It was one crime too many for New Brighton. Two men broke into an elderly woman's home, stole her television, and then stabbed her tenant to death when he tried to protect her.

So the next morning, neighbors tracked down the thieves, put tyres around their necks, doused them with petrol and set them ablaze.

Four tons of gold ore were stolen from a Zimbabwe mine after armed gangs staged two daring robberies, state media reported Wednesday.

The mine at Chav-Chess Farm outside Kadoma, 140 kilometers (85 miles) southwest of Harare, was robbed twice in June when armed gangs drove up in pick-up trucks, beat farm workers, and hauled away the gold, the Herald newspaper said.

A Southern California man stuck a butter knife into his belly in a failed bid at self-surgery to remove a painful hernia, police said Tuesday.

The wife of the 63-year-old Glendale man called the emergency dispatcher on Sunday night and told the operator her husband was using a knife to remove a protruding hernia, Sgt. Tom Lorenz said.

Cows aren't jumping over the moon in this year's Ohio State Fair butter sculptures, but the refrigerated exhibit does have a space travel theme.

Fair officials said Tuesday the usual cow and calf made of butter are accompanied this year by a butter space shuttle and astronaut.

A 1925 Rolls-Royce car customized with mounted guns and searchlights and used by an Indian maharaja to hunt tigers will be put up for auction in the United States next month, Bonhams auction house said.

The New Phantom was commissioned by Sahib Bahadur, officially known as Umed Singh II, the maharaja of Kota, from the British motor manufacturers.

A mysterious poster depicting Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as Captain America, a skinny kid turned comic super hero, appeared Tuesday in Moscow causing Kremlin irritation.

Wearing a black leather jacket and leather gloves, the Russian president is shown in a spoof movie poster for "Captain America: The First Avenger", a movie which hit U.S. screens earlier this month.

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.