The 55-million-year-old fossil dug up in central China is one of our first primate relatives and it gives scientists a better understanding of the complex evolution that eventually led to us. This tiny monkey-like creature weighed an ounce or less and wasn't a direct ancestor. Because it's so far back on the family tree it offers the best clues yet of what our earliest direct relatives would have been like at that time, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"It's a close cousin in fact," said study author Christopher Beard, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. He said it is "the closest thing we have to an ancestor of humans" so long ago.

Primate is the order of life that includes humans along with apes, monkeys, and lemurs. Humans and other primates are set apart from other mammals because of our grasping five fingers and toes, nails, and forward-facing eyes. And this new species called Archicebus achilles fits right in, Beard said.

Among primates there are three suborders: anthropoids, which include apes, monkeys and us; and two other suborders that include lemurs and the lesser known tarsiers. This new species is in the same grouping as tarsiers, but close to the offshoot branch in the family tree where humans come from. The fossil includes anthropoid-like features.

"It's a cute little thing; it's ridiculously little," Beard said. "That's one of the more important scientific aspects of the whole story."

With a trunk only 2.8 inches long, the furry creature was about as small as you can get and still be a mammal, Beard said. Just like elephants and horses, the farther back in time you get for some of today's bigger mammals, the smaller they get, Beard said.

Because it was so small and warm-blooded, it had to eat bugs and move constantly to keep from losing internal heat, Beard said.

That means, Beard said, our earliest primate relatives were "very frenetic creatures, anxious, highly caffeinated animals running around looking for their next meal." They lived in a tree-lined area near a Chinese lake, swinging around trees in a hotter climate, Beard said.

Outside experts praised the study as significant, confirming what some thought about our primate ancestors. Rick Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian Institution, said this fossil's mix of different features illustrate the fascinating and crucial changes that occur around major evolutionary branch points in our family tree.

The study also bolstered another theory that early primates first developed in Asia, even though humans evolved nearly 50 million years later in Africa, Beard said.

___

Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears .

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc is planning a major roll-out of an online grocery business that it has been quietly developing for years, targeting one of the largest retail sectors yet to be upended by e-commerce, according to two people familiar with the situation.

While food is a low-margin business, Amazon could outperform similar online grocery services by delivering orders for higher-margin items like electronics at the same time.

One of the people familiar with AmazonFresh's expansion plans said new warehouses will have refrigerated areas for food, but also space nearby to store up to one million general merchandise products, in some cases.

The company has been testing AmazonFresh in its hometown of Seattle for at least five years, delivering fresh produce such as eggs, strawberries and meat with its own fleet of trucks.

Amazon is now planning to expand its grocery business outside Seattle for the first time, starting with Los Angeles as early as this week and the San Francisco Bay Area later this year, according to the two people who were not authorized to speak publicly.

If those new locations go well, the company may launch AmazonFresh in 20 other urban areas in 2014, including some outside the United States, said one of the people.

Bill Bishop, a prominent supermarket analyst and consultant, said the company was targeting as many as 40 markets, without divulging how he knew of Amazon's plans.

An Amazon spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Amazon is searching for new, large markets to enter as the company tries to maintain a growth rate that has fueled a 220 percent surge in its shares over the past five years. The grocery business in the United States, which generated $568 billion in retail sales last year, may be a ripe target.

Amazon's expansion plans are a potential threat to grocery chains such as Kroger Co, Safeway Inc and Whole Foods Market, as well as general-merchandise retailers Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Target Corp, which also sell a lot of groceries.

"Amazon has been testing this for years and now it's time for them to harvest what they've learned by expanding outside Seattle," said Bishop, chief architect at Brick Meets Click, a consulting firm focused on retail technology.

"The fear is that grocery is a loss leader and Amazon will make a profit on sales of other products ordered online at the same time," he said. "That's an awesomely scary prospect for the grocery business."

Kroger, Whole Foods, Supervalu and Safeway did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday. Target declined to comment.

A successful foray into groceries could also help underwrite the development of a broad-based delivery service employing Amazon trucks to deliver directly to homes, which could have implications for UPS, FedEx and other package delivery companies that currently ship Amazon goods.

Still, groceries have proven to be one of the most difficult sectors for online retailers to crack. One of the most richly funded start-ups of the dot-com era, Webvan, was a spectacular failure as the cost of developing the warehouse and delivery infrastructure proved overwhelming.

