President Hamid Karzai advised Afghans not to hold extravagant wedding parties saying in his weekly radio address to the nation on Friday that they were "against the national tradition."

Since the fall of the Taliban nearly a decade ago, marriage ceremonies in Afghan cities have often gone from being simple family affairs to lavish parties for up to 1,000 people in neon-clad wedding halls.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Friday gave his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk a 15-litre cask of wine to toast Poland's six-month European Union presidency.

"I have brought with me a cask of wine to drink to the success of the Polish presidency," Orban told reporters as he handed over leadership of the 27-nation bloc to Tusk, together with an EU flag.

A British woman's email rant at her future daughter-in-law became an Internet sensation on Thursday after she accused the bride-to-be of "uncouthness and lack of grace."

In a withering message entitled "your lack of manners", Carolyn Bourne took Heidi Withers to task over her failures of etiquette and recommended she attend a finishing school "with utmost haste."

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin caused jaws to drop last year when he gave an impromptu performance of the Fats Domino classic "Blueberry Hill" at a charity concert.

Now one of the country's best known DJs has remixed Putin's vocals into a six-minute dance track that he says is wowing clubbers around the country, even if he admits that Putin is "not a singer."

Thousands of Bulgarians gathered Friday by the seaside to greet the first July sunrise of the year, celebrated since the communist era as a symbol of summer, freedom and a new beginning.

The popular July Morning sunrise ritual, which first emerged in the 1980s, obtained its name from the Uriah Heep song traditionally played at the moment the first sun rays shine over the Black sea.

A government in northern India is offering prizes including television sets, food processors and even a Tata Nano car for people who agree to undergo sterilisation, a doctor told Agence France Presse on Friday.

"We want to promote sterilisation," Pratap Singh Dutter, the deputy chief medical officer of Jhunjhunu district in the north Indian state of Rajasthan told AFP.

Fish and chips-loving Britain celebrated its devotion to the national dish on Wednesday by cooking the world's biggest-ever portion of chips.

The Fish and Chip Shop at the Adventure Island fun park in Southend-on-Sea, east of London, cooked up 448 kilos (988 pounds) of chips, piled up inside a giant box.

A former showgirl turned local politician for Silvio Berlusconi's ruling party denied on Thursday accusations from prosecutors of being a "brothel manager" for the Italian prime minister.

At a pre-trial hearing in Milan this week, a prosecutor accused Nicole Minetti, a local councilor for the People of Freedom party in the northern Lombardy region, of procuring young women for the 74-year-old Berlusconi.

Saudi Arabia has arrested five women for getting behind the wheel in defiance of a ban on female drivers in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom, media outlets and activists said Wednesday.

"A girl who was driving, accompanied by her brother in Jeddah's southern neighborhood of Al-Suleymania, was arrested," Saudi news website Sabq.org reported.

A French woman claiming to have been brainwashed by the secretive Catholic society Opus Dei is suing it for allegedly keeping her illegally as a domestic servant, she told Agence France Presse Tuesday.

Catherine T., who asked not to be identified by her family name, said she joined a hoteliers' school in northeastern France in 1985, aged 14, which she later discovered was run by associates of Opus Dei.