World briefs

A vicar in Germany who had the novel idea of helping parishioners escape the stresses and strains of daily life by letting them lie in an open grave was upset when intrusive journalists spoiled the atmosphere.

"I meant it as a meditative exercise," pastor Thorsten Nolting said. "I wanted people to think about what weighs on them down in the darkness and gather the energy to resist it."

Pastor Nolting, from the western German city of Duesseldorf, said his plan went "horribly wrong" when journalists' persistent questioning as parishioners were "laid to rest" earlier this week ruined the serenity of the occasion.

"It wasn't silent, as it should have been. They ruined it. (They) would not go away, even when I asked them," he said.

Farmer finds mystery space junk

A cattle farmer in Australia's remote northern outback yesterday said he had found a giant ball of twisted metal, which he believes is space junk from a rocket used to launch communications satellites.

Farmer James Stirton found the odd-shaped ball last year on his 40,000 hectare property, about 800 kilometres west of the northern Queensland state capital of Brisbane. But he only started inquiring into what the ball of metal really was, and where it had come from, in the past week.

He said the object was hollow, and covered in a carbon-fibre material. He has contacted some US-based aerospace companies to try to find out what the object really is.

In 1979, large parts of the Skylab space station fell to earth near a tiny outback town in Australia's west. A local council sent Nasa a ticket for littering and then US President Jimmy Carter rang a local motel to apologise.

1860 voice recording found

US audio historians have discovered and played back a French inventor's historic 1860 recording of a folk song - the oldest-known audio recording - made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

"It's magic," audio historian David Giovannoni said yesterday. "It's like a ghost singing to you."

Lasting 10 seconds, the recording is of a person singing Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit (By the light of the moon, Pierrot replied) - part of a French song, according to First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists and others dedicated to preserving humankind's earliest sound recordings.

It was made on April 9, 1860, by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a device called the phonautograph that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp, Mr Giovannoni said.

Schiller's relatives exhumed

Anthropologists have exhumed the graves of Friedrich Schiller's family in an attempt to positively identify the skull of the German dramatist and poet and end a 180-year-old debate.

"The remains of the bodies were in good enough condition for a DNA examination," said a spokesman for the city of Stuttgart, where the bodies of three relatives who died in the 19th century were unearthed.

To obtain DNA samples for testing, the city has opened the final resting place of the dramatist's eldest son, Carl, his grandson Friedrich as well as the wife of his grandson. The tests aim to show which of two skulls belonged to Schiller, one of Germany's most celebrated men of letters.

The mystery surrounding the skulls began in 1826, 21 years after Schiller died in Weimar, when the local mayor had 23 skulls retrieved from a mass grave in which the poet was buried. Many eminent people at that time were buried in mass graves.

Plane hits dog

Authorities in India's technology capital began clearing stray dogs from the city airport yesterday, a day after an aircraft's landing gear collapsed after hitting a dog. Three people were slightly injured in that accident during take-off, which prompted the civic body to catch dogs that wander on to runways.

Within hours, six dogs had been caught. The strays would be sterilised and kept in a pound.

Bangalore, which has about 70,000 stray dogs, issued an order to kill them last year after several children died from dog bites. But protests from animal rights groups stalled that decision. Instead, all dogs caught are sterilised.