Two full page ads placed by British largest clothing retailer Marks and Spencer in two British daily newspapers in London on Friday offering their apologies for charging extra for large size bras.

LONDON – The Battle of the Bust is over, and consumers have triumphed.

Britain’s largest clothing retailer, Marks & Spencer, has backed down on its incendiary policy of charging a 2 pound ($3) surcharge for bras that are DD or larger in the face of a spreading consumer revolt.

Think women don’t care about this issue? Then think again — that’s what M&S executives had to do after some 14,000 women gave their name to a Facebook campaign aimed at eliminating the big boob penalty.

“We always try to do the right thing by our customers and we thought we had, but it’s clear we’ve got it wrong this time,” said M&S chairman Stuart Rose. “From Saturday, no matter whether it’s large or small bras you need, the price will be the same.”

To get the message out, the company paid for an eye-catching full-page advertisement in several national newspapers Friday. It showed a full-figured woman in lacy green lingerie. In the ad, the company apologized for its mistake and offered a 25 percent reduction in all bras of all sizes for the next two weeks.

“We are just overwhelmed,” said Becky Mount, a co-founder of the Busts 4 Justice group that brought retailing icon M&S to its knees with a canny Internet and media-oriented campaign. “We’ve won, and we never thought it would happen so quickly.”

The group, which grew exponentially in the last few days, had vowed to challenge Rose and other M&S executives at the company’s annual meeting this summer. Mount said this threat, and growing media support for their crusade, made the company’s leaders realize they were losing the public relations battle.

“They didn’t want a lot of big-breasted women storming their meeting,” said Mount, 19. “I think they realized they were dealing with a much bigger force than they thought originally, and that we weren’t going to go away.”

She said the group’s members would be happy to shop at M&S now that the surcharge has been dropped.

The new policy brings M&S into line with other major retailers in Britain, who decline to pass the higher cost of designing and manufacturing large-size bras on to the consumer.

British lingerie specialists ranging from the pricey Agent Provocateur to the saucy Ann Summers line do not charge more for DD bras, despite the extra work that goes into producing them. In the United States, bra prices on the popular Victoria’s Secret Web site do not change as sizes get larger.

But policies change store by store and brand by brand.

At the upscale Rigby & Peller shops in London, which specialize in personalized fittings, the company’s own bras are priced the same regardless of the size, said buyer Nicky Clayton. But some outside brands the store sells do contain a markup for larger sizes.

“Some brands like the Italian company Prima Donna charge us more, so we pass that on,” she said. “But for Rigby and Peller bras the prices are exactly the same because we’ve got total control and can maintain pricing across all the sizes.”

She said M&S probably ran into trouble because its lingerie price policy differed from the strategy used for other items.

“If they charged more for larger sizes of all their items, like garments and outerwear, it would have been fine,” she said. “It was just that they took this policy only on the lingerie sector, that made it a problem.”

BERLIN — A pair of watercolor paintings depicting farm scenes and signed “Adolf Hitler” are up for auction in the German city of Nuremberg this month.

The Weidler Auction House said Friday that paintings titled “Farmstead” and “Farm Buildings on the River” and listed in its online catalog are attributed to the Nazi dictator.

Auction house owner Herbert Weidler described the paintings as “average” quality and said they were being offered by a Polish owner, whom he declined to identify.

The watercolors are listed in the catalog as “signed and dated 1914,” with bidding to start at euro3,500 ($4,618) at the auction, which runs April 23-25.

As a young man, Hitler sought to earn his living as an artist. He is believed to have painted hundreds of works, several of which have come up for sale over the years.

Weidler said he sold one four years ago for euro11,000 ($14,364). Another collection of Hitler’s artwork was sold in England in 2006.

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On the Web

Weidler Auction House: www.auktionshausweidler.de (in German)

Israelis wrapped in prayer shawls and phylacteries participate in the special "Blessing of the Sun" prayer on the rooftop of the Azrieli commercial center in Tel Aviv, on Wednesday. Devout Jews around the world on Wednesday observed a ritual performed only once every 28 years, saying their morning prayers under the open sky in the "blessing of the sun."

