A horror film based on the real story of cannibal Armin Meiwes can now be shown in Germany, a court has ruled.

Screenings of Rohtenburg were banned in 2006 after a court ruled the film infringed the convicted 47-year-old’s personal rights.

But a court in Karlsruhe said public interest outweighs his complaint the film would cause him emotional damage.

Meiwes was convicted of murder and given a life sentence in 2006 after admitting partially eating another man.

The film, which was released internationally under the title Grimm Love, starred Mission Impossible: 3 actress Keri Russell as an American exchange student, studying criminal psychology in Germany, who chooses the notorious cannibal case for her thesis.

The makers of the movie argued that Meiwes’ case did no more than provide inspiration for their film in which German actor Thomas Kretschmann plays a cannibal named Oliver Hartwin.

Marketing deal

The court ruled that the producers’ right to artistic freedom, together with Meiwes’ own previous efforts at marketing the gory deed, outweighed his personal rights.

The film did not misrepresent the facts of the case, which were in any case widely known, a court statement said.

Meiwes gave many interviews on himself and the crime and signed a marketing contract with a production company in 2004.

The case has been the subject of a book, several additional films, and songs by Rammstein and Marilyn Manson.

In the real tale that horrified Germany, engineer Meiwes met IT manager Bernd-Juergen Brandes after posting an advert on the internet asking for a willing victim in 2001.

A Frankfurt court sentenced Meiwes, rejecting the argument that his act of cannibalism amounted to euthanasia since Brandes had wanted to be eaten.

It was not immediately clear whether the movie will now be screened in German cinemas.

Diplodocus’s impressive neck sweeps along the main hall of London’s Natural History museum, welcoming its visitors.

Now, findings suggest that 150 million years ago the giant may have held its head higher for much of the time.

By studying the skeletons of living vertebrates, Mike Taylor, from the University of Portsmouth, and his team, reshaped the dinosaur’s resting pose.

But there is more than one way to assemble a dino-skeleton, and more than one theory on the sauropods’ stance.

Dr Taylor said he is not suggesting that museums should re-pose their long-necked sauropod skeletons from the current horizontal position to a more upright posture.

“The diplodocus in the main hall vestibule of the Natural History Museum is in a perfectly good posture,” he told BBC News. “It’s one within a whole range of movement that would have been entirely possible.”

But, after studying X-rays of members of 10 different vertebrate groups, Dr Taylor is convinced that when they were not reaching down for a drink, the sauropods stood with their heads held very high indeed.

With their necks aloft, like giraffes, the dinosaurs would have towered up to 15m above the ground.

Living model

Dr Taylor and his colleagues found that the necks of mammals and birds – the only modern groups that share the upright leg posture of dinosaurs – are “strongly inclined” vertically.

“Our approach was embarrassingly straightforward,” said Dr Taylor. “We looked at real animals, and at the whole animal.”

Bones can only give us so much information, he explained, and the soft tissue in the animal’s huge neck could “enable greater flexibility than the bones alone suggest”.

Some of the earliest reconstructions of sauropod skeletons – in the late 19th and early 20th Century – were posed with erect necks, so the idea is not new.

“It’s largely in recent years that this view has changed,” Dr Taylor said.

“But we can be confident that they held their heads upright.”

Many scientists, however, still maintain a more horizontal view.

And a recent paper, published by Australian scientist Roger Seymour in the journal Biology Letters, went even further.

It suggested that the creatures would not actually be able to lift their heads up to eat from high trees, because this would raise their brains so far above their hearts that their blood pressure would have to be elevated to a dangerous – possibly lethal – level.

But Dr Taylor is not swayed by this argument.

“There are some [living animals] where the heart is able to exert much greater pressure than Seymour’s equations predict [is possible]. We don’t see why that couldn’t also be true in sauropods.”

Heads up

Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist from London’s Natural History Museum, thinks the sauropods were likely to have been able to lift their heads high, but he remains unconvinced that would have been their “resting posture”.

“It would require lots of muscular activity, and put a lot of strain on their hearts,” he said.

Dr Barrett explained that, since it is impossible to know how thick the pads of connective tissue between the dinosaurs’ vertebrae were, it is difficult to estimate how much of a role this tissue, along with muscles and tendons, played in the animals’ range of movement.

“Sauropods are bizarre,” he told BBC News. “There is no living animal built in the same way.”

