An Algerian teenager set himself on fire in front of horrified high school classmates after failing final exams and not being allowed to repeat his senior year, a report said Tuesday.

The 19-year-old was in critical condition at a hospital in the western town of Oran after the incident that unfolded at the Souiyah El Houari high school on Monday, the French-language Quotidien d'Oran reported.

Spain's fabulously wealthy 85-year-old Duchess of Alba faced a topless photo scandal Tuesday on the eve of her wedding to a civil servant 25 years her junior.

A 30-year-old photograph of the duchess as she sunbathed topless in Ibiza was splashed on the cover of the racy Spanish magazine Interviu, reportedly prompting a legal threat.

Lithuanian basketball legend Arvydas Sabonis said Tuesday he would have to limit his pleasures after suffering a heart attack a week ago, as doctors decided to release him from hospital.

"The doctors told me, 'You can't smoke, you can't drink, and you can't play basketball.' So of the things I like, only sex is left," Sabonis told Lithuanian media at the clinic in his hometown, the central city of Kaunas.

Scientists on Sunday said they had gained insights into a remarkable bacterium that lives without oxygen and transforms ammonium, the ingredient of urine, into hydrazine, a rocket fuel.

So-called anammox -- for anaerobic ammonium oxidation -- germs caused a sensation when they were first identified in the 1990s, but uncovering their secrets is taking time.

Trade unions Monday kicked up a storm in Belgium over a rule ordering 10,000 French-speaking civil servants to clock out whenever they stop work for a smoke, with each minute sliced off their wages.

"The rule is that when you go out or come back into a building you clock in," Hugo Poliart, the spokesman for the administration of the French-speaking Wallonia region, told Agence France Presse.

A German man drove around 15 kilometers (nine miles) on the wrong side of a motorway in Austria early on Sunday morning, miraculously causing no accidents, police said.

The man, 36, who was found to be over the legal limit for alcohol, was stopped near Salzburg at around 5.45 am (0345 GMT), telling police he had "turned around on the motorway after noticing his mistake."

Three people are being held in connection with the theft of paintings worth at least 100 million dollars from a Paris gallery last year, but the works are still missing, a legal official said Saturday.

The three, a woman suspected of taking part in the theft and two people suspected of handling stolen goods, were arrested and charged over the robbery of the five paintings, by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Ferdinand Leger and Amedeo Modigliani, and placed in custody on September 16, the official said.

Dutch police in The Hague on Saturday said they had uncovered 7,000 cannabis plants at a business premises south of the city center.

"Police officers found the plantation in Rijswijk shortly before noon after an anonymous tip-off," spokeswoman Chantal Marges told Agence France Presse.

Authorities in the southern U.S. state of Alabama are studying how to implement one city's proposal for first-time, non-violent offenders to choose between church or jail.

The Restore Our Community program, or Operation ROC, launched by police in the city of Bay Minette, is currently under legal review.

The wife of a British lawmaker was found guilty of burglary on Friday after being caught on CCTV stealing a kitten from the home of her husband's lover.

Christine Hemming, 53, had denied the charge, claiming she could not remember taking the four-month-old tabby cat named Beauty when she went to deliver her husband's post on September 29 last year.