U.S. federal officials sought Thursday to figure out how a runaway teenager in Texas used an assumed identity so convincingly that she ended up being deported to Colombia.

Jakadrien Larise Turner, who is now 15, apparently reinvented herself as Tika Lanay Cortez, a 21-year-old illegal migrant from Bogota, when she was arrested in Houston last year on a theft charge.

The era of erotic parties in Italy's palaces of power is over: accused of excesses reminiscent of his predecessor Silvio Berlusconi, Premier Mario Monti said his New Year's Eve do was a homely affair.

Senator Roberto Calderoli -- a member of the right-wing Northern League party known for his provocative comments -- accused Monti of celebrating at the state's cost while Italy slides towards recession, and called on him to resign.

For sale: one idyllic wooden cottage -- with nuclear missile silo attached.

The upstate New York property, listed by Sotheby's for $1.76 million, looks like a typical weekend chalet in the forested Adirondack Mountains.

One of France's best-known mail order catalogues apologized Wednesday after web users noticed a naked man in the background of an advertising photo published on the children's section of its website.

The photo of four young children with their arms around each other running on the beach while a naked man walked serenely through the sea behind them was removed from the site but has since gone viral on the Internet.

This tuna is worth savoring: It cost nearly three-quarters of a million dollars.

A bluefin tuna caught off northeastern Japan fetched a record 56.49 million yen, or about $736,000, Thursday in the first auction of the year at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market. The price for the 593-pound (269-kilogram) tuna beat last year's record of 32.49 million yen.

A Canadian man who realized he forgot his passport as he approached the U.S. border found a new way to gain entry — his iPad.

Martin Reisch said Tuesday a slightly annoyed U.S. border officer let him cross into the United States from Quebec after he presented a scanned copy of his passport on his Apple iPad. Reisch was a half hour from the border when he decided to try to gain entry rather than turn back and make a two-hour trek back home to Montreal to fetch his passport.

The director of a major Polish museum says it was a "witty artistic happening" when an art student secretly hung his own painting in the museum as part of a campaign to open up galleries to young artists.

Director of the National Museum in Wroclaw, Mariusz Hermansdorfer, said Wednesday he treated the campaign as a joke and has kept the painting on display — in the museum's cafe. It will be offered for sale at a charity auction.

Mexico's Grand Warlock predicted U.S. President Barack Obama would fail to win re-election and two more Latin American leaders would be diagnosed with cancer, in a traditional New Year's forecast Tuesday.

The Grand Warlock, or "Brujo Mayor" in Spanish, leads a Mexican tradition of "brujeria" or sorcery centered in the southeastern city of Catemaco.

France's top diet guru Pierre Dukan is urging the government to grade students on their weight in a bid to curb growing obesity.

In a book to be published Thursday, Dukan suggests that students in their last two years of high school be awarded extra marks if they manage to maintain an acceptable Body Mass Index (BMI), a measure of body fat based on height and weight.

Indonesians have found a new symbol for their growing frustration at uneven justice in this young, democratic nation: cheap, worn-out flip-flops.

They have been dropping them off at police stations throughout the country to express outrage over the arrest and trial of a 15-year-old boy for lifting an old pair of white sandals from outside a boarding house used by police in northern Indonesia.