JERUSALEM – Devout Jews around the world on Wednesday observed a ritual performed only once every 28 years, saying their morning prayers under the open sky in a ceremony called the “blessing of the sun.”

Tens of thousands of worshippers stood next to the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s walled Old City, the holiest site where Jews can pray. Hundreds headed to the ancient desert fortress of Masada, while others prayed on the roof of a Tel Aviv high-rise and congregated on road sides.

“God created the world in seven days,” said Yona Vogel, one of the estimated 50,000 who attended the Western Wall prayers. “On the fourth day he put the sun into orbit and every 28 years it returns to the original place that it stood when God created the world.”

The special blessing — called the Birkat Hachamah in Hebrew — was marked in many time zones, starting with members of the small Jewish community in New Zealand. In hundreds of places, from Israel and Italy to New Zealand and Kyrgyzstan, observant Jews rose before dawn for outdoor prayers and dancing.

The prayer came on the eve of the weeklong Passover festival, in which Jews commemorate the exodus from slavery in Egypt. The timing was coincidental, but added to the joyous feeling felt by many worshippers.

In New York City, a rabbi was to lead a morning gathering near the United Nations. Another group was to pray on the deck of a 17th-story penthouse near ground zero, the site of the demolished World Trade Center.

A Birkat Hachamah ceremony in 1981 was held on the 107th-story observation deck of the World Trade Center’s South Tower, and the rabbi was dedicating Wednesday’s blessing to the memory of those who died in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Organizers of a ceremony on the boardwalk in Long Beach, New York, on Long Island, said they would distribute sunglasses to worshippers. But they might go unused; the forecast was for a cloudy morning.

The Orthodox Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch movement scheduled live Webcasts from seven locations as the sun moved across the Earth, starting at 8 a.m. local time in Christchurch, New Zealand, followed by events in Brisbane, Australia; Jerusalem; London; New York; Colorado Springs, Colo.; and Honolulu.

An especially colorful ceremony was reported by The New York Times in 1897, when a rabbi was arrested for presiding over the ritual as hundreds of Jews assembled without a permit in a city park. He and another rabbi tried to explain what they were doing to a police officer.

“The attempt of a foreign citizen to explain to an American Irishman an astronomical situation and a tradition of the Talmud was a dismal failure,” the Times reported, adding that the officer, wondering “whether some new infection of lunacy had broken out … seized the rabbi by the neck and took him to Essex Market Police Court.”

Devout Jews emphasize that they are not worshipping the sun, but rather paying homage to God.

“We make a special blessing on this day to remember the day that God created the world and put the sun into orbit. It’s as though he is creating the world anew,” Vogel said.

Modern science may have overtaken the astronomy of the scriptures, but scholars say the blessing still has symbolic value as acknowledgment of the divine role in the universe.

AP writer Verena Dobnik, in New York, contributed to this report.

Mixes up Paraguay, Uruguay

RIO DE JANEIRO – Where’s Ecuador? Better not ask that question in Brazil.

A new Brazilian geography textbook for sixth-grade students doesn’t even include the South American country on the map.

In fact, the book distributed by the education ministry in Brazil’s most populous state botches the location of most of Brazil’s neighbors. Paraguay is switched with Uruguay, and a second “new” Paraguay is shown with a coastline at the southern tip of Brazil.

That is something that even Paraguay’s military generals could not accomplish during their 1864-1870 war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay – in which historians say landlocked Paraguay dreamed of capturing a slice of Brazil’s coastline.

Bolivia is fortunate enough to appear on the map, but the book misses its border with Paraguay – the Paraguay that sits where Uruguay should be, that is.

The geographical jumbling baffled sixth-grader Joao Gabriel Anchieta, who looked over the map while being interviewed by Globo, Brazil’s largest television network.

Asked what would happen should he have to take a geography test based upon the map, Joao said he “would get a bad grade.”

About 500,000 of the books containing errors were distributed and will be replaced with corrected maps, to be paid for by the Vanzolini Foundation, which published the books, Sao Paulo’s education ministry said.

