Police in the Lithuanian city of Klaipeda were baffled to discover that a woman arrested for shoplifting last weekend had been registered as dead a month earlier.
The woman's parents had mistakenly identified a body found in a forest as that of their 27-year-old daughter, Natalya Pavlova, who disappeared from home in November, police said yesterday.
It emerged that Ms Pavlova was alive and well and living with her boyfriend in the same town.
"Her parents identified the corpse as their daughter. What could we do?" Petras Mikalauskis, a deputy police chief for the area, said."It was the first such case in my experience."
The real identity of the dead woman was not known. The police have launched an investigation.
Former child star dies at 25
Actor Brad Renfro, former child star of such films as The Client and Tom and Huck who had battled drug abuse in recent years, was found dead in Los Angeles on Monday at the age of 25. A Los Angeles County Coroner's spokesman said Mr Renfro's cause of death was under investigation.
The celebrity website TMZ.com reported that Mr Renfro, who pleaded guilty in 2006 to charges of trying to buy heroin, just months after a picture of his arrest ran on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, had just finished filming a movie with actors Winona Ryder and Billy Bob Thornton.
Mr Renfro made his film debut at the age of 12 as a young boy who knew too much in the 1994 John Grisham thriller The Client, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon. The following year he earned notice for his role in The Cure.
Reading dogs' emotions
Hungarian scientists are working on computer software analysing dog barks that could allow people to better recognise dogs' basic emotions, Hungarian ethologist Csaba Molnar said.
Mr Molnar and his colleagues at Budapest's ELTE University have tested software which distinguishes the emotional reaction of 14 dogs of the Hungarian Mudi herding breed to six situations: When the dog is alone, when it sees a ball, it fights, it plays, it encounters a stranger or it goes for a walk.
"A possible commercial application could be a device for dog-human communication," the scientist told Reuters. The computer correctly recognised the emotional reaction of the dogs based on their barks and yelps in 43 per cent of the cases. People had judged correctly in 40 per cent of cases.
Court okays sex films
Recording secret videos of sex with your partner is not illegal, Italy's supreme court has ruled. Rome's highest appeals acquitted a 49-year-old man who, unbeknown to his girlfriend, had recorded and kept films of them having sex. It overruled two previous verdicts which had given him a four-month jail sentence.
The woman had agreed to the man using a video camera to project live images of them having sex on to the bedroom wall, but did not know he was recording the action.
The court acquitted the man because he had not distributed the films to other people.
When the relationship ended the man gave the videos to his partner in a package accompanied by a note saying: "These are my last thoughts for you."
Scientists find 1,000 kg rodent
Scientists in Uruguay have found the fossil remains of a 1,000-kilogramme rodent that lived two million to four million years ago - the largest rodent ever found. The giant creature probably ate soft food such as fruit or tender plants, Andres Rinderknecht and Ernesto Blanco of the National Museum of Natural History in Montevideo reported yesterday.
"Rodents are a very successful group of mammals living almost worldwide and with small body masses (generally less than one kg)," they wrote.
"However, our work suggests that four million years ago in South America, rodents with 1,000 kg of body mass (a 'mouse' larger than a bull) lived with terror birds, saber-toothed cats, ground sloths and giant armored mammals among others."
They have named the fossil Josephoartigasia monesi. They dug it out of rock along the Rio Plata and said they were amazed at its size.
But it had small teeth and weak jawbones.