Hajj Boudella's children will have to wait a while to see their father, even though a US federal judge ordered his release last week from the Guantanamo Bay prison after nearly seven years.

Mr Boudella's wife Nadja Dizdarevic, a mother of four, said she has to move from apartment to apartment each time her landlord finds out about her husband's case. But it may take up to two years before Mr Boudella, one of five Algerians ordered released last week from Guantanamo, returns home to Bosnia, where he first went during the 1992-95 war to help organise humanitarian assistance.

Mr Boudella stayed on past the war after marrying Nadja, who was widowed with one child when her first husband died in the war. They have three children of their own.

"He has never seen our youngest daughter who was only eight days old when they kidnapped him," Nadja said, referring to extradition by Bosnian authorities of six Algerians to the US military authorities in January 2002 shortly after the September 11 attacks on the US by al Qaeda militants.

'Chocolate Jesus'

Germany's churches have criticised a businessman for selling thousands of Jesus chocolates.

Frank Oynhausen set up his Sweet Lord chocolate Jesus-making business saying he wanted to restore some traditional religious values to Christmas in Germany.

But the German Protestant Church criticised the idea as "tasteless" and the Roman Catholic Church was not amused.

"I started thinking about how I could reintroduce traditional religious values into this commercial world," said Mr Oynhausen who developed the concept of "Sweet Lord" figures wrapped in gold foil.

But church associations expressed dismay.

"It is terrible that Jesus is being wrapped up in gold foil and sold along with chocolate bunnies, edible penguins and lollipops," said Aegidius Engel, a spokesman for the archbishopric of nearby Paderborn.

Killer neighbours

An Italian man and his wife were sentenced to life in jail for slitting the throats of four neighbours, including a two-year-old toddler who they said made too much noise, a court said yesterday. Olindo Romano and his wife Rosa Bazzi confessed during the investigation to slitting the throats of 30-year-old Raffaella Castagna, her young son Youssef, her mother and a neighbour.

They later retracted their confession, saying it had been made under pressure from magistrates.

The middle-aged couple lived in the same building as the Castagna family in Erba, and had complained frequently about Youssef's screams in a long-running dispute over noise.

The couple were arrested after another neighbour, whom they had struck with a knife and left for dead on the night of the murders, survived and identified them as the killers.

Jail for adultery?

South Korean prosecutors yesterday demanded a popular actress who tried to overturn the country's law that criminalises adultery be thrown in jail for a year and a half for having an affair.

Actress Ok So-ri's case has created a sensation in South Korea after she admitted to an affair with a singer and called on the country's Constitutional Court to overturn the statute that can send a person to jail for up to two years for adultery.

"The accuser (her husband) wanted a severe sentence," prosecutors said in court as to why they are seeking 18 months in jail for Ok, Yonhap news agency reported.

Last month, the Constitutional Court said adultery damaged the social order and therefore was a criminal offence.

Gender mixup

Handlers of a popular polar bear, brought to mate with a female in a zoo in northern Japan, found their breeding plan was doomed when they noticed that he, in fact, was a she.

Tsuyoshi, a four-year-old, polar bear, had been living in harmony with a female polar bear since June, the two often playing together, Masako Inoue, a zookeeper at the Kushiro Municipal Zoo, said yesterday.

"We thought he was a male, so we never had any doubts as we took care of him," she said.

"But one day we realised that the two bears urinate in the same way, and we thought, is that how males do it? And once we started to look at things that way, we weren't quite so sure."

After two DNA examinations of Tsuyoshi's hair and a manual exam, the Kushiro Municipal Zoo found Tsuyoshi to be a female.

It is not uncommon for the sex of polar bears to be misread, Inoue said.