No one answered telephone calls by The Associated Press to the publisher’s offices.

Libya’s Gadhafi, an ex-terrorist, remaking himself into statesman

Moammar Gadhafi has proposed a joint Israeli-Palestinian state that woul be known as "Isratine."

CAIRO – He has stoked unrest between African nations but now heads the African Union and is pledging to tackle the Darfur crisis. Recently he urged Arab leaders allow their citizens to travel to the Gaza Strip to fight Israel, but later he said the world’s Jews deserve their own homeland – albeit in a state shared with Palestinians called “Isratine.”

At first glance, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s seemingly contradictory stances look like business as usual for a man known for his love of the spotlight – and of controversy – and for eccentricities such as having an all-female bodyguard, a unique move among heads of Muslim nations.

But as oil-rich Libya throws open its doors after decades as a pariah state, some analysts believe what the 66-year-old Arab and African leader is doing is trying to hone his image in the West, using the recognition he gets from fellow Africans to offset the disdain he has long endured from his Arab counterparts.

Gadhafi “says what he feels like saying, with no real sense of possible contradiction,” said George Joffe, a Libya expert at the Center of International Studies at Britain’s Cambridge University. “But there is, behind it, a consistency.

“It is that he doesn’t want to unsettle the United States,” Joffe said.

As President Barack Obama begins to chart a new U.S. foreign policy – and with renewed Tripoli-Washington relations still in their infancy – Gadhafi is careful to appear as a potential facilitator in two of the world’s most troubled regions.

While he seems determined to hang onto his role as revolutionary, he has shed his terrorist image.

“People change, and Gadhafi has been a master of readjusting policies to meet realities,” said Joffe.

Helping him in that change is his background, said John Hamilton, an analyst with Cross-border Information, a British-based firm that researches the Middle East and North Africa.

“Gadhafi has got very strong views, and he’s got the ability to project them because of who he is, and what he’s been,” said Hamilton.

Gadhafi’s nearly 40-year history as Libya’s leader reads like a résumé of terror and revolutionary causes, including playing host to Abu Nidal after Syria expelled the Palestinian militant leader best known for the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

But Libya’s own acts were nothing to scoff at, earning a U.S. airstrike in 1986 for the bombing of a disco in Berlin that killed two American servicemen. Two years later, a bomb believed planted by Libyans destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.

Gadhafi’s decision to hand over the two suspects in the case more than a decade later, pay billions of dollars in compensation and renounce his weapons of mass destruction program paved the way for lifting U.S. sanctions on Libya and the country’s re-emergence on the world scene.

His election early this month to head the African Union marks Gadhafi’s latest triumph – a post that he looks to parlay into promoting his vision of a unified African government he likes to call “the United States of Africa.”

The idea, like most of Gadhafi’s past unity bids, is unlikely to get much traction.

But the new African Union post fits neatly into his hopes to prove wrong the Arab kings and presidents who generally have viewed him as part troublemaker-part madman.

Gadhafi, who is wily enough to have kept a firm hold on Libya’s leadership since seizing power as a young army officer in a 1969 coup, has long sought to put down other Arab leaders by appealing over their heads to the Arab people.

That was the spirit behind his call for Arabs to go fight Israel during its war on the Gaza Strip and for Arab leaders to let them do so, which cast those leaders as too timid or frightened to unleash the Arab masses on the Jewish state.

Then came the other side of the coin – Gadhafi’s op-ed essay in The New York Times late last month in which he declared: “The basis for the modern State of Israel is the persecution of the Jewish people, which is undeniable. . . . The Jewish people want and deserve their homeland.”

Gadhafi resurrected the single state idea that dates to the 1940s when the Palestinians, then the majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, tried to block the birth of a Jewish nation. Lately it’s been taken up again by some Palestinians as they see their tiny would-be state being gobbled up by Jewish settlements, but it is firmly opposed by Israel and the United States.

