World briefs

An elderly German who hid a stolen suit under his clothes was caught because he forgot to take it off the hanger, police said yesterday.

A sales assistant at a men's outfitter in the western city of Aachen noticed the hanger bulging out when the man told her he had decided against buying anything. "Only a sign saying 'stop me, I'm a thief!' would have made the thief look more unprofessional," police said in a statement.

Termite hunters find mummy

Exterminators looking for termites in a monastery in Brazil's biggest city of Sao Paulo found a mummy and a skeleton believed to be at least 200 years old, the head of the monastery said on Tuesday.

"There were some mounds of termite dust and the exterminators broke into the walls to see what was in there," Father Armenio Rodrigues Nogueira, who is in charge of the monastery, one of the city's oldest, said.

"It was a huge surprise."

The bodies, believed to be those of two nuns, were found weeks ago, but officials at the Mosteiro da Luz (Monastery of Light) decided to keep them secret while the Institute for National Artistic and Historical Heritage did further research. The Catholic monastery was founded in 1774 by Brazil's first saint, Antonio Galvao, about 50 years before the nation's independence from colonial power Portugal.

Hanged for sorcery, gives birth

A Papua New Guinea woman gave birth prematurely as she struggled to free herself from a hangman's noose.

Nolan Yekum and her husband Paul were lynched in Kilip village in the jungle-clad western highlands two weeks ago after villagers believed they used black magic to kill a neighbour. The villagers dragged the couple from their home, hung them from a tree and left them to die.

"We managed to loosen the noose to get our feet on the ground... we were able to free ourselves," the husband said. "My wife, who was about seven months pregnant, delivered the baby while struggling to free herself."

The couple hid with friends in other villages but eventually sought medical help at the Mount Hagen Hospital where staff said the couple's baby girl and her mother were doing fine. The couple said they did not practice sorcery and did not know why their neighbour died.

Black magic is widespread in the South Pacific nation where women suspected of being witches are often hanged or burnt to death.

Sea monster could 'bite a car'

The fossil of a 15-metre-long "sea monster" found in Arctic Norway was the biggest of its kind known to science with dagger-like teeth in a mouth large enough to bite a small car, researchers said yesterday.

The 150-million year old dinosaur-era pliosaur, a fierce marine reptile, was about five metres longer than the previous pliosaur record holder found in Australia. "It's a new species and the biggest proven pliosaur," said Joern Hurum, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in Oslo who led the expedition to dig up the fossil 1,300 kilometres from the North Pole.

"A small car could fit inside its mouth," he said, adding the lower jaw was about three metres long. "Something like a Morris Minor would fit perfectly." The Museum said that pliosaurs were the top marine predators of the Jurassic era, preying upon squid-like animals, fish, and other marine reptiles. "The pliosaur is not the biggest sea monster but it's probably the most fierce," Mr Hurum said, adding the fossil has jagged teeth the size of cucumbers and its front flipper alone is three metres long.

Mexico City repairs sewage pipes

Mexico City, whose 20 million people produce enough sewage to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every minute, is fixing up its aging drainage system to avoid a pipe fracture that could flood entire neighbourhoods, the subway and the airport with human waste.

Mayor Marcelo Ebrard has unveiled a set of new pumps as the first part of a $1.2 billion spending plan to refurbish 160 kilometres of sewer tunnels that have not been fully inspected for 15 years. The first $56 million will go to build four new pumping stations that will increase the city's capacity to process the 40,000 litres of sewage it produces every second.

Mexico City, built up by the Spanish on the Aztecs' floating capital in the middle of a lake, is constantly sinking, which causes the drainage canals to back up. The six-metre-wide tunnels beneath the city are often clogged with objects dumped into sewers. A special team of divers wearing rubber suits wades through the filth to remove trash, animal carcasses and even human bodies.

Airline gets rid of 666

Lithuania's main airline is to change the code number under which its shares are listed to get rid of sixes at the end - giving way to a Christian tradition identifying the number 666 as a cipher for the Antichrist.

"It might look strange at first glance, but the meanings of numbers are still important in such an area as aviation... For example, often there is no 13th row marked in the airplane," Linas Dovydenas, the head of flyLAL Group, said. He said the airline's International Securities Identifying Number (ISIN) would be changed to LT0000127995 from LT0000126666.

The number 666 is used as the "number of the beast" in the New Testament's Book of Revelation and is seen by some as a cipher for the Antichrist - though its significance is hotly contested by scholars and theologians. "We live up to the tradition, and therefore we decided to change our ISIN code, which ends in sixes," Dovydenas said. Lithuania is a mainly Catholic country.