Italian clothing firm Benetton went ahead Saturday with a controversial ad campaign featuring key world figures kissing each other, despite outcry last week from the Vatican and the White House.

A photo-montage of an embrace between the Pope and a Muslim cleric was dropped after the Vatican threatened legal action but the rest of the campaign remains unchanged.

With a taste for tropical fruit and a reputation as thieves, a herd of giraffes on a remote Philippine island is one of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos's most intriguing legacies.

The 20 giraffes, along with dozens of zebra and antelope, are descendants of a boatload of animals imported from Africa in the 1970s -- supposedly in a Noah's Ark-style effort to save them from extinction.

A Ukrainian wearing a Darth Vader costume made an unexpected appearance at a city hall in the south of the country, demanding a plot of land on which to park his spaceship, local authorities said Friday.

The man wearing the Star Wars villain's costume was shown in a video posted online walking up to the white pillars of the Odessa City Hall with a plastic light saber as wind ruffled his long black cloak.

A quirky tradition of dressing Asia-Pacific leaders in colorful local costume was revived at an Asian summit in Bali Friday, after briefly falling victim to the global economic crisis.

The annual APEC fashion parade was axed earlier this month at the group's summit in Honolulu, where leaders stepping out in Aloha floral shirts would have appeared out of step with the gloomy economic mood.

The photographer who pioneered Benetton's scandal-generating style of advertising slammed the clothing firm's latest campaign depicting a fake image of the Pope kissing an Islamic cleric.

"There's no creativity, style or poetry. Pathetic," Oliviero Toscani told Italian newspaper La Repubblica on Friday. "It looks like the product of a beginner's art class."

A high school teacher is under investigation after school officials said she was maintaining a pornographic website from her school-issued laptop computer.

Lincoln High School teacher Heidi Kaeslin is on paid leave while the district investigates whether she violated its code of ethics, The Stockton Record reported (http://bit.ly/uka7kA ).

A man claiming to be a former candidate for the post of governor of the U.S. state of Arizona has been found homeless and lovelorn in the west of Ukraine, aid workers said on Thursday.

The man, aged 53, carries the passport of Cary Dolego who in 2010 was a minor candidate for the governor of Arizona, said Anastasia Beridze of the social services charity in the western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi that found him.

France's reputation for chauvinism took a hit Thursday from an opinion poll that revealed that only 27 percent of its people think French culture is better than all others.

In fact, 73 percent of French respondents to the ongoing Pew Research Center survey of U.S. and European attitudes disagreed that "our culture is superior to others," the polling institute reported.

Barack Obama said Thursday he received the "most unique gift" since becoming American president when he was presented with a framed crocodile insurance policy in northern Australia.

Obama made a whirlwind stop in Australia's tropical north to address troops in Darwin on his way to Bali, where he is due at the East Asian Summit.

Italy's former prime minister and cruise-ship crooner Silvio Berlusconi released an album of love songs on his last day in office on Wednesday.

The self-declared Latin lover, who often boasted that he single-handedly kept large groups entertained for hours on end with his charm and silky voice, wrote the lyrics for the album entitled "True Love."