Nobody is going to be too upset, however, about the revival of an idea that’s likely to slip back into obscurity. Most experts do not expect that Gadhafi will be able to create an “Isratine,” any more than he could turn his idea of a pan-Arab state into reality – or that he will be able to bring about a unified Africa, given that some African leaders firmly opposed Gadhafi’s election.

“In terms of weight, or ability to influence the process, nobody feels . . . he has any significant influence,” Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, a North Africa expert at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center, said of the Libyan leader.

Still, Joffe from Cambridge’s international studies center notes that the “Isratine” plan, which Gadhafi incidentally first proposed in 2002, allows him to grab the spotlight without having to take substantial action.

“It’s a device to avoid having to engage,” said Joffe. “If he doesn’t have to engage, he doesn’t upset the United States.”

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Pakistani officials closed in on a peace deal with a Taliban-linked group Sunday that could lead to enforcement of Islamic law in a part of the country that is supposed to be fully under government control.

Militants in the Swat Valley responded by declaring a 10-day cease-fire as a goodwill gesture.

The agreement is expected to be formally announced Monday – and draw criticism from the United States, which has said such deals merely give insurgents time to regroup.

Several past deals with militants have failed, but Pakistan says force alone cannot defeat al-Qaida and Taliban fighters wreaking havoc in its northwest and attacking U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan.

Regaining the Swat Valley from militants is a major test for Pakistan’s shaky civilian leadership. Unlike the semiautonomous tribal regions where al-Qaida and Taliban have long thrived, the former tourist haven is supposed to be under full government control.

But militants have gained power since a peace deal last year collapsed within months, and violence has increased.

Provincial government leaders confirmed they were talking to a pro-Taliban group about ways to impose Islamic judicial practices in the Malakand division, which includes Swat.

The Swat Taliban’s version of Islamic law is especially harsh. They have declared a ban on female education, forced women to stay mostly indoors and clamped down on many forms of entertainment.

Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan said the militants would adhere to any deal reached with the group if Islamic law is implemented in the region.

He also announced the 10-day cease-fire.

“We reserve the right to retaliate if we are fired upon,” he said. “Once Islamic law is imposed, there will be no problems in Swat. The Taliban will lay down their arms.”

Khan also said the militants had freed a Chinese engineer held captive for nearly six months. Long Xiaowei was freed Saturday, days before a planned visit to China by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

Provincial law minister Arshad Abdullah said the deal would require the pro-Taliban group to convince the militants to first give up violence. Then existing laws governing the justice system can be amended or enforced, he said.

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DAILY DEVELOPMENTS

• U.N. officials said they were still trying to establish contact with the kidnappers of one of their American employees seized Feb. 2 in Quetta, Pakistan.

• Afghan President Hamid Karzai and special envoy Richard Holbrooke said Afghan officials will take part in a strategic U.S. review of the Afghanistan war.

The Associated Press

An archeologist works over a skeleton at the site of a mass grave found in a ruined pyramid in Tlateloco neighborhood on Tuesday in Mexico City. Archeologists digging in a ruined pyramid in downtown Mexico City found a mass grave that may hold the skeletal remains of the last holdouts among the Aztecs who fought the Spanish conquerors under Cortes.

MEXICO CITY – Archaeologists digging in a ruined pyramid in downtown Mexico City said Tuesday they found a mass grave that may hold the skeletal remains of the Aztec holdouts who fought conquistador Hernan Cortes.

The unusual burial holds the carefully arrayed skeletons of at least 49 adult Indians who were buried in the remains of a pyramid razed by the Spaniards during the 1521 conquest of the Aztec capital.

The pyramid complex, in the city’s Tlatelolco square, was the site of the last Indian resistance to the Spaniards during the monthslong battle for the city.

Archaeologist Salvador Guilliem, the leader of the excavation for Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, said the Indians might have been killed during Cortes’ war or during one of the uprisings that continued after the conquest.

Guilliem said many burials have been found at the site with the remains of Indians who died during epidemics that swept the Aztec capital in the years after the conquest and killed off much of the Indian population.

But those burials were mostly hurried, haphazard affairs in which remains were jumbled together in pits regardless of age or gender.

