A Paris appeal court yesterday ordered the body of French singer-actor Yves Montand to be exhumed for genetic tests to decide a paternity lawsuit. Aurore Drossard claims that Montand, who died in November 1991 aged 70, was her father.
Montand repeatedly refused to undergo DNA tests to establish the veracity of Drossard's claim, but a court ruled in 1994 that she was his child based on witness accounts and their physical resemblance.
A Geneva judge said yesterday that he had issued international arrest warrants for seven Israelis in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap Athina Roussel - sole surviving heir to Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.
Judge Jacques Delieutraz called the suspects, several of whom were former Israeli army officers, "agents" who had done the "dirty work" of preparing the abduction by photographing the 12-year-old and her security entourage in Switzerland.
Athina was just three years old in 1988 when her mother Christina died at 37, leaving her as sole heir to a fortune amassed by her famous grandfather. He died in 1973, two years after his only son Alexander died in a plane accident.
A Vietnamese woman whose picture fleeing from a napalm attack became a worldwide symbol of the horrors of the war in Vietnam is to be appointed a UNESCO ambassador.
Kim Phuc, who was nine when she was photographed naked and screaming as she ran from her village, will be named "UNESCO goodwill ambassador for a culture of peace" in a ceremony in Paris on Monday.
She is now 34 and lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband and two children.
The black-and-white picture of her, which won a Pulitzer prize for Associated Press photographer Nick Ut, showed her running naked along a dirt road from a village hit by an attack by the deadly nerve gas. Ut rushed her to hospital, and she subsequently spent 14 months in Saigon being treated for burns with skin grafts.
Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej underwent examinations yesterday after developing an irregular heartbeat, the royal household and reports said.
He went into hospital a day after a royal physician said political infighting was making the revered monarch "sick" with worry, a claim which was denied by senior figures.