US researchers say they have discovered what appears to be the oldest imprint of a prehistoric insect, made while the dragonfly-like creature was still alive.
The imprint found at a rocky outcrop in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, is believed to have been made by an insect about 7.6 centimetres long as it stood on mud some 312 million years ago.
"It's not a dragonfly but picture a dragonfly-like body. We're looking at something related, maybe a mayfly," said the discoverer, Richard Knecht, a geology student at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
The imprint of the insect shows the thorax and abdomen, along with six legs, two of which may have moved slightly to create drag marks that hardened into burgundy-coloured stone.
Tufts paleontologist Jake Brenner said, "We don't have many good body fossils from this time period with these early flying insects. The level of detail is really unseen in continental deposits."
South African dies of deadly virus
Brazilian health officials were monitoring people in Rio de Janeiro for possible infections yesterday, after a South African man on a business trip died of a suspected hemorrhagic virus.
The body of the 53-year-old man, who arrived in Brazil on November 23 and began showing symptoms two days later, was being repatriated to South Africa in a zinc-sealed coffin.
Brazilian media reported officials as saying he may have been infected when he was a patient at a hospital in South Africa where four people died from a new strain of arenavirus, which also includes the germ that causes Lassa fever. The arenavirus is spread through the excrement or blood of rats and between humans through saliva or other body fluids.
The disease first infected a safari-booking agent in Zambia who was flown to South Africa on September 12 for treatment. She died two days later. A paramedic who accompanied her, a nurse from her intensive care unit, and a cleaner who worked in the hospital room also died.
Greece gets back Acropolis marble
Greece welcomed back a marble fragment from a frieze decorating the Parthenon temple which an Austrian soldier removed during World War II, but renewed a call for all its stolen treasures to be returned.
An inscription on the fragment, measuring 7-by-30 centimetres, says it was taken from the Acropolis in Athens on February 16, 1943 - in the midst of the three-year occupation of Greece by the Axis powers, led by Germany.
Martha Dahlgren inherited the piece - broken from the frieze adorning the Parthenon's inner colonnade - from her grandfather and decided to return it to Greece.
Greece has stepped up its campaign to recover ancient artefacts, and especially large sections of the decorative frieze removed from the Parthenon in 1801 by Lord Elgin, the then-British ambassador to the Ottoman empire.
The Parthenon Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles, were bought by the British Museum in 1816 but the British Museum has repeatedly rejected Greek calls for the return of the 2,500-year-old frieze on the ground that its statutes would not allow it to do so.
Aims to clear conscience after 25 years
A man who stole a moped in Austria 25 years ago has sent an anonymous confession letter to police, enclosing €1,400 cash to compensate his victim.
"Back then, I had no idea what the immaterial and material scope of such a crime could be, probably due to my lack of maturity at the time," the man wrote in the letter.
He said if police could not find the former owner of the moped to give him or her the cash in damages, they could donate the sum to local social services.
'Witchdoctor' held over 'child killing'
Police have arrested a man in southeastern Nigeria who said in a TV documentary he had killed 110 children he believed to be possessed by evil spirits, officials said yesterday.
Rights campaigners say fraudulent pastors or "witchdoctors" in some parts of Nigeria convince parents that their children are possessed and will bring misfortune such as divorce or disease so as to extort money to perform exorcisms.
Some accused children fall into the hands of child trafficking networks after being handed over by their parents.
"We are working on the orders of the state governor to arrest all those involved in all forms of child abuse and trafficking," Akwa Ibom state's commissioner for information, Aniekan Umanah, said.
Mr Umanah said Bishop Sunday Ulup-Aya, arrested in Mbo close to the Atlantic coast with six other suspects, had claimed in a documentary to have killed 110 children beset by evil spirits.
"I am not denying that I am a witchdoctor, but what I killed are witches in my patients not children," Ulup-Aya said while in detention.