Brazil's upcoming municipal elections are being overshadowed by the Miss Bum Bum pageant, a nationwide online contest to find the cutest female behind.

Young ladies representing the country's 26 states and the federal district Brasilia are vying to qualify for the grand finale scheduled to take place in Sao Paulo on November 30.

For all their visibility along the campaign trail, A-list celebrities hold little sway over the way Americans vote, an omnibus poll for CBS News and Vanity Fair magazine suggested Monday.

Eighty-nine percent of respondents said celebrity endorsements of a particular candidate made no difference to them when it came to putting an X beside a name in the voting booth.

In Washington DC, everyone expects talk-radio-glued taxi drivers to know the ins and outs of foreign policy and bartenders to fine-pick legislative tactics in Congress.

But Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has just found out that the U.S. capital's pervasive policy wonkishness extends even to the city's league-leading baseball team, the Nationals.

Your honor, you're late. Again. And you're fired.

A judge in Costa Rica has been sacked for serial tardiness, the newspaper La Nacion reported Monday.

A child's helium balloon has been blamed for a power failure that knocked out Greece's main civil aviation radar and snarled flights for over an hour over the weekend, a report said on Monday.

Top-selling Ta Nea daily said the balloon knocked out the "heart" of the Athens flight information region (FIR) radar that oversees Greek airspace.

Galaxy S3, iPhone 5 or HTC One? That's a tough question for Taiwan's Cabinet ministers.

Senior Taiwanese officials have been under scrutiny for the smartphones they use — specifically whether they support Taiwan's HTC Corp., which plays a big role the island's high-tech economy.

Philippine convicts who became famous for dancing to Michael Jackson's hits have added South Korean spice to their repertoire, with a performance of the popular "Gangnam Style" rap.

A video posted by prison authorities in the central city of Cebu on YouTube showed about 1,000 inmates clad in orange uniforms doing the horse-riding dance made famous by South Korean rapper Psy.

A joke by the satirical newspaper The Onion appears to have gotten lost in translation.

An Iranian news agency picked up — as fact — a story from the paper about a supposed survey showing an overwhelming majority of rural white Americans would rather vote for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than President Barack Obama. But it was made up, like everything in the just-for-laughs newspaper, which is headquartered in Chicago.

British Prime Minister David Cameron was mocked by the press on Thursday after U.S. chat show host David Letterman left him stumped on questions about British history and culture.

In an awkward appearance on Letterman's "Late Show" on Wednesday, filmed in New York, Cameron failed to guess the composer of the hymn "Rule Britannia" or the meaning of "Magna Carta", an early English charter of rights.

A Hong Kong tycoon who offered a $65 million "marriage bounty" to any man who can win the heart of his lesbian daughter has been inundated with applications from around the globe, a report said Friday.

Cecil Chao told the South China Morning Post newspaper that around 100 would-be suitors of his 33-year-old daughter, Gigi, had poured into his office since he went public with his offer on Wednesday.