As millions watched the sequin-clad samba dancers at Rio de Janeiro's iconic Carnival parade Sunday, at least a few eyes turned toward the stars, or at least toward the VIP boxes hosting celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez and Fergie.

A fight among inmates led to a prison riot in northern Mexico that killed 44 people Sunday, a security official said. Nuevo Leon state public security spokesman Jorge Domene Zambrano said the riot broke out at about 2 a.m. in a high-security section of a prison in the city of Apodaca outside the northern industrial city of Monterrey.

A Swedish man was being treated in hospital Sunday after being dug out alive from his snow-buried car in which he had survived for two months with no food, according to police and local media.

The 45-year-old from southern Sweden was found on Friday, emaciated and too weak to utter more than a few words.

He has railed against the evils of religion, and lectured the world on the virtues of atheism. Now Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against "intolerance and suffering", must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour.

Jean-Marie Loret, who died in 1985 aged 67, never met his father, but went on to fight Nazi forces during the Second World War.

His extraordinary story has now been backed up by a range of compelling evidence, both in France and in Germany, which is published in the latest edition of Paris's Le Point magazine.