Roger Davidson, a former grocery executive at Wal-Mart and Supervalu, said Amazon will struggle to make money from AmazonFresh because fresh produce can easily go out of date in storage warehouses and get damaged during delivery - something known as "shrink" in the business.

"Will it work? I would bet against it," Davidson said. "The reasons these businesses have failed in the past have not gone away."

COMPETITION

Still, Amazon is not alone in wanting to expand in the online grocery business.

Wal-Mart is testing same-day and next-day delivery of online grocery and general merchandise orders in the San Francisco Bay Area and operates a grocery delivery business in Britain.

"We are ready and able to expand grocery delivery in the U.S. as the market demands," Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Toporek said.

FreshDirect delivers food to homes and offices in some parts of New York City and its trying to expand its service into the Bronx.

Peapod, owned by international food giant Royal Ahold NV, says on its website that it is the largest Internet grocer in the United States, delivering more than 23 million orders across 24 markets.

Davidson, who worked with Peapod for several years during stint at Ahold USA, said Peapod struggled to make money for most of its existence. But he believes it now turns a small profit due to supply chain efficiencies, population density in Chicago and its connection to brick and mortar stores on the east coast.

Davidson favors a strategy he called "Click and Connect" which is being used by Harris Teeter, a food and pharmacy chain on the East Coast of the United States. Customers order food online and choose a time to pick up the produce from designated areas outside the company's stores. There is a $4.95 service fee for this.

"Traditional grocery retailers will likely fight back against Amazon with Click and Connect," he added.

It is not clear whether AmazonFresh in Seattle is profitable because Amazon does not disclose results from the business.

Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos was asked about the business during the company's annual shareholder meeting last month and he said that the team had "made progress on the economics over the last year."

"They've been doing a lot of experiments and trying to get the right mixture of customer experience and economics," he added.

COMBINED ORDERS

If online orders also include higher-margin general merchandise such as digital cameras, then AmazonFresh has a chance at profitability, said Manfred Bluemel of Zeitgeist Research, who was head of market research worldwide at Amazon until late 2010.

"Grocery is a frequency business. If Amazon can deliver to consumers' homes two or three times a week, they can up-sell other items," he said.

Bluemel said AmazonFresh's expansion will likely focus on areas where Amazon already offers same-day delivery, or will do so soon.

Amazon offers same-day delivery in several cities including New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago, and since last year the company has been building new distribution warehouses on the outskirts of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.

(Reporting by Alistair Barr; Additional reporting by Dhanya Skariachan and Lisa Baertlein; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Tim Dobbyn)

CANNES (Reuters) - Three years after "Senna", the hit film biography of the late Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna, sporting documentaries about Jackie Stewart, Muhammad Ali and Pele are competing for attention at the Cannes Film Festival.

In "Weekend of a Champion", the Polish-French filmmaker Roman Polanski follows Stewart, his long-time friend, as he prepares to drive in the 1971 Monaco Grand Prix, at a time when the risks to drivers were far greater than they are now.

Polanski said he had forgotten about the film, which was screened at the Berlin film festival in 1972 but never released, until a recent call from a processing lab holding the footage.

He decided to resurrect it, adding a sequence where he and Stewart reunite more than 40 years later to discuss how the sport has changed.

"Back in the day, it was much freer. People could practically, or almost, walk onto the track. Now it's a bit NASA, a bit Martian," Polanski said after the revised version premiered in Cannes on Tuesday.

Three-times world champion Stewart, now 73, said Formula One had always been at the sharp end of technology, "but I think the racing is still as good today as ever, maybe even better".

"The animal is the same, the driver has the same mentality, the same type of person," he told Reuters in an interview.

British director Stephen Frears' documentary "Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight" aims to bring public attention to the boxer's court battle after he refused to fight in the Vietnam War, a stand that made him known far beyond his sport.

HERO AND VILLAIN

Ali refused to be conscripted into the U.S. military in 1967, on the basis of his religious beliefs and his opposition to the war. A hero to a growing anti-war movement, vilified by others, he was found guilty of evading the draft.

At the height of his career, he was stripped of his world heavyweight title and barred from the ring for nearly four years while his ultimately successful appeal worked its way up to the Supreme Court.

The film, made for Time Warner's HBO cable network and screened at Cannes on Wednesday, stars Christopher Plummer and Danny Glover, but no one plays Ali, now 71, who has suffered from Parkinson's disease for three decades and appears only in archive footage.

Frears said he had wanted to highlight the case after discovering how badly Ali had been treated, and had received Ali's approval when he showed him the film two weeks ago.

