The powerful US television industry dominates what's seen on many small screens around Europe. But the Roma Fiction Fest wants to prove there's a world of sitcoms and dramas beyond "Beverly Hills 90210." 

Innovative television shows, mini-series and documentaries are being produced all across Europe, from Italy to France to Denmark and points far flung. But still, the small screens in living rooms across the continent need diversifying.

Luca Milano of Rai Fiction, the Italian state network's production arm, says most stations broadcast international shows from the US and then a series of national fiction.

"This means that in Germany, they see German fiction, in Spain the Spanish, in France the French," Milano said. "It is still difficult to have a true European network of programs that are able to be seen by audiences elsewhere in Europe."

The Roma Fiction Fest taking place in the Italian capital this week wants to change this. Its aim is television without borders. International network executives and Romans alike are getting to take a TV trip to Germany, watching the mini-series "Buddenbrooks," based on the Thomas Mann novel about an aristocratic family's decline.

Then, they journey to Manchester to spend time with the dysfunctional Gallagher family from the British series "Shameless." Programmers are also checking out what's on TV in Spain, France, Iceland, Russia and other countries.

PARIS -- When Jacques Roquencourt handles photographs, he does so with delicate hands. An accomplished aerospace engineer, he spent his life building things like airborne radar systems. He is also one of France's foremost experts on early photography, particularly the work of Daguerre.

But when a package of photographs arrived recently from Freiburg, Germany, he handled them with special delicacy. For if investigations now under way bear fruit, one of the people in the black-and-white photos, taken in the 1930s, will prove to be the father whose identity has remained a mystery to Mr. Roquencourt for all his 67 years.

The so-called enfants de Boches -- roughly, children of the Huns -- born during the war to French women and German soldiers, are seeking to fill a hole in their lives, hunting for long-lost German fathers they never knew and speaking openly of the maltreatment they suffered from their French neighbors. It is estimated that 200,000 children were born of these wartime love affairs.

It has been 14 years since her last major apparition in Ireland but the Virgin Mary is back and this time in the lowly form of a tree stump in Limerick.

To the dismay of local Catholic church leaders, the freshly severed stump, with its supposed image of Our Lady, is rapidly becoming the focus of pilgrims. The last time that Ireland experienced anything similar was during its last recession in 1985, when a "moving" statue drew tens of thousands to Ballinspittle, Co Cork.

This time almost 2,000 people have signed a petition to prevent the stump's removal and hundreds of worshippers have been gathering to recite decades of the rosary and light candles.

Labourers at the Holy Mary Parish Church in Rathkeale, Co Limerick, made the discovery of the supposed image.

A patient in Essex has become the first in the UK without underlying health problems to die of swine flu.

The patient died earlier at Basildon and Thurrock University Hospital.

NHS East of England said it would release no further details about the patient following a request by the family.

Two people in Canvey Island are being treated for a mild form of swine flu and the East of England has seen 14 cases overall, a spokeswoman said.

New research found that males can adjust the speed and effectiveness of their sperm by allocating more or less seminal fluid to copulations. The determining factor is whether the male finds the female attractive.

The study, conducted on red junglefowl, a director ancestor of chickens, adds to the growing body of evidence that males throughout many promiscuous species in the animal kingdom, including humans, can mate with many females, but chances of fertilization are greater when the female is deemed to be attractive.

Desirable female red junglefowl are easy to identify.