The burial reported Tuesday is different. The dead had many of the characteristics of warriors: All but four were young men, most were tall and several showed broken bones that had mended.

The men also were carefully buried Christian-style, lying on their backs with arms crossed over their chests, though many appear to have been wrapped up in large maguey cactus leaves, rather than placed in European coffins.

The mass grave contained evidence of an Aztec-like ritual in which offerings such as incense and animals were set alight in an incense burner, but Spanish elements including buttons and a bit of glass also were present.

Susan Gillespie, an archaeologist at the University of Florida, said the grave was unusual, both because it was unlikely the Spanish would have bothered with such careful burial of Aztec warriors, and because the Indians themselves would have been more likely to cremate any honored dead.

But Gillespie, who was not involved in the excavation, also noted that little is known about the period immediately following the fall of the city, when Cortes razed most pyramids and temples, then abandoned the largely destroyed metropolis. He lived on the city’s outskirts before returning to rebuild a Spanish-style city on the ruins.

It may have been in that interim period after Cortes left that the Aztecs returned to bury their dead, Guilliem said.

Gillespie agreed the burials could be those of disease victims or rebellious Indians from later years, rather than warriors who fell in the 1521 battle, and said more research was needed, such as a skeletal analysis to show cause of death.

Another possibility, she said, was that the men could have been held by the Spanish for some time and killed later. That was the fate that befell the leader of the Aztec resistance, emperor Cuauhtemoc.

Archeologists work among remains found in a ruined pyramid in Tlateloco neighborhood on Tuesday in Mexico City.

Florida deep-sea explorers say they have discovered the legendary British man-of-war HMS Victory that sank in the English Channel 264 years ago.

TAMPA, Fla. – Deep-sea explorers who found $500 million in sunken treasure two years ago say they have discovered another prized shipwreck: A legendary British man-of-war that sank in the English Channel 264 years ago.

The wreckage of the HMS Victory, found below about 330 feet of water, may carry an even bigger jackpot. Research indicates the ship was carrying 4 tons of gold coins when it sank in a storm, said Greg Stemm, co-founder of Odyssey Marine Exploration, ahead of a Monday news conference in London.

So far, two brass cannons have been recovered from the wreck, Stemm said. The Florida-based company said it is negotiating with the British government over collaborating on the project.

“This is a big one, just because of the history,” Stemm said. “Very rarely do you solve an age-old mystery like this.”

Thirty-one brass cannons and other evidence on the wreck allowed definitive identification of the HMS Victory, 175-foot sailing ship that was separated from its fleet and sank in the English Channel on Oct. 4, 1744, with at least 900 men aboard, the company said. The ship was the largest – and, with 110 brass cannons – the most heavily armed vessel of its day. It was the inspiration for the HMS Victory famously commanded by Adm. Horatio Nelson decades later.

Odyssey was searching for other valuable shipwrecks in the English Channel when it came across the Victory. Stemm wouldn’t say exactly where the ship was found for fear of attracting plunderers, though he said it wasn’t close to where it was expected.

“We found this more than 50 miles from where anybody would have thought it went down,” Stemm said. Federal court records filed by Odyssey in Tampa seeking the exclusive salvage rights said the site is 25 to 40 miles from the English coast, outside of its territorial waters.

A Ministry of Defense spokesman said Sunday the government was aware of Odyssey’s claim to have found the Victory.

“Assuming the wreck is indeed that of a British warship, her remains are sovereign immune,” he said on condition of anonymity in keeping with government policy. “This means that no intrusive action may be taken without the express consent of the United Kingdom.”

He would not say whether the government had begun talks with Odyssey over the future of the find.

Newspapers of the day and other historical records analyzed by the company indicated that the Victory sank off the Channel Island of Alderney near Cherbourg, France. A 1991 British postage stamp depicts the Victory crashing on the rocks there. Pieces of the ship had washed up in various places, but its final resting place remained a mystery.

The belief that the Victory had crashed onto the rocks had marred an otherwise exemplary service record of the ship’s commander, Sir John Balchin, and a lighthouse keeper on Alderney was prosecuted for failing to keep the light on. Odyssey believes the discovery exonerates both men.

