Like a bat out of hell, aging hard rock legend Meat Loaf stormed the stage at a Mitt Romney campaign rally Thursday to declare his support for the Republican flag-bearer in the White House race.

In a town chosen as much for its evocative name -- Defiance -- as for its location in the must-win swing state of Ohio, the 65-year-old showman added his name to the small and esoteric list of celebrities backing the challenger.

A new trend has hit the streets of Paris: ripping gold chains from their owners' necks.

Police said Wednesday that 270 people had been arrested in the first nine months of the year for muggings aimed at cashing in on the rising price of the precious metal.

After promising an election-shaking revelation about Barack Obama, right-wing property developer Donald Trump disappointed Wednesday with nothing more than a warmed-up "birther" attack demanding the president release his college and passport files.

A flamboyant real estate tycoon and reality TV host, Trump whipped up media attention by promising a "very, very big" announcement to be made on his Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks dyes his long, bushy beard with the juice of freshly crushed berries to give it its distinctive rusty hue, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, regarded as one of late al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden's most trusted and intelligent lieutenants, probably used henna in the past to obtain his beard's reddish color, longtime observers surmise.

Modern theater often involves some degree of interaction between actors and the audience. But paying money to be chased by a blood-soaked lunatic?

New York's Halloween season this year features "Killers: A Nightmare Haunted House" in which the public wanders from room to room, perusing gory sights.

A nine year-old boy in Ireland has discovered a message sent in a bottle from Canada eight years ago, and has even managed to track down the two senders.

Charlene Dalpe and Claudia Garneau, from Montreal, were 12 years old when they placed a message in a bottle while on holiday in Gaspesie in the Grande-Vallee part of Quebec in 2004.

A South African magistrate found herself swapping her robe and gavel for a pair of cleaners gloves, as she helped volunteers with the birth of a baby in a courtroom toilet.

Acting senior magistrate Pearl Andrews on Tuesday said she was among those crammed in to a bathroom stall giving a hand to the surprised mother and her newborn at Cape Town's Wynberg magistrates' court on Monday.

There was screaming. There was fainting. It doesn't happen every day: a car washer in Brazil walked into his own wake, where his distraught family was already weeping over their loss.

"People were so startled. Women were fainting, people started running all over the place," said Maria Menezes, one of the mourners at the event in Alagoinhas, in Salvador de Bahia state, G1 news reported.

Researchers in bicycle-mad Netherlands have come up with a novel way to get more cyclists out during the harsh winter months while also lowering the number of injuries: heated bike paths.

"The idea is to install a system under bike paths to prevent ice forming in winter," engineer Marcel Boerefijn from the Tauw engineering consultancy told Agence France Presse.

One in five lottery winners in Britain carry on working after they hit the jackpot and one third invest in a jacuzzi, according to a survey published Monday.

The study of 3,000 winners who became instant millionaires showed only 59% handed in their notice immediately after their life-changing windfalls, while 19% carried on working.