In brief: Seven sentenced to prison for Swedish helicopter heist

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – A Swedish court has sentenced seven men to prison and awarded $1.6 million in damages for last year’s helicopter raid on a Stockholm cash depot.

A Stockholm district court on Thursday sentenced two men to seven years each in prison for robbery. One confessed to theft after his DNA was found inside the cash depot and the court said DNA traces proved the other man had been flying the stolen helicopter. He denied the charges.

Five other people were convicted of assisting the robbery or protecting the robbers and sentenced to 1-5 years in prison. Three people were acquitted.

Police have not recovered the millions of dollars taken from the Sept. 23, 2009, heist and say several suspects are still at large.

LONDON – An ordinary-looking white flower from Japan may carry something quite extraordinary within its pale petals – the longest genome ever discovered.

Researchers at London’s Kew Gardens said Thursday they’d discovered that the Paris japonica has a genetic code 50 times longer than that of a human being. The length of that code easily beats its nearest competitor, a long-bodied muck dweller known as the marbled lungfish.

“We were astounded really,” said Ilia Leitch, of Kew’s Jodrell Laboratory.

Leitch and her colleagues suspected the plant might have an larger-than-usual genetic code as its relatives have rather large ones too. But the sheer size of this flower’s genome caught them by surprise. If laid end-to-end it would stretch to more than 300 feet.

A genome is the full complement of an organism’s DNA, complex molecules that direct the formation and function of all living organisms. The size of an organism’s genome is typically measured by the number of bases it contains – base pairs being the building blocks of DNA. The human genome, for example, has about 3 million bases and measures about 6 feet in length.

The marbled lungfish has a whopping 130 million bases. And the 12-inch flower studied by Leitch turns out to have 150 million.

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan – A Russian rocket carrying a U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts has blasted off successfully from Kazakhstan.

They were seen off early this morning by an unexpected visitor to the Baikonur cosmodrome – Russian spy Anna Chapman, seen in public for the first time since being deported from the United States in July.

The three-man crew of Scott Kelly and Russia’s Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka is due to reach the International Space Station in two days.