LOS ANGELES. Patrick Swayze diagnosed with cancer. Actor and dancer Patrick Swayze, star of such hit films as Dirty Dancing and Ghost, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer but is responding well to treatment, his publicist said on the day before. The 55-year-old performer was working during his treatments, publicist Annett Wolf said, dismissing reports in the tabloid media that portrayed him in grave condition with only weeks to live.

Wolf issued a written statement from his physician, Dr. George Fisher that said: ?Patrick has a very limited amount of disease and he appears to be responding well to treatment.?

?All of the reports stating the timeframe of his prognosis and his physical side effects are absolutely untrue,? Fisher said in the statement. ?We are considerably more optimistic.?

Wolf said Swayze deeply appreciated the ?outpouring of support and concern? he has received from the public.

BORDEAUX. Cemetery full, mayor tells locals not to die. The mayor of a village in southwest France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them. In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that ?all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish.?

It added: ?Offenders will be severely punished.? The mayor said he was forced to take drastic action after an administrative court in the nearby town of Pau ruled in January that the acquisition of adjoining private land to extend the cemetery would not be justified.

Lalanne, who celebrated his 70th birthday on Wednesday and is standing for election to a seventh term in this month?s local elections, said he was sorry that there had not been a positive outcome to the dilemma.

JERUSALEM. High on Mount Sinai? The biblical Israelites may have been high on a hallucinogenic plant when Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, according to a new study by an Israeli psychology professor. Writing in the British journal Time and Mind, Benny Shanon of Jerusalem?s Hebrew University said two plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared. The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an ?altered state of awareness,? Shanon hypothesized. ?In advanced forms of ?ayahuasca inebriation?, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings,? Shanon wrote. ?On such occasions, one often feels that in seeing the light, one is encountering the ground of all Being ... many identify this power as God.?

HONG KONG Indonesian fossils belonged to diet-poor dwarfs. Small human-like skeletons found in a cave on a remote Indonesian island were actually human and their miniature features probably due to nutritional deficiency, some researchers in Australia say. Writing in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the scientists said these were more likely to be cretin offspring of normal mothers who suffered from iodine and other dietary deficiencies.

NEW YORK. Depression, anxiety tied to unhealthy habits. Depression and anxiety are associated with obesity and poor health behaviors like smoking, drinking, and inactivity, new research indicates. ?Depression and anxiety are serious mental health conditions and without treatment may assume a chronic course,? Dr. Tara W. Strine who led the study told Reuters Health. ?Given this, it is important to take depression and anxiety seriously and to seek medical care when needed.?

FORBES. Buffett world?s richest man, Slim second. Warren Buffett, the famed US investor who heads Berkshire Hathaway, replaced his friend and Microsoft founder Bill Gates as the richest man in the world, Forbes magazine said on the day before.

The magazine estimated Buffett?s worth at $62 billion in its annual ranking of the world?s wealthiest people.

Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim came in second with an estimated worth of $60 billion, pushing Gates to third place at $58 billion.