The United States has planned to reduce troop levels in South Korea, now standing at about 30,000, by 2008.

The official said the cut was possible due to South Korea's improved capabilities, and noted that judgments about the threat posed by North Korea were driving changes in the U.S.-South Korean military relationship.

U.S. and South Korean officials are hashing out details of a broader plan to change the countries' military relationship, giving South Korea the lead in operations during wartime.

Under the plan, which may be finalized by October, the United States would assume a supporting role in combat operations, the defense official said.

According to the official, the United States wants South Korea to assume the lead in military operations by 2009, but South Korea has pushed for a 2012 target date for the change.

"I brought home my favorite candies, and when I bit into one, my teeth knacked on something hard and I took out of my mouth a ring with a white gem," Elena says.

"I looked at it closely and saw it was gold."

The "white gem" turned out a diamond. The pensioner first thought she had won a prize from the local candy factory. But when she called on the phone to inquire, she learned there was no such promotion.

"I then thought the ring must have slipped from someone's finger when the candy was being produced," Elena says.

"Of course I was tempted to keep it. But then I thought maybe this ring meant the world to somebody. I would not want to make them unhappy. But again, I knew better then to make a public announcement, because the butter-fingers could get fired for breaking safety regulations."

Elena decided to find the woman. She went to the factory and found the team producing her favorite candy. She talked to women, and someone said it could have been one of the girls in the team who had recently got married.

When Elena saw the girl, called Tatiana, she had no more doubts - Tatiana's face was all misery. Elena approached her and asked, "Have you lost a ring?"

The girl was both thrilled and happy.

"I was shocked!" Tatiana says. "I had not expected to ever see the ring again, but luckily there are honest people like Elena."

Tatiana, who had been married only two weeks, took her wedding ring to the factory with her to show it to co-workers. She did not notice it slip off her finger into the sweet paste and get into a candy bar, where Elena later found it.

"We gave our passports to the officer, and when she saw we are Israelis she asked for ID cards. We told her we don't understand why we need ID cards and she responded shouting: 'You know very well how to ask Palestinians for IDs and humiliate them for three years."

That's what Avracohen wrote in a complaint letter he sent to Israel's Ambassador to Australia Nati Tamir.

The three were held at Fiji airport for six hours and officials rebuked their pleas to be allowed to make a phone call.

Armed policemen took them to a cell at the airport where they spent the night before being sent back to Australia.

"I don't look like a terrorist and there is no reason to point a gun at me," Nimrod Lahav wrote in a letter to ambassador Tamir.

Avracohen wrote that the incident was the most humiliating experience he had ever gone through.

The Foreign Ministry said the matter is being dealt with.

A Met Office spokesman said: "There is a significant human contribution to these heatwaves because of carbon dioxide emissions over recent decades.

"This is a sign of things to come, with the current temperatures becoming a normal event by the middle of the century."

The existing record of 38.5C (101F) was recorded in Faversham, Kent, in August 2003.

Temperatures of 37C are expected across the south-east, but one or two places could reach 39C.

The Met Office predicted that the record was likely to be set somewhere such as Cambridgeshire or Bedfordshire.

The Met has set its "heat health alert" at level two, which means the heat could be dangerous to the very young and very old.

Other regions could also see records, with temperatures predicted to reach 36C in the Midlands, 35C in the north-west and 31C in Scotland.

Woven among the sand dunes of the now arid Willandra Lakes World Heritage area are some 700 fossil footprints, 400 of them grouped in a set of 23 tracks (related photos: 2006 World Heritage sites named).

First spotted in 2003 by a young Mhutti Mhutti Aboriginal woman named Mary Pappen, Jr., the tracks are the oldest fossil human footprints ever found in Australia and the largest collection of such prints in the world.

"Still Here"

Mary Pappen, Sr., a Mhutti Mhutti tribal elder and Pappen Jr.'s mother, says the age of the footprints highlights just how clever and adaptable Aboriginal ancestors were.

"We did not die 60,000 years ago. We didn't dry up and die away 26,000 years ago when the lakes were last full," she said.

"We are a people that nurtured and looked after our landscape and walked across it, and we are still here today."

(Read a travel column about seeing Australia through Aboriginal eyes.)

Steve Webb is a biological archaeologist with Bond University in Queensland. He has studied and partially excavated the tracks with help from other scientists and members of three area Aboriginal tribes.

Last December Webb published a study in the online edition of the Journal of Human Evolution describing eight of the tracks, and his work continues. Webb says the footprints reveal things that archaeological sites or skeletal remains couldn't.

For example, "these people were very active in this area, and we wouldn't have guessed that," he said.

One-Legged Man

The footprints also held puzzles, such as the tracks of what experts say was a one-legged man.

"All we could pick up was the right foot," Webb said, adding that each step left a very deep impression in the mud.

"It's a very good impression," he said. "It's one of the best foot impressions there is on the whole site. But there is no sign of the left foot at all."

The conundrum was solved with the help of five trackers from the Pintubi people of central Australia.

"They looked at the ... track and said, Yes, it's definitely a one-legged man," Webb said.

"Now, these people are able to tell you whether a woman's got a baby on her hip when she's walking along and whether she moves that baby from the right hip to the left hip."

"So they see nuances of tracks in a way we have no skill in doing whatsoever."

It helped that the Pintubi knew a living one-legged man from their own community.

"They knew what a one-legged man could do," Webb said. The trackers believe the ancient man probably threw his support stick away and hopped quite fast on one foot.

Olympic Sprinter

The trackers "gave us an amazing insight, just showing us small things which we hadn't even looked at," Webb said.

One such detail was a set of small, round holes where a man stood with a spear. Another was a squiggle in the mud, perhaps drawn by a child.

Webb's own track analysis has yielded some intriguing conclusions, particularly for the prints left by a group he calls the Five Hunters.

The archaeologist used data from 17,000-year-old human remains excavated nearby and details from the tracks themselves, such as foot size and stride length.

The bones suggest the people were tall, in good health, and very athletic.

What's more, Webb calculates that one hunter was running at 23 miles (37 kilometers) an hour, or as fast as an Olympic sprinter.

"If you weren't fit in those days, you didn't survive," Webb said.

To date, Webb and his colleagues have identified about 700 footprints.

He says ground-penetrating radar suggests thousands more prints may lie below the ground in at least eight layers of ancient mud stacked like trodden carpets.

For now the excavated tracks sit under protective layers of cloth and dirt to shelter them from erosion caused by wind, sand, and rain.

The footprints will stay there until scientists and Aboriginal community members devise a plan to protect the ancient tracks.

As part of the plan, tribespeople want to erect community and educational centers near the site and develop related ecotourism.

They also hope to build a "keeping place," or sacred shelter, to safeguard the footprints of their ancestral families.