Europe: Thief strikes at the Louvre

Someone with deep pockets and a taste for ancient Greece walked out of the Louvre with a 32-cm (12-inch) stone fragment from around 400BC, museum officials said. The piece, originally found near Athens, is a fragment of a wish-list dedicated to Zeus, asking the god to protect the country from all kinds of illnesses. "It's not really a work of art like a sculpture ... it has more of an historic, documentary and scientific value," said a Louvre spokesman.

- AP, Paris