Most pre-Carnival street parties in Brazil are all about samba, but the moves on display at Sunday's Blocao parade were focused more on wagging and strategic sniffing than on fancy footwork.

Hundreds of decked-out dogs — and a few brave cats — got in on the Carnival fun at Rio de Janeiro's annual pet-friendly parade: Labradors in pink tutus or engineers' overalls cavorted with Maltese terriers with fairy wings, and poodles in superheros' capes sniffed sausage dogs dressed up as Salome, with sequin-covered harem pants.

A French mayor's plan to erect a statue of President Nicolas Sarkozy's former supermodel wife Carla Bruni in worker's attire has angered the opposition and embarrassed the first lady.

Jacques Martin, the mayor of Nogent-sur-Marne to the east of Paris and member of Sarkozy's UMP party, commissioned the statue to honor the mostly Italian immigrant women who used to work at a feather factory in the town.

Australian women may have embraced the digital era, but they prefer a face-to-face declaration of affection to an "I love u" text and find men addicted to their mobile phones a major turnoff.

That's according to a study carried out by romance publisher Mills & Boon, timed to coincide with Valentine’s Day on Tuesday.

Thousands of bottles of rare cognac and other drinks, some dating back to the French Revolution, went up for sale Friday, with its Dutch collector expected to reap several million dollars.

Describing it as the "largest collection of old liquors in the world", a spokesman for Breda publisher Bay van der Bunt said around 5,000 bottles of cognac, whisky, armagnac and other liquors are to be sold for a total estimated price of eight million dollars (six million euros).

A veterinary medical association in Western Canada announced Friday a ban on the cosmetic cropping of dogs' ears, but some breeders warn it could lead to torn floppy ears.

The Manitoba Veterinary Medical Association passed the bylaw at its annual general meeting on February 3 after all four of Canada's eastern maritime provinces enacted similar bans, but only now publicized it.

Orthodox Christians in Bulgaria on Friday observed a holiday traditionally associated with bees and honey.

It was the Day of St. Haralambos, a patron saint of beekeepers, who also is known as "the lord of all illnesses."

A Taiwanese man was taken into custody for allegedly swindling millions of Taiwan dollars by selling Sesame Street dolls and other items which he claimed had "magic powers," police said Friday.

The suspect, identified by his surname Lin, was accused of conning some Tw$3 million ($100,000) from a businessman with products including an Elmo doll, a Sesame Street Muppet, which he said was "holy" and could bring luck, they said.

Nearly six years after the U.S. ambassador's wife reported jewelry worth millions of euros stolen from a Dutch hotel room, police said Thursday it had actually been gathering dust in a forgotten drawer for years.

The seven-million-euro ($9.3-million) collection of gold- and diamond-set jewelry was found if the hotel room where the couple stayed for a few months leading up to the supposed 2006 theft.

People from around the world are flocking to an upstate New York zoo's website to help name a Humboldt penguin chick hatched last month.

The Rosamond Gifford Zoo has released the top 10 girl and boy names from among 1,100 suggestions offered from the U.S. and a list of countries including Germany, Brazil, Singapore, Ecuador and Finland.

Qasim Khan waged the unlikeliest of battles with Pakistani authorities Thursday over the right to charge hundreds of curious visitors the equivalent of 22 cents each to see a roughly 40-foot whale shark he bought from a fisherman.

Khan is in the business of buying fish, albeit usually much smaller ones, and jumped at the chance on Tuesday to pay about $2,200 for the 20-ton behemoth, which was discovered dead in the Arabian Sea off the southern Pakistani city of Karachi.