A round-up of today's other stories in brief.
Man (23) is charged with killing vicar
LONDON -Police charged a 23-year-old man with the murder of a vicar in the grounds of his church in south Wales.
Fr Paul Bennett (59) died after suffering multiple stab wounds in an attack on Wednesday afternoon at St Fagan's Church in the village of Trecynon, near Aberdare in the Welsh valleys. - (Reuters)
Polish teachers face anti-gay law
WARSAW -Polish teachers who "promote homosexuality" will lose their jobs under a draft law expected to be passed within a month, a deputy education minister said.
Miroslaw Orzechowski, a member of the nationalist League of Polish Families party, said the law was not aimed against gay teachers.
"It will by no means harm the rights of homosexuals, hit by this affliction," the minister said. - (Reuters)
Oldest person has 116th birthday
STARIY YARYCHIV -A former shepherd presumed to be the world's oldest living person celebrated his 116th birthday in Ukraine.
Hyrhory Nestor was born in 1891, when his home was in the Austro-Hungarian empire. It became part of Poland in 1918 and later part of the Soviet Union. - (Reuters)
Gender equality for Spanish
MADRID -Spain signed equality between the sexes into law, enforcing better working opportunities for women and giving men better childcare rights.
The Socialist government has pursued equality since it came to power in 2004 and half of the cabinet are women. - (Reuters)
Intern sold Civil War files on eBay
WASHINGTON -An intern with the US National Archives stole 165 Civil War documents, including the war department's announcement of President Abraham Lincoln's death, and sold most of them on eBay, prosecutors said.
Denning McTague (40), runs a website that sells rare books. - (Reuters)
Court clears men of PM's murder
SOFIA -A top court overturned the life sentences of five men convicted of the assassination of Bulgaria's first post-communist prime minister Andrei Lukanov, officials said.
The original verdicts had been the Balkan country's only convictions for a string of Mafia-style assassinations since the fall of communism in 1989. - (Reuters)
Boys (12) held for shooting 17 pupils
LONDON -Two 12-year-old boys were arrested after 17 schoolchildren were shot in a playground with a ball-bearing gun.
The youngsters, aged seven to 11, were hit by the pellets fired through a hedge at Etchinghill primary school, in Rugeley, Staffordshire. - (PA)
US condemns blogger's jailing
WASHINGTON -The United States condemned an Egyptian appeals court ruling that upheld a jail sentence for a blogger convicted of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak.
"His conviction is a setback for human rights in Egypt," said state department spokesman Sean McCormack. - (Reuters)
Baby given away to pay for birth
HYDERABAD -An impoverished Pakistani couple has given away their new-born baby to a childless couple because they could not pay the hospital bill for the birth, the mother said yesterday.
Mohammad Hanif and his wife, Hakimzadi, gave away their five-day-old son to the childless couple who paid the 4,500 rupees (€56) bill to the hospital in the southern province of Sindh. - (Reuters)