"I just had no idea that that was the story, but nobody did, nobody realized," Frears said.

Pele, 72, was in Cannes to discuss a film about his life being made by Hollywood producer Brian Grazer, maker of "Apollo 13" and "A Beautiful Mind", to be released next year as Brazil hosts the 2014 soccer World Cup.

"Pele" focuses on the Brazilian star's rise from an impoverished childhood to lead his country to its first World Cup victory, in Sweden in 1958.

A documentary called "Pele Forever" was made about his life in 2004, but he said the new one aimed to inspire young people, many of whom are facing bleak prospects.

"The way we constructed the film is for the new generation," he told Reuters in an interview.

(Additional reporting by Rollo Ross and Johnny Cotton; Writing by Belinda Goldsmith; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Crewmembers flying toand back using traditional chemical thrusters would be exposed to the high radiation levels of deep space for 12 to 17 months. That's simply too long to keep astronauts' radiation doses from fast-moving particles known as galactic cosmic rays within currently acceptable limits, researchers said.

At the same time, they added, improved shielding is needed to help protect deep-space explorers from charged particles blasted out by the sun. (Traditional shielding does little good against cosmic rays.) []

"We need to get there faster to reduce the , but we need to have shielding, local shielding, on board to eliminate the effects of solar particle events," Eddie Semones, spaceflight radiation health officer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, told reporters Thursday (May 30). "So it's hand in hand."

[More from BGR: ]

Some caveats are obviously in order here: First, the video decided to use the $750 off-contract 64GB Galaxy S4 as its example, which just happens to be the most expensive version of the device on the market. You can always buy a 16GB Galaxy S4 for $640 off-contract and .

[More from BGR: ]

Second, Microsoft on its Windows Phone YouTube pagetouts the Lumia 521 a perfect, everyday smartphone that embodies a range of high-end features, which might be true if the year were 2010.These are the specs for the Lumia 521: a4-inch, 800 x 480-pixel display, a dual-core 1GHz processor, a 5-megapixel rear camera,512MB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. These are the specs for the cheapest Galaxy S4: a5-inch Super AMOLED display with 1080p HD resolution, aquad-core Snapdragon processor,a 13-megapixel rear camera, 16GB of storage and 2GB of RAM. It goes without saying that theres really not much of a comparison here.

Microsofts full video is posted below.

Paul, who is considering a presidential campaign in 2016, said the path to victory needs both principle and pragmatism, noting that the GOP is consistently losing campaigns on the West Coast, in New England and in Midwest states like Illinois. Invoking President Ronald Reagan during his speech, Paul said Republicans need to become a "bigger, more inclusive party" to restore their fortunes.

"I think the party can be big enough to allow people who don't all agree on every issue. It's not going to change who I am or what I talk about but I think we can be a big enough party to include people," Paul said at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. "It's like when you talk to your family do you agree on every issue?"

Paul, the son of former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, said the party should not "dilute" its message of limiting government's reach and curtailing spending but said it needs to put together a broader coalition that includes Hispanic and black voters. He urged Republicans to appeal to voters on issues like the environment and education that have been more associated with Democrats.

"If we want to win in bluish-getting-bluer states like California, we have to change the current perceptions of who we are," he said.

The libertarian senator has challenged Republicans to confront the results of the 2012 election, saying it requires outreach to new voters and a willingness to reform government. He won applause at the California speech when he pointed to a bill he has introduced that would require the Senate to hold off voting on a measure for one day for every 20 pages of legislation it considers. He quipped that President Barack Obama's health care reform law would have required a long wait.

The speech honoring Reagan, who remains revered within the party, capped a month that took Paul to the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. He held fundraisers in Silicon Valley earlier in the week and met with executives and employees representing technology companies such as Google, Facebook and eBay.

In June, Paul is scheduled to headline fundraisers in South Carolina and make another trip to Iowa, giving him more visibility among Republicans searching for someone to help it rebound from two terms under Obama.

"When the Republican Party looks like the rest of America, we'll win again," Paul said.

___

Follow Ken Thomas on Twitter: http://twitter.com/AP_Ken_Thomas

(Reuters) - Target Corpcut its full-year profit forecast on Wednesday while turning in a weak first quarter with disappointing sales, as a chilly start to spring kept shoppers from buying seasonal items like clothing.

Target warned in April its first-quarter results would be weaker than anticipated, and its performance was even worse than revised Wall Street expectations due to the cool weather and the impact of higher payroll taxes on spending.

Shares of Target fell 3.6 percent to $68.70.

