A round-up of today's other stories in brief.
Husband who helped suicide escapes jail
LONDON - A husband who helped his seriously disabled wife to commit suicide walked from court yesterday after being given a nine-month suspended jail sentence.
Wheelchair-bound Gillian March (59) had suffered from multiple sclerosis for more than 20 years and had tried to kill herself twice.
The Old Bailey heard that her husband, David, a landscape gardener, had admitted tightening the string on a plastic bag his wife put over her head when he returned to their home in Caterham, Surrey, in September last year. - (Reuters)
Pope urges Italians to defend family
VERONA - Pope Benedict yesterday urged Italian Catholics to defend the traditional family and in an apparent reference to gay marriage said they should oppose any moves to legalise "weak and deviant" unions. The pope made his comments in a wide-ranging speech to a convention of Italy's politically powerful Roman Catholic Church in Verona. - (Reuters)
Death row inmate kills himself
HOUSTON - A Texas death row inmate killed himself yesterday leaving a message scrawled in his own blood, hours before he was to be executed for a 1995 murder.
Michael Johnson (29) used a makeshift metal blade to cut his jugular vein and an artery in his right arm. Texas prison system sources said Johnson wrote: "I didn't do it." - (Reuters)
Darwin's works now on internet
LONDON - The complete evolutionary works of Charles Darwin have gone online, including the stolen notebook he carried in his pocket around the Galapagos Islands.
Tens of thousands of pages of text and pictures and audio files have been made available, including some previously unpublished manuscripts and diaries of the British scientist. - (Reuters)
Hizbullah used cluster bombs
BEIRUT - Hizbullah fired cluster bombs into civilian areas of northern Israel in the recent conflict, Human Rights Watch said yesterday. The Lebanese Shia militia used two Chinese-made rockets for cluster strikes that hit the village of Mghar in Galilee on July 25th, according to the US-based organisation. - (Guardian service)
'Borat' invited to Kazakhstan
ASTANA - Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, whose depiction of a homophobic, misogynistic Kazakh journalist has outraged the central Asian nation, has been invited to visit.
"We must have a sense of humour and respect other people's freedom of creativity," deputy foreign minister Rakhat Aliyev was quoted as saying. - (AP)