A 70-year old German seeking Swiss citizenship was told to go back to school to learn his own native tongue despite being proficient in German, a Swiss newspaper said. The Swiss town of Dielsdorf ordered Ulrich Kring ? who lived in Switzerland his entire life but is only now applying for citizenship ? to take a German language course to the tune of 250 Swiss francs ($222.6), the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper said. The class was obligatory for all foreigners seeking a Swiss passport and the town would not make an exception for the German national, the newspaper said. Kring had lodged an appeal against the decision with a higher local authority, but had not had a reply yet. Roughly two-thirds of Switzerland's 7.5 million inhabitants are German speakers. Many German nationals find the Swiss spoken dialect hard to understand, although the official written language taught in schools is the same as in Germany.

China. Censors sued for cut steamy sex scenes</B>

<B> Amsterdam. Police arrest teenage online furniture thief

Dutch police have made their first arrest of an online thief ? a 17-year-old accused of stealing virtual furniture from rooms in the Habbo Hotel ? a popular teen-ager networking Web site. An Amsterdam police spokeswoman confirmed a report that the teen-ager was accused of stealing 4,000 euros ($5,864) worth of virtual furniture by hacking into the accounts of other users. Four other 15-year-olds have also been questioned in the case, which was instigated by the Web site. They are suspected of moving the stolen furniture into their own online hotel rooms. Habbo users can create their own characters, decorate their own rooms and play a number of games, paying with Habbo Credits, which they have to buy with real cash. Habbo Hotel is owned by Finnish Internet company Sulake which said last month it had reached 80 million registered users of its sites in 31 countries.

<B> Guatemala. Tropical fish can live for months out of water</B>

A tropical fish that lives in mangrove swamps across the Americas can survive out of water for months at a time, similar to how animals adapted to land millions of years ago, a new study shows. The Mangrove Rivulus, a type of small tropical killifish, seeks refuge in shallow pools of water in crab burrows, coconut shells or even old beer cans in the tropical mangrove swamps of Belize, the United States and Brazil.