A Dutch ship towing a high-tech, US Navy listening device was trawling the Atlantic today for data and voice recorders that investigators say are key to determining what caused an Air France jet to crash with 228 people on board.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy are relaxing in a posh Brazilian beach resort, according to local news reports.

DNA tests have confirmed that a body found off the coast of Brazil is that of a priest who disappeared while flying over the Atlantic buoyed by hundreds of brightly coloured party balloons, authorities said.

Supermodel Naomi Campbell has been admitted to hospital in Brazil for the removal of a cyst, her publicist said today.

Pope Benedict XVI urged tens of thousands of young Catholics packing a football stadium to resist the temptations of wealth, power and other “snares of evil,” and told them to promote life from “its beginning to natural end.”

An Amazon river passenger ship crashed into two barges and sank, leaving at least three people dead and dozens missing, authorities said today.

THE student visa of Jean Charles de Menezes expired more than two years before he was wrongly shot by police, a British Home Office spokeswoman said last night.

A regional leader of Brazil's landless farmers' movement was found murdered.