London

Sega, the creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, expects profits to be squashed this year after the slow release of new titles and poor returns from the Tokyo stock market.

A Chinese woman with HIV has married her partner in a widely reported ceremony in Beijing which illustrates changing attitudes in China towards the country’s growing Aids crisis.

”I landed lying down on my back and reached for my camera — it felt amazingly heavy, like a huge 50lb lead dumbbell. It was incredible. Just putting one foot in front of the other required tremendous effort.”

Former family doctor Harold Shipman, sentenced to life imprisonment for 15 murders, in fact killed nearly 300 of his patients, according to an official inquiry whose results may be published this week, press reports said on Monday.

Indonesian state terrorism, backed by Britain, America and Australia, is to blame for the deadly Bali bombings, prominent Australian journalist John Pilger argued in an essay published on Wednesday.

The rains have come to the undulating pastures of northern Matabeleland. In the bread basket of Zimbabwe, the seed should be in the ground by now. But instead the rural poor are bracing themselves for a catastrophe on a scale not seen since the Matabeleland massacres a generation ago.

Forty-five of the 117 hostages killed during the Moscow hostage drama died from gunshot wounds, Interfax reported on Tuesday quoting the Moscow prosecutor.

The sunken oil tanker Prestige had begun to release some of its potentially lethal cargo of about 60 000 tons of fuel oil from the bottom of the Atlantic ocean yesterday, according to Portuguese officials.

The US government warned yesterday that it might take ”intrusive, interventionist measures” to deliver food aid directly to millions of famine-hit Zimbabweans if President Robert Mugabe continues to starve his political opponents.

The Kenyan sun had not long risen on the first day of the Israeli tourists’ holiday when they arrived at the hotel. Children and their parents mixed with couples on Hanukkah vacation at the Paradise Hotel’s reception.

In a year-long experiment called LaughLab, a British psychology professor asked thousands of people around the world to rate the humour value of a list of jokes. The online search has produced a winner.

This week’s public row between Australia and south-east Asia has thrown into sharp focus a truth that many in the region have realised for some time: after years of living as a peaceable power a new, more aggressive Australia is emerging.

More than 40 years after his death, the novelist Ernest Hemingway is playing a key part in the delicate relations between the country of his birth and his adopted home. The Cuban government is to work with American scholars and descendants of the man who wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in a unique project to preserve the writer’s legacy.

A man wanted for questioning about a murder in which the victim’s body parts were found strewn around a housing project has fled to New York.

Three in 10 young people cannot find the Pacific ocean. Hint: it covers one third of the planet on a world map.

On the other side of the world from the White House, the brutal dictator of a rogue state where millions are close to starvation is stealthily acquiring the nuclear arsenal and missiles to threaten tens of thousands US troops and two stalwart American allies.

Fifty-four cases of Legionnaires’ disease have been confirmed in Cumbria, northern England, and 16 other suspected cases have been hospitalised.

Mars has always been a popular colony of earth in science fiction. Now, as space settlements become ever more likely, a British scientist has issued a warning about the nature such ”colonies” might take.

A scandal over a paedophile ring run from a state orphanage gripped Portugal yesterday as it threatened to engulf diplomats, media personalities and senior politicians.

At least five people were killed and three others wounded last night when a suspected Palestinian gunman entered a kibbutz near the West Bank and opened fire.

Astronomers are carefully monitoring a newly discovered two kilometre asteroid to see whether it is on a collision course with Earth.

An all-party committee of British lawmakers called for the reduction of criminal penalties for some drug offences.

New nurses and doctors in England may be subject to HIV tests amid fears that more than 700 infected nursing staff from Africa were recruited to the country last year.

A Hamburg court was given an insight yesterday into the last hours of one of the alleged pilots in the September 11 attacks during the trial of Mounir el-Motassadeq, a Moroccan accused of being the paymaster for the al-Qaeda cell which led the strikes.

Nazi researchers used concentration camp inmates to test a cocaine-based ”wonder drug” they hoped would enhance the performance of German troops, it was reported yesterday.

The Joy of Sex, the world’s most beloved bible of intimacy after the ancient Indian treatise, the Kama Sutra, has hit its second wind.

The British high commission in Kenya was closed yesterday for an indefinite period after receiving a ”specific threat” less than a week after the Mombasa attacks blamed on Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.

A British couple who claim to have adopted a boy who made their life hell are suing their local authority for failing to reveal the child was ”uncontrollable and vicious”, their lawyer said on Thursday.

The publication of a sensational ”kill-and-tell” autobiography by one of France’s most infamous child-murderers has sparked a national debate over the right of convicts to make money from their crimes.