Ready, maestro; start your engines. A new musical piece called Car Orchestra which features the engines and horns of five utility trucks, known as 'utes', alongside a saxophone, double bass and disc jockey, made its debut at a music festival in western Sydney yesterday.

Michael Atherton, a professor at the University of Western Sydney, says he composed the score to connect the festival with the local culture of the working-class Campbelltown area, inviting a local Ute Club to play the piece.

"A festival's concept of culture should be very broad," Atherton told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.

"People can expect to hear fanfares, jazz-funk sections, percussion solos. They will hear mag wheels played like Balinese gamelans," he said.

Paparazzi gave Ledger drugs

A lawsuit against a Hollywood photo agency says two of its paparazzi supplied actor Heath Ledger with cocaine so they could secretly videotape him snorting the drug in a hotel room two years ago.

The suit says footage of the Ledger encounter, a portion of which aired briefly on two US television shows days after his death in January - prompting an outcry in Hollywood - was sold to media outlets around the world, some in Britain and his native Australia.

Sanctioned drug site

North America's only legal drug injection site in Vancouver is heavily used and widely supported, but probably has limited effect in cutting harm, the Government said.

An official report said the Insite facility, designed to help addicts in a drug-infested neighbourhood inject themselves more safely, operated at near full capacity but accounted for only about five per cent of the area's total injection drug use.

"This limits the likelihood of significant direct impact," said a panel appointed by Health Minister Tony Clement.

The federal government has been weighing Insite's long-term future. Clement opposes the facility but said he wanted a panel to review scientific studies before deciding its fate.

Annual Goldman prize

Six campaigners who took on governments and multi-national corporations from Russia to Ecuador and won have been rewarded with this year's Goldman Environmental Prizes.

The prize, dubbed the Nobel Prize for the environment and worth $150,000 to each of the six winners, is awarded to the individual deemed to have made the greatest contribution to the local environment - often alone and against great odds.

Founded in 1990, a recent survey suggested that the work of the Goldman Prize recipients to date had benefited more than 100 million people worldwide. The awards will be presented at a ceremony in San Francisco tomorrow.

This year's Africa winner is Feliciano dos Santos, a musician with polio who has used his band Massukos and personal drive to get cleaner water and better sanitation in some of the poorest parts of his native Mozambique.

Spain's Zapatero sworn in

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was sworn for a second term yesterday before naming a new Cabinet that includes Spain's first woman defence minister and a new post to boost low productivity.

"I promise on my conscience and honour to comply faithfully with the obligations of Prime Minister," Zapatero said, his right hand on a copy of the constitution in front of King Juan Carlos during a ceremony at the Zarzuela palace near Madrid.

Later, Zapatero named the pregnant Carme Chacon as Spain's first female defence minister, moving her from the Housing Ministry, and he installed Miguel Sebastian, his former chief economic adviser, as industry minister.

Women outnumber men for the first time in a Spanish Cabinet - nine to eight - continuing the reformist bent of the Socialist government which was re-elected on March 9.

One of them, Bibiana Aido, becomes Spain's first Equality Minister and at 31 years old, the youngest to sit at the Cabinet table.