“As far as the family is concerned, it is an astonishing revelation,” said Robert Balchin, a 66-year-old British university administrator and direct descendant of the commander. “It’s as if he’s sort of come alive again.

“When I went to see this extraordinary find of the cannon with the coat of arms of the king on the side, it was really a wonderful feeling to know that Sir John Balchin saw that every day, and it brought a very special communion with the past.”

WASHINGTON – A released Guantanamo Bay terror detainee has re-emerged as an al-Qaida commander in Yemen, highlighting the dilemma facing President Obama in shaping plans to close the detention facility and decide the fates of U.S. captives.

A U.S. counterterror official confirmed Friday that Said Ali al-Shihri, who was jailed in Guantanamo for six years after his capture in Pakistan, has resurfaced as a leader of a Yemeni branch of al-Qaida.

“By Allah, imprisonment only increased our persistence in our principles for which we went out, did jihad for, and were imprisoned for,” he said in a video posted on a militant-leaning Web site Friday. It was the second time this week a reference to al-Shihri has shown up on the Web site. He was mentioned in an online magazine on Jan. 19 with a reference to his prisoner number at Guantanamo, 372.

Al-Shihri was released by the U.S. in 2007 to the Saudi government for rehabilitation. But this week a publication posted on a militant-leaning Web site said he is now the top deputy in “al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula,” a Yemeni offshoot of the terror group headed by Osama bin Laden. The group has been implicated in several attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Yemen’s capital Sana.

The announcement from the militant site came the same day that President Obama signed an executive order directing the closure of the jail at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year.

A key question facing Obama’s new administration is what to do with the 245 prisoners still confined at Guantanamo. That means finding new detention facilities for hard-core prisoners while trying to determine which detainees are harmless enough to release.

According to the Pentagon at least 18 former Guantanamo detainees have “returned to the fight” and another 43 are suspected of resuming terrorist activities. Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell declined to provide the identity of the former detainees or what their terrorist activities were.

It is unclear whether al-Shihri’s name would be a new addition to that list of 61.

Al-Shihri is one of a small number of deputies in the Yemeni group, the U.S. counterterror official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive intelligence.

The militant Web site referred to al-Shihri under his terror nom de guerre, “Abu Sayyaf al-Shihri.” The video refers to him as “Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri.”

An online magazine posted to the Internet site said al-Shihri is the group’s second-in-command in Yemen. “He managed to leave the land of the two shrines (Saudi Arabia) and join his brothers in al-Qaida,” the statement said.

Included in the site’s material was a message to Yemen’s populace from al-Qaida figure Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s top deputy. SITE Intel Group, which monitors extremist Web sites, provided a partial translation of the magazine article and the video.

According to Pentagon documents, al-Shihri was stopped at a Pakistani border crossing in December 2001 with injuries from an airstrike and recuperated at a hospital in Quetta for a month and a half. Within days of leaving the hospital, he became one of the first detainees sent to Guantanamo.

CANBERRA, Australia – Two men were found floating in an ice box in the seas off Australia and told authorities they had spent 25 days adrift after their fishing boat sank with the loss of 18 other crew members, an official said Tuesday.

The men, 22 and 24, from the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar, were rescued from the Torres Strait by a helicopter Saturday and flown to a hospital on Thursday Island off the coast of Queensland state, Maritime Safety Authority spokeswoman Tracey Jiggins said.

Both men stood in the pink ice box which has waist-high sides and waved when they were spotted by a customs border protection patrol flight.

The men told police they had been aboard a 30-foot (9-meter) wooden fishing boat that sank Dec. 23 with a total of 20 crew from Thailand and Myanmar, which is also known as Burma.

Jiggins said the men found refuge inside a large insulated box that held ice on the boat. “At the time of the sinking, the two survivors also witnessed other crew in the water with no flotation devices,” she said.

She did not know what the men ate or drank during their ordeal.

One of the rescuers, pilot Terry Gadenne, told Seven Network television that each man drank about four pints of water within seconds of being hoisted aboard the helicopter.

