London  - A 14-year-old girl of Sikh faith Tuesday won a High Court discrimination battle against her school in Britain where she will now be allowed to wear a religious bangle known as the Kara.

Sarika Singh, from Cwmbach, in Wales, was excluded from her girls' school in November 2007 for refusing to take off the slim steel bracelet which teachers said contravened rules on jewellery at the school.

Sarika's lawyers said wearing the bangle was important to her as a symbol of her Sikh faith. She will now return to the school in September.

Taipei- Twelve men from mainland China were arrested in Taiwan posing as Buddhist monks for the purposes of swindling money, police said Tuesday.

The 12, with shaven heads and wearing monks' yellow gowns and yellow cloth bags, were arrested Sunday as they were about to board a flight for China from Taoyuan International Airport outside Taipei. They were paraded before reporters at a news conference on Tuesday.

According to the National Immigration Agency (NIA), the 12 men from Shenzhen, south China, entered Taiwan as company managers to attend a furniture exhibition.

Melbourne, July 29 : Lawyers representing the three Islamic militants who are on death row for the 2002 Bali bombings, have argued that they could suffer unnecessary pain if they do not die immediately when the lethal punishment is carried out.

The plea came ahead of a Constitutional Court challenge that is to be taken up next week.

London, July 29 : At least 3,000 British passports that were to be sent to the country’s embassies abroad have been stolen.

A British Foreign Office spokeswoman said 24 parcels containing blank passports and vignettes (blank stickers for visa stamps), were removed from a van that was travelling from a factory in Oldham to the Royal Air Force Base in Northolt near London.

According to the Daily Express, the Greater Manchester Police has been roped in to investigate this security breach.

The Home Office and the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) have taken "preventative action" to guard against forgeries.

Athens, July 29 : A 21-meters long ancient Greek ship, which archaeologists believe sank in a storm some 800 metres off the Gela coast in Greece while transporting goods from the Greek colony in Gela back to Greece in around 500 BC, has been pulled out of the seabed, where it lay for nearly 2500 years.

On Monday coastguards and experts from the Caltanissetta Culture Department salvaged the vessel using a boat equipped with a crane able to lift loads of up to 200 tonnes. Around 20 other support craft joined the operation, sounding their fog horns when the wreck finally emerged from the water.

Moscow, July 29 : Archaeologists in the Sverdlovsk Region in Russia''s Urals have discovered the 9000-year-old bones of a rhinoceros, a local museum worker has said.

The finding is likely to belie the assumption that rhinoceros last wandered the Urals some 15,000-20,000 years ago. It seems to prove that they existed in the area a lot more recently.