Three hundred Danes believed a dream lifestyle of champagne and caviar awaited them this week after they were announced billionaire lottery winners -- until they discovered it was a mistake.

All 300 had received an email from the head of the Danish state-run lottery company Danske Spil congratulating them on the astronomical sums they had won, Danske Spil spokesman Thomas Roersig told Agence France Presse.

A fringe candidate for next month's French presidential election on Wednesday alleged that the Queen of England owes her fortune to drugs money laundered by "Jewish bankers in The City".

Jacques Cheminade, an independent, is one of 10 candidates who has been cleared by France's Constitutional Court to run in the April 22 first round of the battle to unseat incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Two Russian men Thursday managed to hijack a helicopter at gunpoint and then break their friend out of jail by lowering a rope ladder over a prison colony, investigators said.

"According to preliminary information, the escaped inmate was convicted of murder and had served half his sentence," the Investigative Committee said in a statement.

Susan Dhliwayo was stunned when she pulled her car over recently to pick up a group of male hitchhikers and they refused to get in. The reason? They feared being raped.

Sensational reports of gangs of beautiful women picking up male travelers to have sex and harvest their sperm in condoms have gripped Zimbabwe in a dizzying mix of taboos, rituals and the downright bizarre.

Three overweight elephants at a Swiss circus will have to diet and work out in order to shed between 50 and 300 kilograms (110-660 pounds), Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger reported Wednesday.

To help them lose weight, Circus Knie is not only putting them on a special and low-sugar diet but also making them work for their food.

What looked like a large hole in the wing did not stop a Russian airline jet from taking off for Siberia with dozens of panicked passengers on board.

The Boeing 737 jet was delayed on the tarmac of a Moscow airport when one of the passengers looked out of a window and noticed an oval-shaped gap on the left wing above one of the engines.

No one knows what led a Florida neighborhood watch captain to shoot Trayvon Martin, a teenager carrying no weapon.

But a new study raises an intriguing question: Could the watch captain have been fooled into thinking the youth was armed in part because he himself was holding a gun?

One of Japan's best-known pop stars said on Wednesday that she has married a fellow musician nearly 20 years her junior, setting off a frenzy in the country's tabloid press.

Miwa Yoshida, 46, the lead singer of Dreams Come True which has sold about 50 million albums worldwide, announced on her New York-based blog that she tied the knot with Juon, the 27-year-old lead singer with rock band Fuzzy Control.

The United States vowed to help solve the 75-year-old mystery of aviation legend Amelia Earhart after analysis of a photograph showed that she may have crashed on a remote Pacific island.

Earhart set off in 1937 from Papua New Guinea on a mission to circumnavigate the globe over the equator, its longest route. She and her navigator Fred Noonan were never seen again, despite a massive U.S. search in the midst of the Great Depression.

It's a quintessentially Cuban experience: Capping off a meal with a snifter of rum and an aromatic cigar.

This Caribbean nation is renowned around the world for its pungent Cohibas, Montecristos and Romeo y Julietas, but on the island, stogie-lovers are increasingly being told to take it outside.