After last year's triumph for a terrier who went on to Oscar glory with "The Artist", the 2012 pack of celluloid canine talent was looking strong Thursday for Cannes' unofficial Palm Dog award.

"A dark dramatic trend has emerged" which "starts with 'Moonrise Kingdom' in which a plucky pooch is pierced by a fatal arrow... to the nasty end for Fanny in 'The Hunt'," said Toby Rose, who announces the winner on Friday.

Two Poles were detained Thursday after a corpse rolled up in a rug fell out of a sofa-bed that they were trying to load on a local commuter train, a police officer said.

"We were informed by railway men that the body fell out of the sofa-bed onto the station platform. At first, I thought they were joking," Robert Czerwinski, a spokesman for the northern Polish city of Slupsk told Agence France Presse.

A penguin on the run from a Tokyo aquarium since early March was adjusting to life back on the inside Friday after being recaptured on a riverbank.

The Humboldt penguin, one of 135 kept at Tokyo Sea Life Park, was recaptured after 82 days of freedom that had even seen it outwit Japan's well-resourced coastguard.

Taiwan's unmarried women were up in arms Thursday over the education ministry's online dictionary, which defines a "good woman" as one who focuses on her family life and adores her husband.

Several women lawmakers slammed the ministry for being biased against unwed women and promoting chauvinistic attitudes.

A British stuntman became the world's first skydiver to land without a parachute on Wednesday, falling 731 meters (2,400 feet) to drop safely onto a crash-pad of cardboard boxes.

Wearing a specially-made "wing suit", Gary Connery leapt from a helicopter over Henley-on-Thames in southern England, aiming -- with his life hanging in the balance -- at a "runway" of 18,000 cardboard boxes.

Two newborn cheetahs are settling into Washington's National Zoo after they beat the odds and came in the world in circumstances worthy of a veterinary thriller, the zoo said Wednesday.

Their mother Ally bore one of the cubs, a male, on April 23 at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute outside the U.S. capital and -- not unexpectedly for a first-time cheetah mother in captivity -- abandoned it.

Los Angeles has something of a bad reputation for traffic jams, with its perennially snarled freeways. But, surprisingly, it's not the worst U.S. city for gridlock, says a new study.

That dubious honor goes to .. Honolulu.

The mayor of one of the largest cities in Japan, where body art is associated with gangsters, has told municipal workers to forget about promotion unless they reveal whether or not they have a tattoo.

Toru Hashimoto, the hugely popular mayor of Osaka and a rising star on the national political stage, described the order to about 34,000 city workers earlier this month as "necessary for labor affairs management.”

A Silicon Valley software executive put fake bar codes on Lego sets at various Target stores, bought the toys at a steep discount, then sold them online for thousands of dollars, authorities said.

Thomas Langenbach, 47, appeared in court Tuesday on four felony counts of burglary that could net him up to five years in prison if convicted. He did not enter a plea.

A Channel Islands auction house says it's selling a vial that allegedly contains blood residue from Ronald Reagan — a move denounced Tuesday by the late U.S. president's family and his foundation.

The vial being auctioned online was used by the laboratory that tested Reagan's blood when he was treated at George Washington University hospital after a 1981 assassination attempt in Washington, the PFCAuctions house said.