The U.S. government is easing the airport screening process for travelers 75 and older, beginning to roll out new rules just in time for the long Memorial Day holiday weekend, an official said Friday.

From this weekend the elderly will no longer have to doff shoes, belts and jackets as they pass through security checkpoints at New York's three major airports: John F. Kennedy International, La Guardia, and Newark Liberty.

They may need more work to look like screen beauty Angelina Jolie or pop star Lady Gaga, but growing numbers of women are taking a step toward emulating the stars by having their skin tattooed.

At the annual New York City Tattoo Convention last weekend, tattoo artists from Brazil, Europe, Japan and other spots around the globe unveiled their wares to a mixed crowd, and women were a strong presence.

U.S. director Lee Daniels had some explaining to do in Cannes Thursday over a scene in his new film "The Paperboy" which sees Nicole Kidman pee on the jellyfish sting of her co-star Zac Efron.

The movie premiered on Thursday casts Kidman as a small-town vamp whose tacky sensuality proves mesmerizing to the fresh-faced youth played by Efron, a world away from his "High School Musical" debut in the Florida-set thriller.

After last year's triumph for a terrier who went on to Oscar glory with "The Artist", the 2012 pack of celluloid canine talent was looking strong Thursday for Cannes' unofficial Palm Dog award.

"A dark dramatic trend has emerged" which "starts with 'Moonrise Kingdom' in which a plucky pooch is pierced by a fatal arrow... to the nasty end for Fanny in 'The Hunt'," said Toby Rose, who announces the winner on Friday.

Two Poles were detained Thursday after a corpse rolled up in a rug fell out of a sofa-bed that they were trying to load on a local commuter train, a police officer said.

"We were informed by railway men that the body fell out of the sofa-bed onto the station platform. At first, I thought they were joking," Robert Czerwinski, a spokesman for the northern Polish city of Slupsk told Agence France Presse.

A penguin on the run from a Tokyo aquarium since early March was adjusting to life back on the inside Friday after being recaptured on a riverbank.

The Humboldt penguin, one of 135 kept at Tokyo Sea Life Park, was recaptured after 82 days of freedom that had even seen it outwit Japan's well-resourced coastguard.

Taiwan's unmarried women were up in arms Thursday over the education ministry's online dictionary, which defines a "good woman" as one who focuses on her family life and adores her husband.

Several women lawmakers slammed the ministry for being biased against unwed women and promoting chauvinistic attitudes.

A British stuntman became the world's first skydiver to land without a parachute on Wednesday, falling 731 meters (2,400 feet) to drop safely onto a crash-pad of cardboard boxes.

Wearing a specially-made "wing suit", Gary Connery leapt from a helicopter over Henley-on-Thames in southern England, aiming -- with his life hanging in the balance -- at a "runway" of 18,000 cardboard boxes.

Two newborn cheetahs are settling into Washington's National Zoo after they beat the odds and came in the world in circumstances worthy of a veterinary thriller, the zoo said Wednesday.

Their mother Ally bore one of the cubs, a male, on April 23 at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute outside the U.S. capital and -- not unexpectedly for a first-time cheetah mother in captivity -- abandoned it.

Los Angeles has something of a bad reputation for traffic jams, with its perennially snarled freeways. But, surprisingly, it's not the worst U.S. city for gridlock, says a new study.

That dubious honor goes to .. Honolulu.