troupe of street drummers got a shock when Helen Mirren, dressed as Queen Elizabeth II, emerged from a London theater to berate them for disrupting her show.