France - A self-professed cannibal was put in solitary custody after apparently eating bits of a fellow prison inmate in a gory case in France. Nicolas Cocaigne has confessed to attacking his cellmate, 31-year-old Thierry Baudry, when guards opened the cell door last Thursday morning to find Baudry beaten, cut with scissors and a razor, strangled and asphyxiated with a plastic bag. Cocaigne has been charged with premeditated murder and “violating the integrity of a corpse”.

Iraq — According to a new controversial law, Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies. The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, which would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon, 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972.