A 19-year-old German woman has escaped from prison by hiding in a friend's suitcase.
The fugitive hid inside the large case when her 17-year-old fellow inmate was released from the youth prison in northwest Germany on Friday, Lower Saxony ministry spokesman Dennis Weilmann said yesterday. The girl simply walked out of the building with her friend concealed in her luggage, Mr Weilmann said.
Neither of the teenagers has since been caught. Both had been jailed for theft. The escaped prisoner had less than two weeks left to serve.
Concert on Everest slopes
A US-based anti-cancer group yesterday said international musicians had staged the world's highest rock concert on the icy slopes of Mount Everest to raise awareness about the disease.
The concert was held on October 21 at an altitude of 5,640 metres by musicians who also included a cancer survivor, said Shannon Foley, a director of the Love Hope Strength Foundation, the Denver charity that organised the gig.
"We have registered with the Guinness Book of World Records to become the highest concert on earth," Ms Foley said, adding that the feat was the first of its kind.
Serial jail breaker does it again
A Belgian inmate made a dramatic escape from jail for the fourth time on Sunday evening after his armed accomplices landed in the prison grounds in a hijacked helicopter, prosecutors said yesterday.
Nordin Benallal, self-styled "escape king" with several convictions for armed robbery and carjacking, has previously run from a prison van, walked out of jail wearing a wig and sunglasses and scaled a prison wall with a rope ladder.
On Sunday, Mr Benallal's accomplices hijacked a helicopter near the prison in Ittre, some 30 kilometres south of Brussels. On landing, the helicopter was crowded by other prisoners, making take-off impossible and causing it to crash. The pilot and a prisoner were slightly injured.
Mr Benallal and his cohorts then briefly seized two prison warders as hostages and fled in a car parked nearby.
Mistaken identity
Passengers on a German train mistook a Halloween reveller dressed up as a gore-covered zombie for a murder victim and called the police.
The 24-year-old man fell into a drunken slumber on his way home from a Halloween party in Hamburg, police in the northern town of Bad Segeberg said yesterday. Believing his hands and face were smeared with blood, passengers alerted police after getting no response from him.
A first aid team called to the scene soon cleared up the confusion. Police told the man to remove his make-up after which he was allowed to continue his journey.
Liz Taylor to keep van Gogh
The US Supreme Court allowed actress Elizabeth Taylor to keep a Vincent van Gogh painting yesterday, rejecting an appeal by descendants of a Jewish woman who said she was forced to sell it before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939.
The justices refused to review a US appeals court ruling that dismissed the lawsuit because the descendants waited too long to bring their claims demanding that Ms Taylor return van Gogh's View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy.
Van Gogh painted the work in 1889. Less than a year later, he killed himself. Ms Taylor's father purchased the painting on her behalf at a Sotheby's auction in 1963 in London for £92,000. The painting now is estimated to be worth tens of millions of pounds.
'Chessboard killer' gets life
Russia's "chessboard murderer" was sentenced to life in prison yesterday for killing 48 people, after the supermarket worker told a court last week he felt like God as he decided whether his victims should live or die.
The 33-year-old Alexander Pichushkin stood with his head bowed inside a glass cage in the courtroom as the judge read out the sentence. Asked if he understood, Mr Pichushkin without lifting his head replied: "I'm not deaf. I understood."
Mr Pichushkin was given his nickname by the Russian media because he told detectives in a confession that he had hoped to put a coin on every square of a 64-square chessboard for each of his victims.