Chinese court sentences Buddha statue thief to death
Beijing: A farmer, who stole and damaged a rare two-tonne statue of Lord Buddha has been sentenced to death, an official report said. Chen Mengxing, from north China's Hebei province was also found guilty of stealing another rare relic from a temple in Shouyang county in Shanxi province, Xinhua news agency said, quoting a verdict handed down by the Beijing no 1 intermediate peoples court on Friday. Chen's accomplices, Liu Xueru and Wang Liqiang, were given life imprisonment. The 165-cm-high stone Buddha statue, Beijing's oldest, dates back to 499 AD and had been kept in a house in a village for the past 1,500 years. Chen and his friends stole the statue on the night of March 25 last year and badly damaged it as they tried to remove it.

Tehran revels in the sound of long-forgotten opera music
Tehran: The German opera trio fromthe opera houses of Berlin and Dusseldorf received a standing ovation after their two-hour concert here on Thursday and had to give three encores before the enthusiastic audience left the Rudaki Music Hall. More than 400 people had come for the one and only public concert and an equal number had to stand outside the sold-out music hall where the trio two men, one woman played pieces by Schubert, Mozart and Verdi. The concert was arranged by the German embassy in Tehran on the occasion of Germany's presidency of the European Union. Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Rudaki Music Hall hosted the late conductor Herbert von Karajan, who gave a concert for the former Shah of Iran.