An official at the hospital, Dr. Oscar Whitehead, said the men were in good condition and would be discharged into the care of immigration authorities later Tuesday. He said their greatest medical problem had been dehydration.

Immigration Department spokesman Sandi Logan said the men would likely be kept in a motel at Thursday Island under the department’s supervision while officials attempted to prove their identities. Neither man had identity documents.

Logan did not know how long the men were likely to be kept in Australia.

The Myanmar embassy in Canberra had not contacted the men and did not intend to make any public statement, an embassy official said.

Officials did not know why the fishing boat sank, Jiggins said, but the two men said the vessel had been taking on water for some time before it went down.

The survivors were not able to provide accurate details of where the boat sank, Jiggins said. She said Australian authorities did not plan to search for other survivors.

“We’ve made an assessment … that the remaining crew members would not be able to survive 25 days in the water without any form of flotation device,” Jiggins said.

SYDNEY, Australia – Position: Island caretaker. Duties: Lazing around Australia’s Great Barrier Reef for six months. Salary: $100,000.

Unemployed, take heart – the aforementioned job ad is real. Billing it as the “Best Job in the World,” the tourism department in Australia’s Queensland state on Tuesday said it was seeking one lucky person to spend half a year relaxing on Hamilton Island, part of the country’s Whitsunday Islands, while promoting the island on a blog.

The move is part of a campaign to boost tourism in the state. In exchange for the plush salary, free accommodation in an oceanfront villa and airfare from the winner’s home country, the “employee” will be required to stroll the island’s white sand beaches, snorkel, maybe take a dip in the pool – and post photos and videos of his or her experiences on a weekly blog.

Applications are open until Feb. 22 and 11 finalists will be flown to Hamilton Island in May for the final selection process. The job begins on July 1.

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On the Web

Best Job in the World: www.islandreefjob.com

A World War II-era mass grave was unearthed by construction workers in Malbork, northern Poland.

WARSAW, Poland – Construction workers in northern Poland unearthed a World War II-era mass grave containing what are believed to be the bodies of 1,800 German men, women and children who disappeared during the Soviets’ march to Berlin.

Poles digging at the site of a planned luxury hotel in Malbork, which was called Marienburg and was part of Germany during the war, excavated a bomb crater at the foot of the city’s famous 13th century Teutonic Knights fortress, authorities said Monday.

The workers found a small group of bodies in late October and halted digging to allow prosecutors to investigate. After resuming work weeks later, the workers turned up dozens, then hundreds, of additional corpses. They believe more may be found.

It was not immediately clear how the bodies ended up in the crater, but initial examinations by Polish and German experts concluded that they are likely the remains of German citizens still classified as “missing” more than 60 years after the end of the war, town official Piotr Szwedowski said.

Millions of civilians were killed or declared missing during World War II. Many of those who disappeared in the chaos of wartime Europe are unaccounted for.

“Examination of the remains and the circumstances confirm that these are the missing German inhabitants of Malbork,” Szwedowski said. “I have no doubt it is them.”

As the Red Army advanced in early 1945, the inhabitants of Malbork were ordered to evacuate. Some refused, while others were prevented from doing so by the general chaos of the nearing front.

The Soviets bombarded the city with heavy artillery in their assault. After the German military retreated, the remaining civilians found themselves at the mercy of Red Army troops. There are no known living witnesses of what happened, Szwedowski said.

The bodies were buried naked without possessions, he said.

“We found no trace of any clothes, shoes, belts, glasses – not even dentures or false teeth,” he said.

About 100 skulls – primarily of adults – have bullet holes in them, suggesting these people could have been executed, but it is unclear how the others were killed, Szwedowski said.

A strong earthquake shook Costa Rica on Thursday, killing at least three people and sending frightened residents running into the streets of the capital as windows shattered and walls cracked.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the 6.1-magnitude temblor was centered 22 miles (35 kilometers) northwest of the capital of San Jose in the early afternoon, near the Poas Volcano national park.

The National Emergency Commission said more than 200 people were injured and that 42 communities suffered damages.

