World Briefs

Germans fretted about being unloved in Europe yesterday after their most popular band of the last decade got zero points from 40 of 42 countries in the Eurovision Song Contest and they ended up sharing last place.

"Why doesn't anyone like us?" asked Bild am Sonntag newspaper after Germany had yet another horrendous showing in the annual contest watched by more than 100 million viewers. "Are we too stupid to win or is it simply we're not liked?" the Sunday newspaper said.

Britain's veteran Eurovision presenter Terry Wogan questioned whether the contest favoured Eastern European countries after Britain's highly touted entry came last with Germany and Poland.

"It's no longer a music contest," Mr Wogan said, adding he was not sure he would bother going to Eurovision anymore.

The No Angels, four women in skimpy dresses who sold more than five million albums in the last eight years, went into the contest in Belgrade with hopes of giving Germany their second victory, in the 53-year-old contest. Germany last won in 1982.

Shark attack kills surfer

A shark killed a 21-year-old surfer off a Mexican Pacific coast beach, police said over the weekend, the second fatal shark attack in the area in less than a month.

Mexican Osvaldo Mata, a student at a nearby university, was surfing with friends near the resort town of Zihuatanejo on Friday when a shark grabbed him, bit off one of his hands and took two bites out of his thigh, a police spokesman said.

His friends paddled him back to shore, a few metres away, but he lost consciousness and died before medics arrived. "Two witnesses, his friends who were swimming with him, told us they saw a two-metre shark attack him and pull him underwater," the police spokesman for the state of Guerrero said.

Sarkozy takes aim at satirical T-shirt

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has launched legal proceedings against the makers of a satirical T-shirt who mocked his reputation as a law-and-order hardliner, the company's owner Thierry Boeuf said over the weekend.

The T-shirt firm is already being sued by some leading firms, including Heineken and Lacoste, over its hard-hitting slogans and on Friday found out that Mr Sarkozy's lawyers had joined the legal attack.

"It is astonishing. I can't understand it," Mr Boeuf told France Info radio. "There are so many other things going on in this country and I would have thought there are better things to do than worry about these T-shirts," he added.

The T-shirt which caused offence to the President has Mr Sarkozy's name written in large letters across the chest with a gun target replacing the letter "o" in his name. Above his name is the French national motto "liberty, equality, fraternity" splattered with blood.

Fourth human foot washed ashore

Another severed human foot has been discovered washed ashore on Canada's Pacific coast, but police are no closer to solving the gruesome mystery on where they are coming from.

The shoe-clad foot was discovered over the weekend on a small uninhabited island south of Vancouver in the Strait of Georgia, and is the fourth discovered in the region in the past 10 months. All four cases involved right feet, and each was found on a different island. The earlier feet were also still in shoes.

The discoveries have sparked wide speculation over where the feet came from and who they belonged to, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police warned people yesterday "not to get caught up in unsubstantiated theories".

None of the severed feet appears to have been forcibly removed, and because the shoes would have protected the feet as they floated in the water, forensic experts say they could even have floated into the strait from a long distance away.

DNA testing has failed to link the earlier discoveries to any missing person cases in British Columbia.

Oldest Everest climber

A 76-year-old Nepali man has become the oldest person to climb to the top of Mount Everest, a government official said yesterday, beating a record set last year by a Japanese man.

Min Bahadur Sherchan reached the summit yesterday along with four other Nepali climbers, said Ramesh Khatri Chhetri, a tourism ministry official. "He is in good health and coming down the slopes of the mountain," Mr Chhetri said.

Mr Sherchan breaks the record set last year by Katsusuke Yanagisawa, who was 71 at the time of his ascent.