First-quarter sales at stores open at least a year fell 0.6 percent, while analysts targeted a 0.03 percent decline, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Back in April, Target forecast same-store sales would be about flat versus its previous outlook of flat to up 2 percent.

"This is Target's weakest quarterly same-store sales performance since the Great Recession year of 2009," said Sandy Skrovan, U.S. research director at Planet Retail.

The last time Target's quarterly same-store sales fell was in the third quarter of 2009, when it posted a decline of 1.6 percent.

This year, shoppers held off buying spring merchandise such as clothing, fans and garden supplies as a chilly start to the season left them little reason to splurge.

"Across the board things were disappointing for a lot of retailers," Skrovan said.

The U.S. economy has been somewhat resilient. Core U.S. retail sales, which strip out automobiles, gasoline and building materials, rose 0.5 percent in April, after an upwardly revised 0.1 percent gain in March.

The end of a 2 percent payroll tax cut took effect on January 1 and the smaller paychecks have made some consumers less willing to spend. Still, declining gasoline prices have offset some of the drag on household income.

"While weather was a clear negative in (the first quarter), the revised view suggests that underlying pressure on moderate income consumer spending remains," said Bernstein Research analyst Colin McGranahan.

The pressure is not limited to Target. Last week, Wal-Mart Stores Incposted an unexpected 1.4 percent decline in same-store sales at its Walmart U.S. unit, while Kohl's Corpposted a 1.9 percent decline in same-store sales. And on Wednesday, Lowe's Cos Increported weaker-than-expected quarterly profit, hurt by the chilly weather as well as competition from larger rival Home Depot Inc .

PROFIT DOWN

Target earned $498 million, or 77 cents per share, in the first quarter ended on May 4, compared with a profit of $697 million, or $1.04 per share, a year earlier.

Including the effects from opening Canadian stores, but excluding losses related to the early retirement of debt and gains from the sale of its credit card business, Target earned 82 cents per share. On that basis, analysts looked for 85 cents per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Total sales rose 1 percent to $16.71 billion, while analysts expected $16.78 billion in revenue.

The number of transactions in stores open at least a year fell 1.9 percent. Shoppers spent more overall and bought more items, but the selling price per unit was down, suggesting lower-priced items like groceries were selling well, Skrovan said.

Also, more shoppers took advantage of the 5 percent discount offered to Target's REDcard holders. It said 17.1 percent of sales in its stores were paid for with REDcard credit and debit cards, versus 11.6 percent a year ago.

Target said its first 24 Canadian stores, opened in March, generated $86 million in sales in the quarter. The company, which plans to have 124 stores in Canada by the end of the year, said costs related to the Canadian launch reduced earnings by 24 cents per share in the first quarter.

Target now expects adjusted earnings of $4.70 to $4.90 per share this year, down from its April forecast of $4.85 to $5.05.

(Reporting by Jessica Wohl in Chicago; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook made no apology on Tuesday for the iPad maker saving billions of dollars in U.S. taxes through Irish subsidiaries and told lawmakers that his company backs corporate tax reform, even though it may end up paying more.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has found that Apple in 2012 alone avoided paying $9 billion in U.S. taxes, using a strategy involving three offshore units with no discernible tax home, or "residence."

Cook, in his first congressional testimony since becoming Apple CEO in 2011, said his company is a major taxpayer, handing over nearly $6 billion in cash to the U.S. government in 2012.

"We expect to pay even more this year," Cook said. "We pay all the taxes we owe."

But Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the subcommittee and a veteran tax sleuth, said Apple had sought "the Holy Grail of tax avoidance," creating one Irish unit that paid no income taxes to any national tax authority for the past five years.

Levin said Apple used Ireland as a base for a web of offshore holding companies and negotiated a deal with the Irish government for a tax rate of less than 2 percent. The top U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent, one of the world's highest.

Cook said Apple did not depend on tax gimmicks. "We don't move intellectual property offshore and use it to sell our products back to the United States to avoid taxes. We don't stash money on some Caribbean island," he said.

In Ireland, where low corporate taxes have been an economic development tool for many years, the government said it had not made a special tax deal with Apple. If Apple's tax rate was too low, it was the fault of other countries, deputy prime minister Eamon Gilmore told national broadcaster RTE on Tuesday.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Tuesday that President Barack Obama "thinks it is inexplicable that our tax code would actually be written in a way that rewards companies for taking jobs and profits offshore."

