A young woman has told police she escaped a kidnapper after being held for eight years in a sealed garage, apparently resolving a missing child case that shook Austria.

Police said relatives identified her as Natascha Kampusch, who vanished in 1998 aged 10 while walking to school.

Her suspected kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil, 44, a communications technician, died after throwing himself in front of a Vienna commuter train when a manhunt for him was under way, police said.

The head of the Federal Crime Office, Herwig Haidinger, said the woman was undergoing DNA tests to confirm her identity but that investigators were almost certain she was Ms Kampusch. Her passport was found in the cellar and she bore an identifying scar.

She met her mother yesterday for the first time since 1998.

Her father, Ludwig Koch, who split from her mother before the kidnapping, said he was overcome after being told his daughter had been found.

“I can’t believe that after eight desperate years my daughter is finally coming home. If it is true it will be the greatest thing that could possibly be.”

When Hitler’s Cross restaurant opened four days ago in a Bombay suburb, local politicians and movie industry types were on hand to celebrate beneath the posters of the Nazi leader and swastikas. The owner insisted then — and still does — that the name and theme of his new eatery is only meant to attract attention, even if it has outraged Bombay’s Jewish community.

Turner Broadcasting is scouring more than 1,500 classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons, including old favourites Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo, to edit out scenes that glamorise smoking. The review has been triggered by a complaint to British media regulator Ofcom by one viewer who took offence to two episodes of Tom and Jerry shown on the Boomerang channel.

Prisoners at Pematang Sinatar jail in Sumatra mixed hot chillies with water in plastic bottles to spray at guards.

The fiery liquid temporarily blinded the guards, allowing prisoners to grab their keys and make the break for freedom.

Sixteen of the inmates had now been recaptured, a police official said, but two were still on the run.

The men were meant to be on their way to breakfast but instead stormed the prison gate, Detective Den Martin told the Associated Press news agency.

They were spraying the chilli water and shouting “attack, attack”, he said.

A prison warder, Harianaja, told the Jakarta Post newspaper that the guards could not fight back because they were outnumbered.

“The is the first time chilli has been used to get out of this penitentiary,” the daily quoted him as saying.

A apartment tenant stabbed his building superintendent after being told to pay his rent or move out, then jumped from a third-floor window to his death, according to police and witnesses.
The superintendent, Andres Bautista, said Sebastian Catalan punched him and then stabbed him in the stomach.

After the attack, Catalan returned to his apartment and tried to escape out a window as police cars approached the building, officers said.

Witness LaShawn Richardson said she saw him jump, possibly aiming for a nearby tree, but that he instead hit a barbed-wire fence and then the ground. Catalan, 27, was pronounced dead at the scene.

Bautista, 35, speaking from his hospital bed, said the two men and others had been together for several hours at the building in the East New York section of Brooklyn. He said the violence broke out after he told Catalan that his 18-year-old brother would have to pay rent or move out.

Sure, those 100-inch LCDs are all well and good if your living room happens to encompass a large international tradeshow at all times, but if you’d prefer an LCD TV you can actually purchase and lug home for reals, Samsung’s new 70-incher is your biggest option yet.
They’re busting out this monster in the first half of 2007, and are packing in all the niceties like a 2000:1 contrast ratio, a sub-8ms response time, 600 nits of brightness and of course a juicy 1080p resolution. The display bests the 65-incher from Sharp which currently holds the LCD throne, and Samsung will be showing it off at the upcoming International Meeting on Information Displays on the 23rd of this month — where we doubt it will fail to impress.

Cigarette smoke can turn normal breast cells cancerous by blocking their ability to repair themselves, eventually triggering tumor development, University of Florida scientists report.

While some cells nonetheless rally and are able to fix their damaged DNA, many others become unable to access their own cellular first aid kit, according to findings from a UF study published today (Aug. 21) in the journal Oncogene. If they survive long enough to divide and multiply, they pass along their mutations, acquiring malignant properties.

Past research has been controversial. Tobacco smoke contains dozens of cancer-causing chemicals, but until more recently many studies found only weak correlations between smoking and breast cancer risk, or none at all. Those findings are increasingly being challenged by newer studies that are focusing on more than just single chemical components of tobacco, as past research often has done. In the UF study, researchers instead used a tar that contains all of the 4,000 chemicals found in cigarette smoke.

“Our study suggests the mechanism by which this may be happening,” said Satya Narayan, an associate professor of anatomy and cell biology at UF’s College of Medicine. “This is basically the important finding in our case: We are now describing how cigarette smoke condensate, which is a surrogate for cigarette smoke, can cause DNA damage and can block the DNA repair of a cell or compromise the DNA repair capacity of a cell. That can be detrimental for the cell and can lead to transformation or carcinogenesis.”

In their study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Miami-based Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute, UF researchers exposed normal breast epithelial cells to cigarette smoke condensate—a tar derived from a machine that literally “smokes” a cigarette in the laboratory—and found the cells acquired mutations characteristic of malignant cells.

The scientists say DNA repair appears to be compromised when chemical components of smoke activate a key gene. That gene interacts with an enzyme that plays a crucial role in repairing damaged DNA, preventing it from doing its job. The cell, despite its mutated form, can then multiply wildly.

A cell with damaged DNA has one of two fates, said Narayan, also a member of the UF Shands Cancer Center.

To work as a flight attendant, young women, for the first time in the country, are to be required to have martial arts skills, sources close to Sichuan Airlines confirmed this week.

Witnesses say a woman repeatedly abused her 14-year-old and 5-year-old daughters, tying them to a bed without food or water, forcing them to eat toilet tissue with dog feces on it, and making the youngest sleep in a dog crate, authorities said Friday.

Penny Lea Holloway, 42, of Broken Arrow also allegedly forced one of her children to take anti-psychotic medication and left the pair alone for days on end, according to reports.

Holloway, who was arrested Thursday night at her home in the 8500 block of South 193rd East Avenue, was moved from Broken Arrow to the Wagoner County jail on Friday. She is charged with four counts of child abuse.

“These children are telling us these outlandish stories, (but) we found evidence in the home which corroborates what they said,” Broken Arrow Police Maj. Mark Irwin said. “The victims say it’s been going on for years.”

Police rescued the children Tuesday night after a tip from a family friend, authorities said. The 14-year-old girl then told investigators that Holloway, their natural mother, put them through various types of physical and emotional abuse, according to a probable cause affidavit.