Sniffer dogs found 10 Iraqi and Syrian migrants hidden in the false bottom of a camper van in the Italian port of Brindisi, on a ferry coming from Greece, border police said on Thursday.

Fire crews had to cut open the bottom of the van to extract the nine Iraqis and one Syrian, three of whom required medical assistance.

Some world leaders may be making full use of the micro blogging Twitter tool to promote their ideas, but other international figures are shunning the medium, a new survey revealed Thursday.

"Sixteen of the G20 leaders are actively using Twitter for public diplomacy," said Matthias Lufkens, Digital Practice Leader at Burson-Marsteller, the communications firm behind the study.

Your mother was right: Pop music has become louder and less original over the years.

At least, this is the conclusion of a computer analysis of nearly half-a-million songs recorded between 1955 and 2010 and reported in Nature Scientific Reports Thursday.

The director of the International Monetary Fund's Latin America operations has resigned to become the head of a Chile's Canal 13 television network, the IMF said Thursday.

Nicolas Eyzaguirre, who took up his latest IMF post in January 2009, will leave his job immediately but his resignation will only be effective from the end of August, the IMF said in a statement.

Police were called to restore order after a bank ATM in eastern England started dispensing twice the money its customers were asking for.

The Lloyds TSB cash machine in the town of Ipswich began dispensing "free money" to customers on Wednesday after the bank branch had closed for the evening.

A 21-pound (9.5-kilogram) lobster caught off Cape Cod has found a new home at the New England Aquarium in Boston.

That's after a raffle for the lobster at Capt'n Elmer's Fish Market in Orleans, where it was caught July 14.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has unveiled a digitized 3-D image of Simon Bolivar based on remains exhumed two years ago to determine whether the South American independence hero had been murdered.

"Hurray for Bolivar! This is his face," Chavez said in presenting the portrait of over a meter (3.3 feet) high in a ceremony at the presidential palace marking Bolivar's 229th anniversary on Tuesday.

Britain's Manchester Airport launched an urgent investigation Wednesday after an 11-year-old boy managed to slip through security and fly to Rome without a passport or ticket.

Liam Corcoran walked through security checks without showing any documentation and successfully boarded a Jet2.com flight to the Italian capital on Tuesday, the airport in north-west England admitted.

Brazil's well-heeled socialites swear by them. Legions of slum-dwellers from the country's hillside "favelas" don them almost every day. Minimum wage earners behind juice bar counters use them, as do newly minted millionaires and, alarmingly, construction workers.

In Brazil, literally everyone wears Havaianas, the now world-famous brand of rubber and plastic flip-flops that's celebrating its 50th birthday this year.

Three Singaporean teenagers are facing the prospect of up to seven years behind bars for allegedly stealing school buses to go on joyrides, the Straits Times reported Wednesday.

A police statement said the three boys, aged 15 to 17, were arrested Monday after investigations showed they were the behind the theft of two school buses on an industrial estate.