HP, MICROSOFT PRECEDED APPLE

Subcommittee staffers said on Monday that Apple was not breaking any laws and had cooperated fully with the inquiry.

Levin's panel has previously examined what it called tax avoidance by other U.S. technology giants, including Hewlett-Packard Co and Microsoft Corp. The senator said Apple has used similar tax avoidance strategies.

Senator John McCain praised Apple as a success story, but he said the company's tax strategy reflected a "flawed" tax system.

"For years, Apple has opted to forego fully contributing to the U.S. Treasury and to American society by shifting profits and circumventing U.S. taxes," McCain said.

Cook said Apple agreed with those in Congress who want to reform corporate taxes and called for changes that include lower corporate income tax rates and a reasonable tax on foreign earnings.

"Apple recognizes these and other improvements in the U.S. corporate tax system may increase the company's taxes," he said in prepared testimony.

Many U.S. multinationals take advantage of a tax law that allows profits earned abroad to be tax-free as long as they are not brought into the United States, or "repatriated." Total U.S. corporate profits parked offshore rose 15 percent to $1.9 trillion last year, according to research firm Audit Analytics.

Taking advantage of this law and others, the offshore earnings of U.S. companies have risen 70 percent in the past five years, Audit Analytics said two weeks ago.

"The baldness of the Apple strategy surprises me more than anything else," said University of Southern California Law Professor Edward Kleinbard. "European member states are going to be very angry with Apple and very angry with Ireland."

OFFSHORE MANEUVERS

Offshore profits are typically taxed by the countries in which they are earned, but companies work hard to move offshore profits into countries with lower tax rates, like Ireland.

One way this is done is through "transfer pricing," or the management of moving goods and services across international borders from one corporate unit to another. Sometimes companies move valuable intellectual property to a low-tax country, then bring profits derived from its use into that country through royalty payments and other structures.

Levin's panel said Apple used a cost-sharing agreement "to transfer valuable intellectual property assets offshore and shift the resulting profits to a tax haven jurisdiction."

Assessing taxes on these arrangements is one of the biggest challenges facing U.S. tax collectors, said Mark Mazur, assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department, who testified after Cook.

The panel also said Apple took advantage of loopholes in tax law and regulations known as "check the box" and "look through" that let some offshore units be disregarded for tax purposes, sheltering substantial profits from taxation.

Levin has unsuccessfully called for closing the "check the box" and "look through" provisions of the tax code.

The Levin inquiry comes at a turbulent time in tax circles, with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service under investigation because of the way agents handled conservative political groups' applications for tax-exempt status.

It is not clear, however, whether that controversy and Levin's allegations will lead to an overhaul of the U.S. tax code. Tax law writers in Congress had been inching forward on such a project before the IRS scandal erupted earlier this month. Levin's inquiry has been under way for months.

Shares of Apple closed down 0.7 percent at $439.66 on Tuesday.

(Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton in Washington, Tom Bergin in London, Conor Humphries in Cork, Padraic Halpin in Dublin; Writing by Kevin Drawbaugh; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Tim Dobbyn)

Baz Luhrmann reinvented The Great Gatsby for the big screen this spring, but the starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrowis still a favorite among film buffs for its faithful rendering of this timeless F. Scott Fitzgerald tale.

"The Museum's lavish late 19th-century interiors provide the perfect setting for this film," says Driehaus Museum Director Lise Dube-Scherr. "The Great Gatsby is set in the Roaring Twenties, but this movie was filmed partly on location in the grand Gilded Age-era mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. These palaces share their heritage of opulence, wealth, and entertaining on a grand scale with the Nickerson Mansion."

The evening commences at 7:00 p.m., allowing guests to indulge in vintage cocktails and explore the Museum. At 7:30 p.m., guests enjoy movie-style popcorn and the feature presentation, which will be shown in the Museum's ballroom. The movie runs 144 minutes, and there is 30-minute intermission for guests to vote for the best dressed 1920s costume. Costumes are encouraged, but not mandatory.Guests must be 21 or older to attend.

Steps away from Chicago's Magnificent Mile, the Richard H. Driehaus Museum is a fascinating and rare example of the palatial homes erected by the wealthy of America's Gilded Age. The galleries are furnished with pieces from the most celebrated designers of the late 19th and early 20th century, such as Louis Comfort Tiffany and the Herter Brothers. These objets d'art are presented in harmony with the immaculately-restored interiors and surviving furnishings of the Samuel M. Nickerson Mansion, which was designated as a national landmark in 1977. For more information about the Museum, its collection or offerings, please visit .

