Police in Canada have seized more than 600 barrels of maple syrup in New Brunswick as part of an investigation into the theft of millions worth of syrup in Quebec and are transporting it back to Quebec under police protection, officials said.

The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers reported large quantities of syrup missing last month during a routine inventory, finding empty barrels at a site of the province's global strategic reserve at St-Louis-de-Blandford.

Oil prices rose slightly Thursday after positive U.S. economic reports offset some of the pessimism about global growth prospects.

Benchmark oil for November delivery was up 16 cents to $88.30 per barrel at midday Bangkok time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. On Wednesday, oil fell $3.75, or 4.1 percent, to $88.14 per barrel in New York. That was the biggest decline since May 4.

Police say they arrested a U.S. man after he showed up at a crime scene wearing a Batman outfit because he wouldn't leave them alone.

"He wouldn't clear the scene, and we had a canine out there, and he kept screwing up the scent," State Police Sgt. Jeff Gorno told the Petoskey News-Review. "He said he wanted to help us look for the driver."

Lacking the necessary cash and manpower, Pakistan is struggling to stem the flow of millions of dollars in ancient Buddhist artifacts that looters dig up in the country's northwest and smuggle to collectors around the world.

The black market trade in smuggled antiquities is a global problem that some experts estimate is worth billions of dollars per year. The main targets are poor countries like Pakistan that possess a rich cultural heritage but don't have the resources to protect it.

Marc Jacobs, more than anyone, knows that it's not what you say but how you say it. The Louis Vuitton showman thus capped an incredibly strong Paris fashion week — with help from artist Daniel Buren — by building a life-size shopping mall inside the Louvre.

Understatement is not a word in Jacobs' vocabulary, so a collaboration with the minimalist artist — who made the famed striped columns in Paris' Palais Royal — might have raised eyebrows. But Buren rose to the occasion.

Orthodox Jewish Israelis, the driving force of the West Bank settlement movement, have begun to turn their attention inward to Israel itself, moving into Arab areas of mixed cities in an attempt to cement the Jewish presence there.

Activists say that in recent years, several thousand devout Jews have pushed into rundown Arab areas of Jaffa, Lod, Ramle and Acre, hardscrabble cities divided between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods. Their arrival has threatened to disrupt fragile ethnic relations with construction of religious seminaries and housing developments marketed exclusively to Jews.

A federal inspector found two strains of salmonella and unclean conditions at an Indiana cantaloupe farm's fruit-packing plant during inspections prompted by a deadly outbreak linked to the farm's melons.

The Food and Drug Administration's report on the mid-August inspections at Chamberlain Farm Produce Inc. shows an inspector found improperly cleaned and apparently rusted and corroded equipment. The inspector also found what appeared to be algae growing in standing water beneath conveyer belts at the Owensville, Ind., plant, the report said.

Teva Pharmaceuticals has stopped shipping its generic version of a popular antidepressant after a federal analysis showed the pill does not work properly.

The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday it asked Teva to withdraw Budeprion XL 300 after new testing showed the drug releases its key ingredient faster than the original drug Wellbutrin XL 300, made by GlaxoSmithKline.

An outbreak of a rare and deadly form of meningitis has now sickened 26 people in five states who received steroid injections mostly for back pain, health officials said Wednesday. Four people have died, and more cases are expected.

Eighteen cases of fungal meningitis are in Tennessee where a Nashville clinic received the largest shipment of the steroid suspected in the outbreak. The drug was made by a specialty pharmacy in Massachusetts that issued a recall last week. Investigators, though, say they are still trying to confirm the source of the infections.

Too often, newborns die of genetic diseases before doctors even know what's to blame. Now scientists have found a way to decode those babies' DNA in just days instead of weeks, moving gene-mapping closer to routine medical care.

The idea: Combine faster gene-analyzing machinery with new computer software that, at the push of a few buttons, uses a baby's symptoms to zero in on the most suspicious mutations. The hope would be to start treatment earlier, or avoid futile care for lethal illnesses.