LONDON: Sir John Woolf, the British film producer of the musical Oliver and political thriller The Day of the Jackal, died aged 85 on Tuesday.Woolf was also a founder director of Anglia Television and established the company as a leading producer of drama with Tales of the Unexpected among his credits. He worked with many big stars while guiding the Drama Department at Anglia for 25 years, including Kenneth More, Anna Neagle, Alec Guinness and Telly Savalas.Earlier in his career, he founded Romulus Films with his late brother James. Among their several successes were films like African Queen, Room at the Top and Oliver.

27 killed in Japan floods

TOKYO: The death toll from flooding and landslides caused by week-long heavy rains across Japan rose to 27 on Wednesday. The Hiroshima prefecture was the hardest hit by the rains with 22 of the 27 deaths occurring here. The 27 victims, including a new-born baby, were either killed in landslides or drowned infloods. The death toll is expected to rise further as rescue workers search for those still missing in western Japan. At least 10 other people are still missing, police said, adding that more than two dozen people had suffered injuries. Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi on Wednesday expressed condolences to the victims' families and his sympathy for those who lost their houses and suffered other damage due to the heavy rains. Japan's national police agency said rain-related property damage has been reported in 31 of the nation's 47 prefectures since the rains started to lash the Japanese archipelago a week ago. Police received 854 reports of landslides and 7,818 reports of flooded houses.

Germs & gems

SAN FRANCISCO: A robber who stole a doctor's bag from a hotel room may find out the hard way that crime does not pay. Besides containing jewellery and clothes, the bag stolen by the thief also contained a potentially lethal vial of live tuberculosis bacteria, the San Francisco Examiner reported on Tuesday.The vial belonged to a female researcher attending a conference on tuberculosis, a deadly disease which attacks mainly the lungs, intestines, skin and brain. The paper quoted health officials as saying that the missing vial did not pose a widespread danger to the public, but that if someone opened the vial and breathed in close to it, one could become infected.

`Christ lived in India'

MOSCOW: Russian orientologist Prof Sergei Alexeyev believes that the ``Son of God'' spent almost 16 years in India and Tibet, citing as evidence travelogues of 19th century Russian newsman and researcher Nikolai Notovich. Prof Alexeyev, in a Voice of Russia broadcast last weekend, said Christ reached Tibet with a caravan. He learned local languages of the region and studied Buddhist scriptures. Some Buddhist lamas believed that Christ was a bharatiya rishi (Indian hermit), while others regarded him as an ``angel'', he said. After spending some years in Tibet, Christ toured northern cities of India, including Delhi,Jaipur, Varanasi and Rishikesh, Prof Alexeyev claimed. Also, the orientologist says the founder of Christianity made an in-depth study of sacred Hindu texts during his Indian tour.