A court in Greece has rejected an appeal for the release of a British man who killed his son when he plunged from a hotel balcony with his two children on the island of Crete two years ago, his lawyer said yesterday.
John Hogan from Bristol was cleared of murdering his six-year-old son Liam by a Greek court earlier this year, but ordered to be kept under psychiatric treatment.
He jumped with Liam and his sister Mia, two, from a balcony in the Cretan resort of Ierapetra during a family holiday in August 2006.
"Our request was rejected and it broke our hearts. He will remain in the psychological clinic for the time being and not be released," Dimitris Xyritakis, his lawyer, said. "In a few months' time, we are going to try again."
Mr Hogan had hoped to return to Britain, where a court ruled last month he had the right to appeal against a British inquest verdict that Liam's death was an unlawful killing.
Birds fall prey to foreclosure crisis
Real estate agent Jeffrey Dolfinger was making a routine occupancy check on a foreclosed home near Poughkeepsie, New York, when he made a heart-wrenching discovery: two bedraggled cockatiels nearly starved to death.
"We entered into this wreck of a house, opened the door, and there sat two cockatiels with about a six-inch-high pile of bird feces under them," Mr Dolfinger said.
"I'm not a bird person, but I knew a bird is not supposed to look this way."
Despite terrible bird allergies, Mr Dolfinger gathered them up and brought them to a pet store specialising in birds. A woman at the store nursed them back to health.
The pair of cockatiels represents a little-known side of the foreclosure crisis: exotic birds abandoned or dropped at shelters because their owners cannot move into an apartment or a relative's home with the sometimes- noisy creatures.
Gays linked to spread of AIDS
Moscow has banned gays and lesbians from promoting their way of life because they can help spread HIV/AIDS, the Russian capital's 72-year-old mayor was quoted by RIA news agency as saying.
Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, speaking at an HIV/AIDS conference in Moscow, also said there was no scientific proof that condoms provided full protection against sexually transmitted diseases. "We have banned, and will ban, the propaganda of sexual minorities' opinions because they can be one of the factors in the spread of HIV infection," Mr Luzhkov was quoted as saying by state-owned RIA.
Mr Luzhkov's administration has banned several gay rights marches in Moscow in the interests, it argues, of ensuring security and preventing public disorder.
Search for Europe's rarest bird
Birdwatchers the world over, here's a challenge for you. Conservationists have launched a global quest for the slender-billed curlew, the rarest bird in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, which was last spotted in Oman in 1999.
The crow-sized bird, also known as Numenius tenuirostris, used to be seen regularly and in large flocks - it was regarded as very common in some areas of the Mediterranean. But its population declined dramatically during the 20th century because of hunting and loss of its wetland habitat.
Conservationists want birdwatchers to help find out whether the bird still exists - and are handing out a toolkit complete with pictures, a map of the most recent sightings and a recording of the bird's call to make identification easier.
"This is the Holy Grail of birdwatching. We need to find it before it's too late to save it," said Nicola Crockford of Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, one of the main conservation groups behind the campaign.
"Next winter we will have the first-ever comprehensive international survey to find the bird - it will stretch all the way from Morocco right the way through to Iran, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Middle East," she told Reuters in an interview.
Researchers create body-swap illusion
Researchers using closed-circuit television to create an illusion have made volunteers virtually swap bodies, even making women believe they were in a man's body and vice-versa.
The experiment, reported in the Public Library of Science journal Plos One, shows it is possible to manipulate the human mind to create the perception of having another body, the Swedish researchers said. It helps explain how humans understand the limits of their own bodies, Valeria Petkova and Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm reported.
They set up a series of experiments aimed at fooling their volunteers, each an extension of a common illusion in which people can be fooled into thinking a rubber hand is their own. For the illusion, the volunteer's real hand is concealed and stroked at the same time the visible rubber hand is. The brain will often trick the volunteer into truly feeling as if the rubber hand is his or her own hand.
Dr Petkova and Dr Ehrsson went further, using a closed-circuit camera to fool their volunteers into believing a rubber mannequin was in fact their own body - and eventually, that another human being was.