Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, who wrote the worldwide bestseller "The Alchemist," accused Iran Monday of banning his books.

"My books have been published in Iran since 1998, in different publishing houses," Coelho wrote on his website http://paulocoelhoblog.com, noting estimates that over six million copies of his books have sold in the country.

The offensive squawks of a pet bird so enraged a Taiwanese man that he sued its owners -- his neighbors -- for inflicting emotional stress and injuries, a report said Tuesday.

Wang Han-chin, an electrician in central Taiwan, accused five neighbors of teaching their mynah, a parrot-like bird, to curse at him as revenge after he complained to the police that they were too loud, the Liberty Times reported.

Hundreds of New York subway riders, unencumbered by skirts, trousers or modesty, took part Sunday in a spontaneous showing of leg despite sub-freezing temperatures.

The 10th annual "No Pants Subway Ride" saw hundreds of New York strap-hangers shed outer garments from the waist down, even as they wore seasonally-appropriate jackets, scarves, earmuffs and other winter garb on their upper halves.

A cross-eyed opossum in Germany called Heidi who is not yet even on public display has become an Internet hit, winning more than 65,000 "friends" on social networking website Facebook.

Heidi is thought to be two and a half years old, and was abandoned outside an animal shelter in North Carolina in the United States, together with her sister Naira, and has been in Leipzig zoo in eastern Germany since May.

People who become euphoric over music unleash dopamine, a brain chemical that also induces the sense of reward that comes from food, psychoactive drugs and money, an unusual study says.

McGill University researchers in Montreal, Canada, recruited eight volunteers aged 19-24 among 217 people who responded to advertisements requesting people who experienced "chills" -- a marker of extreme pleasure -- when listening to music.

The French live in one of the richest and safest countries in the world, yet they are global champions of pessimism, fearful of the future and longing for the past, according to a survey published this week.

"The French are afraid. They feel the present is less good than the past and that the future will be worse than the present, and that their children's lives will be harder than their own," said commentator Dominique Moisi.

Everyone curses the tax man, but Romanian witches angry about having to pay up for the first time are planning to use cat excrement and dead dogs to cast spells on the president and government.

Also among Romania's newest taxpayers are fortune tellers — but they probably should have seen it coming.

Beirut's iconic Glass Cafe, which dates back to Ottoman times, shuts its doors this week, taking with it a slice of the Lebanese capital's cultural and political heritage.

"The history of this cafe is closely intertwined with the history of Beirut," said Angele Abi Haidar, 50, whose family has operated the Glass Cafe -- which first opened its doors in 1920 -- since 1951.

Lithuania is pioneering a new type of national symbol to convey the character of the ex-Soviet Baltic state in a fragrant way with a bottle of perfume.

Lithuania's foreign ministry has already sent bottles of the new fragrance to all ambassadors accredited to Vilnius.

A cigar lounge in suburban Detroit is decorated with paintings and photos of famous people with a stogie: John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, even the 1950s Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.

"We have only one thing in common," said owner Ismail Houmani, a U.S. war veteran, who immigrated to Toledo, Ohio, from Lebanon when he was 18, pointing at a cigar in the fingers of Guevara, a Marxist rebel.