Butterflies floating from a dress onto a video screen: Frank Sorbier reached for the high-tech future of haute couture in Paris Wednesday with a visually-gorgeous retelling of a dark fairytale.

Sorbier took as his cue the 17th-century French fairytale "Donkeyskin", about a widowed king set on marrying his own daughter, who escapes his clutches only by demanding a series of impossible gowns, the color of the sky, moon or sun.

World champion hot dog eater Sonya Thomas crushed her previous record Wednesday in the annual showdown, wolfing down 45 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes, to the cheers of an entranced crowd.

The 44-year-old "Black Widow," weighing in at 100 pounds (45 kg), said she achieved her goal of eating her age in dogs. The Korean-American, one of 14 competitors beat her record from last year by five.

A young lifeguard in Florida has lost his job after rescuing a drowning man in a section of beach he was not assigned to patrol, local news media reported Wednesday.

Tomas Lopez, 21, was manning his post on Hallandale Beach, north of Miami, on Monday afternoon when a beach-goer alerted him to a swimmer struggling in an "unprotected" part of the beach.

Burglars broke into the office of Greece's new deputy finance minister, making off with his passport and documents ahead of a crucial audit by EU-IMF creditors, a police source said on Wednesday.

The break-in at the general accounting office occurred several days ago but was initially kept under wraps, the police source told Agence France Presse.

A one-time anorexic from Toronto turned world-class competitive eater clinched his fourth straight hamburger title in Washington on Tuesday on the eve of New York's iconic hot dog classic.

Peter Czerwinski, 24, ate 15 hamburgers in the space of 10 minutes at the Z-Burger Independence Burger Eating Championship to win a $1,000 prize plus a similar amount of gift cards for the local burger chain.

A six-week-old Twitter account is making apparent progress in its mission to get people to stop tweeting pictures of their bank cards, often with full numbers visible.

It's unclear who set up @NeedADebitCard, but several of the Instagram and Twitpic images of debit cards that it has found and retweeted on the microblogging website have been pulled down.

The United States government has assured its citizens that, much like zombies, mermaids probably do not exist, saying in an official post: "No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found."

"Mermaids -- those half-human, half-fish sirens of the sea -- are legendary sea creatures," read the online statement from the National Ocean Service (NOS).

A German couple on holiday on the Italian island of Sardinia bought the live lobsters on the menu at a posh seaside restaurant for 500 euros ($629) and put them back in the sea, local media said Tuesday.

"When the woman came into the restaurant, she saw the lobsters straight away," Giuseppe Demuro, a chef at Mama Latina on Sardinia's luxurious Emerald Coast, was quoted as saying by the L'Unione Sarda newspaper.

Startled drivers weren't seeing things — it really was a kangaroo hopping down the highway in the U.S. state of Washington.

The meandering marsupial nearly caused a couple of accidents in the weekend and police responded, keeping the kangaroo off the road while its owner tracked it down and caught it with help from friends.

Spotlessly clean and decorated with plastic flowers and balloons for its opening ceremony, Priyanka Bharti's toilet is seen as a gleaming symbol of the empowerment of Indian women.

It has been built in the village of Vishnupur Khurd in Uttar Pradesh state due to the determination of Priyanka, a young bride who walked out of her new marital home when she was appalled to find she had to defecate in the open.