So, although the study of living animals’ skeletons is very valuable, he added, “finding a model to explain the biology of these creatures is not that easy”.

Survivors of childhood cancer have a higher life-long risk of developing a new form of the disease, a study shows.

The Journal of the National Cancer Institute study blames potent therapies rather than genetics, and is the first to show the risk is so long-term.

The study of 50,000 also found those diagnosed after 1975 appeared to have a slightly higher risk of cancer as treatments became more aggressive.

But they also led to a big improvement in child cancer survival rates.

A team from the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Copenhagen studied 47,679 people who were diagnosed with cancer before the age of 20, between 1943 and 2005. They were drawn from the cancer registries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

In all, they were three times more likely to develop a new cancer than their contemporaries – and the risk remained even as people approached their seventies.

Among survivors, the generation diagnosed between 1975 to 2005 were more likely to have developed second cancers at comparable ages than either the generation treated between 1960 and 1974, which saw first-generation chemotherapy, and the period before 1960, with no chemotherapy at all.

This increase occurred despite the advances in radiation treatment in which doses were markedly reduced, leading the team to point the finger at chemotherapy – either as an independent factor or one which exacerbates the carcinogenic effects of radiation.

Brain tumours were found to affect survivors more than the general population, due to the susceptibility of the brain to cancer treatments.

“What we need now is two-fold: new treatment ideas to decrease the risk of later effects, and much better surveillance of childhood cancer survivors during adulthood,” said Dr Jorgen Olsen, who led the research.

“Cancer treatments don’t just increase the risk of other cancers, but can lead to all sorts of other problems – from cardiovascular to reproductive.”

Making changes

Dr James Nicholson, a paediatric oncologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge welcomed the research as one of the most comprehensive studies yet, but stressed change to treatment was already afoot.

“We have known about this for a while, and we are now in a position where we can decrease the intensity of treatment in many cases and still get the same results.

“But a study like this does raise awareness of the problem. If it means alarm bells ring earlier when there are symptoms in people who were treated for cancer as a child that would be a very good thing.”

Judith Kingston, a consultant at Barts and the London, said the paper highlighted the importance of following-up survivors to learn about the long-term effects and to investigate how treatments might be modified.

“However for the children with “bad” or high risk tumours, we still need to give intensive chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy to effect a cure and this intensive therapy will come at the cost of potentially increasing that child’s risk of developing a second cancer,” she said.

“I am afraid it is a problem we have to recognise, be alert to and warn the parents about, but the risk needs to be put into perspective, as it affects a small minority of patients, whilst the majority of children will continue to lead healthy lives after treatment for childhood cancer.”

Ed Yong, Cancer Research UK’s health information manager, said: “More and more children are surviving an early fight against cancer and this study suggests that they still have a slightly higher risk of different cancers later on in life.

“Even so, when a child is diagnosed with cancer, the priority must be to save life. Thanks to research, over the past few decades we have seen tremendous improvements in the treatment of childhood cancer.

“In the 1960s, only a quarter of children who were diagnosed with cancer survived for more than five years. Now around three quarters survive.

Mexican authorities have arrested 27 high-ranking officials suspected of collaborating with drug-trafficking gangs in the state of Michoacan.

They include 10 mayors, a judge and an aide to the governor of Michoacan.

The arrests come days after police detained several suspected members of the cartel, known as La Familia, which controls drug trafficking in the state.

President Felipe Calderon chose Michoacan state to launch his military offensive against the cartels in 2006.

Last year, the authorities arrested several high-ranking officials – including Mexico’s former drugs czar – in connection with alleged links to the drug cartels.

But the latest of wave of arrests marks the first time the government has gone after such a large group of mayors.

Among those detained was the mayor of Uruapan, which made headlines early in the drug war in 2006 when hitmen dumped five human heads on the dance floor of a bar.

Local media report that among those held was Citlalli Fernandez, the state’s former security chief who is currently employed as an adviser to the governor, Leonel Godoy.

The drugs trade in Michoacan is controlled by the La Familia cartel – considered to be one of the most violent drug gangs in Mexico.

President Calderon launched his nationwide crackdown on organised crime in 2006.

Since then, tens of thousands of troops have been deployed throughout the country to tackle the drugs-related violence which has claimed the lives of close to 9,000 people in the last two years.