Saddam's golden gun goes on display

Saddam Hussein was truly the man with the golden gun. And to prove it, Australia has put the weapon on display at its war museum. Australia went to war in Iraq to remove Saddam's weapons and still maintains forces in and around the Middle Eastern country.

On Monday, the Australian War Memorial accepted a golden Tabuk rifle -- the Iraqi equivalent of the AK-47 -- from the Australian military, which in turn received it from allied U.S. troops in thanks for taking part in the Iraq war.

"This weapon is an example of the excesses of the former Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein," the Memorial's Assistant Director Nola Anderson said. The rifle was found by American soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) during the clearance of buildings around Kirkuk, in northern Iraq.

Healer's nude dance rite upsets some..

A Malaysian traditional folk healer who dances in the nude while treating her patients has upset some people in the conservative, mainly Muslim country, a newspaper said Tuesday. Mokhtar Mohamad Noor, 53, a teacher who wanted his sick wife to be cured, said the healer gave his wife a drink and spoke an incantation before she and some male followers in their 20s and 30s started dancing in the nude, the Star newspaper reported. "She kept muttering unintelligible incantations which sounded like the singing of Koranic verses," Mokhtar said, adding that the woman sat under a yellow umbrella and the dance continued before he left with his wife, tired of the group's antics. The bomoh, or shaman, whom some superstitious Malaysians believe can call on spirits to assist in curative rituals, is based in the city of Kota Baru, Kelantan state. "I want the state religious affairs department to take stern action against the bomoh whose healing practice is against Islamic teachings," the Star quoted a neighbor, Fuzi Nor, as saying. Malaysia is a relatively modern and relaxed Muslim country where about 40 percent of the population is non-Muslim, but authorities in Kelantan, which is ruled by an opposition Islamist party, frown on departures from Koranic injunctions.

Human bone smuggling racket uncovered

Indian police have discovered a stash of hundreds of human skulls and thigh bones and arrested a gang for allegedly smuggling them to the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan for use in Buddhist monasteries. "During interrogation they confessed that the hollow human thigh bones were in great demand in monasteries and were used as blow-horns, and the skulls as vessels to drink from at religious ceremonies," investigating officer Ravinder Nalwa said Tuesday. It was the second cache of bones found in eastern India since April and police now believe the region could be the center of a much broader trade in human bones. They suspect some bones may even have ended up as far away as Thailand and Japan.

Officers found the latest collection in Jaigaon, a town in eastern India on the border with Bhutan, and arrested four people who said they were smuggling them across the border, Nalwa told Reuters by telephone from the northeastern town of Siliguri.

In April, police discovered what they called a "human bones factory" in the state, and arrested six people for illegally trading in skeletons. The bones were apparently being sold to medical students and for use in traditional medicine.

Both caches of bones appear to have originated in Varanasi, a Hindu holy city in northern India where millions of people are cremated every year on the banks of the Ganges. "The skeletons seized in Jaigaon had all come from Varanasi's cremation centers and all these years we thought they were just going secretly to medical students," Nalwa said. Eastern India was once a thriving center for the export of human skeletons, which were sent as far as western Europe, former traders in Kolkata said.

But the federal government banned the exports in the late 1980s after human rights groups raised questions about how the bones were being collected, forcing the trade underground.