Perched on a wooden dais in front of 600 workers rolling Cuba's legendary cigars, Grisel reads aloud -- poems, novels and even sex tips from the newspaper -- keeping workers entertained, their attention rapt, just the way it has been done for 150 years.

Grisel, 55, a petite former teacher who wears reading glasses she adjusts frequently, may have a job that predates electricity.

British villagers who tried to create the world's smallest pub by converting a disused red telephone box into an alehouse were served a bitter blow Monday when record-keepers barred their entry.

People in the village of Shepreth, eastern England, set up The Dog and Bone pub in the three-feet (90-centimeter) square ex-phone box for just one night, calling time when the only barrel serving drinkers ran dry.

A sentence in which tiny birds and the English language are both slaughtered took top honors Monday in an annual bad writing contest.

Sue Fondrie of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, won the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for her sentence comparing forgotten memories to dead sparrows, said San Jose State University Prof. Scott Rice. The contestant asks writers to submit the worst possible opening sentences to imaginary novels.

A Jordanian who confessed to killing his wife's alleged lover cut off the man's penis before putting it in a bag and handing it over to police, a judicial official said on Monday.

The 35-year-old man "lured the victim to a hotel room in downtown Amman, claiming that he wanted to resolve the issue about his wife quietly" on Saturday, the official told Agence France Presse.

A 50-year-old South African man thought to be dead woke up in a chilly morgue on Sunday and shouted to be let out, scaring off two attendants who thought he was a ghost, local media reported.

"His family thought he had died," health spokesman Sizwe Kupelo told the Sapa news agency.

Hundreds of gay couples dressed in formal suits and striped trousers, gowns and T-shirts recited vows in emotion-choked voices and triumphantly hoisted their long-awaited marriage certificates as New York became the sixth and largest U.S. state to recognize same-sex weddings.

Couples began saying "I do" at 12:01 a.m. Sunday from Niagara Falls to Long Island, though New York City became the sometimes raucous center of action by daybreak as couples waited on a sweltering day for the chance to exchange vows at the city clerk's office.

A man suffered life-threatening burns Monday after a portaloo he was using exploded apparently after he lit a cigarette.

The victim, who was taking part in a joint Australia-United States military exercise at the time, was rushed to hospital with burns to his head, face, arms, chest and airways after the incident at Rockhampton airport.

A 13-year-old boy has been charged with drink driving after police pulled him over for his erratic behavior on the road, authorities said Sunday.

New South Wales police said they spotted a car driving strangely late on Saturday at a holiday park near the north coast town of Kempsey.

A lion was reunited with his longtime partner Friday at a Brasilia zoo after becoming so depressed by their separation that he stopped eating, Brazilian media reported.

Dengo the lion was sedated and his journey from Niteroi's ZooNit to a facility in Brasilia began with a herculean effort by eight men to load him out of his cage. He traveled to the Brazilian capital in an Air Force plane, O Globo newspaper said.

A poll in Venezuela says President Hugo Chavez's public approval rating remains at 50 percent and has not significantly varied since his cancer diagnosis.

The Caracas polling firm Datanalisis surveyed 1,300 people earlier this month, giving the poll a margin error of about 2.5 percentage points.