Palestinians carry a wounded boy to a hospital in Gaza City this week.

RAFAH, Egypt – It’s a 2 1/2-hour journey that should take 30 minutes. A hair-raising sprint on dirt roads through bombed-out cities and military checkpoints, all while coping with the ever-present threat of gunfire or a stray bomb.

Such is the ordeal faced by paramedics ferrying patients out of Gaza – where hospitals are overflowing due to the conflict with Israel – into neighboring Egypt. Ambulances run by the Red Crescent, the Islamic world’s equivalent of the Red Cross, have been busy transporting amputees, spinal cord patients, burn victims and other severe medical cases.

On Wednesday, Israel and Hamas observed a three-hour pause in fighting to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid such as food, fuel and medical supplies into Gaza. Similar lulls will occur in the future, Israel said.

The pauses “will help the movements of the ambulances,” said Hesham Hassan, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross. “But three hours is not enough.”

Nearly 3,000 Palestinians have been wounded since the war began Dec. 27, along with 690 dead, according to Associated Press figures based on interviews with Palestinian health officials. Ten Israelis have been killed, Israel’s government has said.

Abdel Bassam El Sharafi, 40, often accompanies the wounded in ambulances. The Gaza City doctor was injured in the first week of the fighting when a piece of shrapnel lodged in his back, yet he presses on in spite of the pain.

The most dangerous part of the 25-mile trip from Gaza City to Rafah, El Sharafi said, comes each time they encounter an Israeli army checkpoint.

“We usually stop,” he said, “and wait until they wave us through. Last time they shot in our direction.”

Hakim El Habashi, a paramedic from south Gaza, noted that slow ambulance response times have led many Gazans to transport the wounded in their own vehicles. This prevents the injured from getting adequate medical care during transport, he said.

Ambulance drivers operate in the extreme stress of a live combat zone, with mortars and rockets often shaking the ambulance and rattling its patients.

“There is a risk on the road from the Israeli bombings,” said Ahmed Abdel Wahab, a health official at the Rafah border crossing.

Since the conflict began, Egypt has allowed only medical supplies to cross its border into Gaza. There are signs, though, that the Arab state is loosening its policy slightly as baby formula and dried milk were among the goods permitted to cross Wednesday.

Still, the situation in the Gaza Strip, home to 1.5 million Palestinians, remains critical.

“If electricity is not restored,” said Hassan of the Red Cross, “the hospitals, which are running on generators, will soon be unable to provide basic services.”

Many people died in earthquakes last year.

Quakes killed 88,070 in 2008, the highest figure since 2004, reports the U.S. Geological Survey and the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The year’s strongest quake was in Sichuan, China, on May 12. At least 69,185 people died, 18,467 are missing and presumed dead, and 374,171 were injured due to the magnitude 7.9 quake.

The deadliest year for earthquakes since the 1970s was 2004. That year 228,802 died as a result of quakes, the majority — 227,898 — in Asia due to tsunami waves generated by an undersea earthquake near Indonesia on Dec. 26.

The deadliest quake in the past four centuries was on Aug. 7, 1976 in Tangshan, China. Although the death figures were officially 255,000, the estimated death toll has been put as high as 655,000.

In 2008, killer quakes hit 13 other countries on four continents, including Algeria, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Peru, Russia, and Rwanda.

The strongest quakes in the United States struck Alaska’s Aleutian Islands on April 15 and May 1, both magnitude 6.6. Because the islands are sparsely populated, there was no damage.

The next largest was a magnitude 6.0 quake on Feb. 21 near Wells, Nev., which injured three people and heavily damaged 20 buildings.

A magnitude 5.4 temblor struck southeastern Illinois on April 18. It caused little damage but was felt throughout the central states.

While USGS estimates that there are several million earthquakes worldwide each year, most are too small or too remote to be detected. Location and depth, as well as the seismic stability of buildings and roads, determine how much damage they do.

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On the Web:

For the list of 2008 earthquake statistics: neic.cr.usgs.gov/neis/eq—depot/2008/