A 71-year-old Italian man completed on Wednesday a 300-kilometer (190-mile) journey down the Danube from Vienna to Budapest -- by gondola.

Vittorio Orio was greeted in front of the Hungarian capital's riverside parliament building by a handful of Italian diplomats and journalists after his five-day trip down one of Europe's main waterways.

How much does it cost to tell the one of the EU's top officials he has "the charisma of a damp rag?" About €3,000, or close to $4,000, as a European member of Parliament has discovered.

In 2010, Nigel Farage, an anti-European Union member of the EU Parliament, rose following a speech by Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council. As Van Rompuy listened, Farage, a Briton, added that the former Belgian prime minister came from "pretty much a non-country."

Nearly 1,000 civil servants in Taiwan must take classes in cyber security after falling for a trap set up by their employer to test Internet safety, an official said on Wednesday.

The government of New Taipei City, near capital Taipei, sent out an email last month which claimed to contain a steamy sex video in order to check how carefully its 6,000 staff were protecting their computers against hacking and virus attacks, she said.

With burgers as ballots, a restaurant in the U.S. capital is conducting its own gourmet straw poll in the run-up to national elections on November 6.

BLT Steak, a stone's throw from the White House, is giving patrons a choice of hamburgers named after President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Republican challenger Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan.

A shopping centre near Milan is claiming an unusual record -- the biggest vertical garden in the world, covering a surface of 1,263 square metres (13,600 square feet) with a total of 44,000 plants.

The huge garden, which was inaugurated in 2010 but was only certified as a record this week, was designed by architect Francesco Bollani who headed up a creative team that included an architecture studio from Montpellier in France.

A man who admits cooking and serving his own severed genitals to paying diners in Japan has been handed over to prosecutors on an allegation of indecent exposure, Tokyo police said Tuesday.

Criminal papers against the 23-year-old man and three other people who helped organise the event were sent to the Tokyo district public prosecutors' office, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) said, without naming them.

A 55-year-old French hunter who had to have his right hand amputated after his dog accidentally shot him said Monday he didn't blame the pet, which he still considered "adorable".

The hunter, identified only as Rene, told France Bleu radio the dog accidentally pulled the trigger of his shotgun when he jumped on him while they were hunting Sunday in the Dordogne region.

Fast food chain McDonald's is branching out: after salads and wraps, the burger restaurant is entering the noodle business.

From September 20, the chain will add Asian noodle boxes -- "McNoodles" -- to its menu, but only in Austria and only for a two- or three-month trial period.

Re-tests on people receiving blindness benefits on the Ionian island of Zante have exposed a fraud rate of over 82 percent, Greece's largest social security agency said on Monday.

The Social Insurance Institute (IKA) said that it had re-tested 221 people after an inquiry ordered by the health ministry last year.

Two masked armed thieves who robbed a shop in Germany over the weekend got away with a disappointing booty: one pink piggy bank containing 20 euro cents ($0.26) and two bars of chocolate.

Police in the western German city of Duesseldorf said the two robbers fled in panic when the alarm was raised, managing only to grab what was to hand.