A 114-year-old Californian woman was named the oldest woman living on Earth after Maria De Jesus of Portugal died Friday, Gerontology Research Group said.

Gertrude Baines was born in small town in south Atlanta in 1894 and now lives at Western Convalescent Hospital west of USC in Los Angeles.

There will be no room in Bethlehem for Christmas 2008. But the lack of vacant accommodations are not meant for the city's most famous birthday celebrant, but tourists because of the tourism boom enjoyed by the Palestinian city.

All 3,000 rooms in Bethlehem have been fully booked for the Yuletide holiday, said Samir Hazboun, chairman of the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce and Industry. About 250,000 tourists are expected to arrive in Bethlehem on Christmas week, up from only 65,000 for the same week in 2007.

Australian astronomers who charted the night sky 2,000 years ago claim that Jesus Christ was born on June 17 and that the Star of Bethlehem was a conjunction of two planets.

Sky and Space magazine editor Dave Reneke arrived at the theories after leading a team of astronomers in recreating the exact positions of celestial bodies over the Holy Land in 2 B.C. using a complex computer software and with St. Matthew's Gospel as a reference point. The gospel placed the nativity to somewhere between 3 B.C. and 1 A.D.

An elaborate tattoo of Virgin Mary on the back of a Swiss man fetched $219,000 from a German collector at a Zurich gallery on Monday, on condition he allows it to be exhibited at least three time a year.

Gallery owner Jutta Nexdorf said the extraordinary deal also gives the "buyer" the right to take from the skin of Tim Steiner the tattoo upon his death.

A 2,000-year-old bone from an apostle, a sacred relic to believers, has been stolen from the altar of the Transfiguration Greek Orthodox Church.

The bone was from St. Andrew, it had been passed down through generations of a family and was given to the church six years ago. It was kept in a silver box under glass on a mantle in a wooden shrine under a painting of the saint, who was one of the 12 apostles of the biblical Jesus Christ of Nazareth.