A one-legged delivery truck driver was stopped at a Cape Town roadblock Friday, when police found him using his 11-year-old son to operate the clutch.

The 39-year-old driver had his left leg amputated in 1996 after a gunshot injury, leaving him unable to press the clutch to change gears, the city's traffic department said in a statement.

Vampires, the devil's deceit and mental illness are among the hot topics for some 300 exorcists who flocked to Poland this week from as far away as Africa and India for a week-long congress.

Held at Poland's Roman Catholic Jasna Gora monastery, home to the venerated Black Madonna icon, this year's congress "examines the current fashion for vampirism in Europe and the world-over, schizophrenia and other mental disorders as well as the devil's deceit during exorcism," according to the monastery's radio station.

Marriage is losing its luster for many in the Philippines, with an increasing number of couples starting families out of wedlock, the government census office said on Friday.

More than 37 percent of the 1.78 million babies born in Asia's Roman Catholic outpost in 2008 had unmarried mothers, it said in a statement, citing results of the latest population census.

Niko Alm wanted to test an Austrian law saying that head coverings would only be allowed in official documents for religious reasons.

So the tongue-in-cheek atheist applied for a new driver's license in his country with a photo of himself wearing a pasta strainer as headgear. Alm said he was a "pastafarian" and that the headpiece was required by his religion.

Hong Kong police said Thursday they are probing Internet photos showing a group of policewomen in controversial poses, pointing guns at each other and pulling up their uniform skirts.

The photos, including one in which two policewomen touch a colleague's breasts, and another group dressed in their underwear, were splashed in the territory's Chinese-language dailies this week.

In Germany the idea of a teenager spending a few months abroad looking after someone else's children while she studies or travels has given rise to a new concept -- the granny "au pair".

Newspapers now explicitly solicit applications from older women rather than students with ads such as: "Family living in Australia with two children aged 4 and 2 seeks German replacement granny for three to six months".

An 18-year-old model and five other people, including two Dutch citizens, have been arrested in Argentina on charges of trying to smuggle drugs to Europe, authorities said Wednesday.

The head of Argentina's airport police said the Argentine model Daiana Antivero was part of the operation to send mules to Europe.

An Ohio zoo is using artificial eggs to fool its mother flamingoes, so they don't wear themselves out.

The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium has found eggs laid by its female flamingoes are most likely to hatch if they're put in an incubator.

A 14-year-old German boy sparked a major police operation after taking his father's new Ferrari for a spin lasting several hours, authorities said Wednesday.

The teenager's parents bought the 200,000-euro ($280,000) sports car in Berlin and were on Tuesday returning to their home in Spain when police stopped them on a motorway near the German capital and detained them for questioning.

A two-headed snake has gone on display at a zoo in southern Ukraine.

The "Skazka" (Fairy tale) zoo in the Crimean city of Yalta on the Black Sea said Wednesday that the albino California Kingsnake has two heads that think, react and eat separately, though one is more passive than the other.