Members of the media may contact Samantha Chmelik, Sales and Marketing Coordinator, for more information: 312 482 8933, ext. 39 or . High-resolution images are available at .

SOURCE Richard H. Driehaus Museum

_2011

July: Chinese student Jun Lin arrives in Montreal.

_2012

May 24: Lin last seen by friends.

May 25: Neighbour spots porn actor and model Luka Rocco Magnotta carrying box to post office.

May 26: Magnotta flies out of Montreal to France, landing in Paris. Montana lawyer Roger Renville sees bizarre Internet video he believes is snuff film depicting bound man being stabbed to death and dismembered.

May 27: Renville alerts U.S. and Canadian police to Internet video but they dismiss it as a fake.

May 29: Montreal police called to low-rent apartment building after janitor finds dismembered torso in suitcase left in trash. Same day, foot is found in package mailed to Conservative party in Ottawa and hand is found in package in Canada Post warehouse. Package destined for Liberal party. Lin reported missing by friends.

May 30: Montreal police name Magnotta as prime suspect and say national warrant issued for his arrest. Interpol adds him to its wanted list, putting police in 190 countries on alert. Magnotta spotted in Paris bar where he had soft drink and later left with a man. Montreal police find video on Internet and try unsuccessfully to have it taken down.

May 31: Montreal police confirm they have video that apparently shows man tied to bed and being killed and then dismembered.

June 1: Montreal police identify torso victim as Lin, a 33-year-old Chinese computer science student at Concordia University. Warrant issued for Magnotta on upgraded first-degree murder charge. Police say Magnotta also charged with threatening Prime Minister Stephen Harper because of the foot mailed to the Conservative Party of Canada offices. Montreal police confirm Magnotta left Canada on May 26 for Europe.

June 2: French police conduct ``targeted'' searches.

June 3: Reports that Magnotta stayed in low-budget hotel in Paris, leaving behind pornographic magazines as well as air sickness bags from airplane. French media report police are checking on claims of two people who say they saw him. Chinese Embassy in Ottawa issues statement advising Chinese visitors to Canada to take safety precautions.

June 4: German police acting on tip arrest Magnotta in Berlin after he is spotted in an Internet cafe apparently reading news reports about himself. Faces charges of first-degree murder, committing indignity to dead body, mailing obscene material and criminally harassing prime minister and several unidentified members of Parliament. Harper, attending Queen's Jubilee in Britain, congratulates police on their quick work.

June 5: Two schools in Vancouver receive packages containing human remains: a hand and a foot. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Magnotta informs authorities he will not fight his extradition. Lin's family arrives in Montreal.

June 13: Forensic tests allow Montreal police to confirm that the torso, feet and hands all belong to Lin. A Berlin court orders Magnotta to remain behind bars pending his extradition to Canada.

June 18: Magnotta arrives in Montreal aboard a Canadian military plane. He was shackled during the flight and escorted by several armed guards. Montreal police say they were unable to convince a commercial carrier to take Magnotta onboard.

June 19: Magnotta pleads not guilty after being formally charged with the first-degree murder of Lin, along with defiling his corpse, harassing Harper and members of Parliament, and publishing and mailing obscene material.

June 21: Magnotta makes an in-person court appearance in Montreal in order to set future court dates (his previous appearance was via video conference). He is represented by Toronto lawyer Luc Leclair, who has received a special dispensation from the Quebec bar to represent Magnotta in the case.

July 1: A tip leads Montreal police to a park in Montreal's west end, where they discover human remains near a pond.

July 4: Forensic tests allow Montreal police to confirm that the body part found three days earlier was Lin's head.

_2013

March 11: Preliminary hearing begins. Magnotta's lawyers argue, unsuccessfully, that the courtroom should be closed to the public and media. The courtroom remains open and a more routine publication ban is applied to details of the preliminary hearing.

March 12: Jun Lin's father, Daran, leaves courtroom in tears after hearing evidence. Details of that evidence are subject to the publication ban. Members of Lin's family have arrived from China to follow the case.

March 19: Magnotta collapses in court during his preliminary hearing while appearing to be distraught by the evidence presented against him. Still handcuffed, he falls to his side in the prisoner's box and curls into a fetal position.

April 12: Magnotta ordered to stand trial on five charges, including first-degree murder, in decision by Quebec court Judge Lori-Renee Weitzman.

April 29: A trial date is set for Sept. 15, 2014. Also, there will be an earlier pre-trial conference on Sept. 3, 2013.