A roundup of today's other stories in brief.
Body of third woman found in Suffolk
LONDON -Suffolk police investigating the murders of two prostitutes said the body of a third woman had been discovered. A spokeswoman said it was too early to say if the death was linked to the murders of Gemma Adams (25) and Tania Nicol (19).
Officers were called to Nacton near Felixstowe yesterday afternoon after a member of the public spotted the body, she said.
Earlier, police investigating the murder of the two prostitutes whose bodies were found in the same stretch of water said there were "striking similarities" between the deaths. - (PA)
220,000 hectares burn in Australia
MELBOURNE -Two houses were destroyed by wildfires yesterday in drought-stricken southeast Australia on the region's hottest December day in 53 years. More than 3,500 firefighters battled blazes that have already burned more than 220,000 hectares (550,000 acres) of alpine forest and farmland in Victoria state.
The state Country Fire Authority said two houses had been lost in the villages of Rose River and Stonyford and more were threatened. No one was injured.
Smoke shrouded the state capital, Melbourne, Australia's second largest city, where the temperature reached 42.1 degrees, the hottest since December 20th, 1953. - (PA)
Laureates accept Nobel prizes
STOCKHOLM -Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and six academics credited with breakthrough research on the origins of life, the universe and economic policy have accepted their Nobel prizes in Stockholm.
Earlier yesterday, Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo for a powerful grassroots campaign to relieve poverty in Bangladesh.
Physicists John Mather and George Smoot won the physics prize for discovering a type of radiation that gave clues to the origin and age of the universe, while economist Edmund Phelps accepted his prize for research into the interplay between inflation and employment.
For chemistry, Roger Kornberg won for showing how cells copy genes, a process essential to how cells develop and to life itself. Medicine prizewinners Craig Mello and Andrew Fire won for discovering how genes can be "silenced" or kept from expression. - (Reuters)
Rival now says he will back Royal
PARIS -Socialist candidate Segolene Royal got a boost in her bid to become France's first woman president when a rival abandoned plans to run and backed her instead in the 2007 election.
Jean-Pierre Chevenement, a former interior minister, who heads the small Republican and Citizen Movement party, had threatened to run next year, but yesterday he said he was retiring from the race and would support Ms Royal. - (Reuters)
Roadside bomb blows up bus
ALGIERS -A roadside bomb attack on a bus near Algiers yesterday killed an Algerian and wounded nine people - four Britons, two Lebanese, an American, an Algerian and a Canadian.
The official APS news agency said police were trying to establish the origin of what it called the makeshift device. - (Reuters)
Reid warns of Christmas attacks
LONDON -An attempted terrorist attack in Britain in the run-up to Christmas is "highly likely", British home secretary John Reid warned yesterday. "The threat in this country is very high indeed," Mr Reid told a television programme.
"It is at the second highest level and people now know that publicly, because we publish it on the web. And that means that it is highly likely that there'll be a terrorist attempt." - (Guardian service)