Two people were arrested in Britain Thursday over an assault on an "emo" teenager -- the first such move after police began recording attacks on subculture members as “hate crimes.”

The term, short for “emotive” or “emotional,” usually refers to an introspective style of music -- somewhere between punk and grunge -- and its associated fashion styles.

Earlier this month, Greater Manchester Police became the first force in the U.K. to treat attacks on groups such as goths, emos and punks in the same way as crimes based on race, religion, disability or sexual orientation.

The 16-year-old victim was “distinctively dressed as an emo” in an eastern suburb of the northern England city when he was punched in the face Monday evening, the Manchester Evening News newspaper said.

The victim “describes himself as an emo,” police said in a statement, adding that officers had arrested a 14-year-old boy and a 44-year-old man over the attack.

“The assault has been reported as an alternative subculture hate crime and will be investigated as such,” the statement added.

A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police said the injured teen was hit "several times."

Garry Shewan, assistant chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, said:  "It is unfortunate that this incident happened, but the fact we were able to identify this as a hate crime is very positive. Just last Thursday we announced that we will now record alternative subculture as a hate motivation."

Lancashire Police / PA via AP

Sophie Lancaster was fatally attacked in a park in Lancashire, northern England, because of her goth appearance in 2007.

"We hope this encourages victims to continue to come forward so we can take positive action against offenders," he added.

In England, a hate crime is defined by prosecutors as “a criminal offense motivated by prejudice based on a person's disability, race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.”

The decision by police to include subcultures was partly a result of the 2007 killing of Sophie Lancaster, a 20-year-old in the northern England county of Lancashire, who was kicked and stamped to death for being a goth.

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Jacques Brinon / AP

A visitor stands in front of the closed Louvre museum Paris, France, Wednesday.

PARIS - Tourists caught no glimpse of the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory or Venus de Milo on Wednesday due to a one-day closure of the Louvre, as guards protested that pickpockets were rampant at the world's most visited museum. 

Two hundred museum guards exercised their right to a work stoppage, forcing the museum to shut its doors for the day, union representatives said. 

The CGT union said guards were "fed up" by attacks and threats directed at them and visitors over the past few months by pickpockets.

The secretary general of the national union for museums (SNMD), David Maillard, said petty thieves were multiplying at the site, visited by nearly 9 million people each year.

"There are thefts and threats every day. The guards are fed up with being assaulted by pickpockets," Maillard told Reuters, adding that the unions want better security at the museum.

The Louvre, which confirmed the closure on its website, could not be immediately reached for comment, but unions said the museum would reopen on Thursday.

Paris police regularly patrol the city's most crowded tourist sites, such as the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre.

But thieves who often operate in organised gangs are a constant frustration for authorities as they are easily able to exploit tourists and can lose themselves in crowds.

Many of those arrested do not hold French nationality or are minors, complicating judicial pursuit. 

Reuters contributed to this report.

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MAKASSAR, Indonesia -- A mob of wild monkeys has gone on a rampage in a village in eastern Indonesia, entering houses and attacking residents, injuring seven people.

One of the victims was listed in critical condition.

Ambo Ella, a spokesman for Sidendeng Rappang District in South Sulawesi province, says the surprise attack by about 10 monkeys happened in Toddang Pulu village.

He said late Wednesday that a 16-year-old boy was badly bitten in Monday’s attack and is being treated at the hospital.

He believes the troop came from a nearby forest protected by a local tribe.

It is unclear why the monkeys, which are usually afraid of humans and flee when they hear human voices, emerged and attacked.

Local authorities are investigating to find out what prompted the attack, which caused panic among villagers.

By The Associated Press.

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A landslip has exposed human bones in the English coastal cemetery that inspired a scene in Bram Stoker's horror novel Dracula.

Erosion has dislodged banks of earth containing human remains from graves at St Mary's in Whitby, North Yorkshire, ITV News reported.

The cemetery was mentioned in the 1897 novel, whose author lived in the seaside town for several years, and the church is a magnet for fans of the book.

'I managed to identify one hip bone, two pieces of skull and a large bone that looked like it was part of a leg,” local resident Barry Brown told the Northern Echo newspaper.

He said he found several bones in the backyard of his kipper smokehouse, which sits under the cliff on which the church is perched, the newspaper reported.

"It’s quite sad picking that sort of thing up, I expect the people who buried them thought they’d be there forever,” he said.

Whitby Town Council said tthe church itself was not in danger of collapse, and that the remains in the churchyard were very old.

The church dates from 1100, according to a BBC report.

A damaged drainage pipe, which left rainwater pouring out of the ancient graveyard and down the cliff, was thought to be to blame for the landslip, ITV said.

Swedish prosecutors have issued international arrest warrants for two Britons suspected of masterminding a smuggling ring involving over a ton of Chinese garlic.

The men first shipped the garlic to Norway by boat, where it entered the country duty-free since it was considered to be in transit, prosecutor Thomas Ahlstrand said Wednesday. They then drove the approximately 1.2 tons of garlic across the expansive Norwegian-Swedish border, avoiding customs checks and thus Swedish import duties.

Ahlstrand said the men avoided more than $13.1 million in Swedish taxes through the scheme. A lengthy police investigation led to the identification of the two Britons allegedly behind the Swedish operation, which took place in 2009-10.

It was not the first time smugglers had shown a preference for garlic from China, which accounts for nearly 80 percent of world output and is often significantly cheaper than local varieties.

In 2010, Polish authorities seized six containers with 144 tons of Chinese garlic that had been smuggled into the country via the Netherlands.

It was not immediately clear whether the Polish smuggling was linked to the Swedish case.

BERLIN - A 65-year-old man thought to be sleeping while sitting upright on a Berlin underground train as it crisscrossed the German capital was actually dead, police said on Sunday.

"It's tragic," a Berlin police spokeswoman said. "We don't know how long he was sitting dead on the train nor do we know the exact cause of death yet. There are no indications of foul play. He seems to have died of natural causes."

The man was found in the U-8 underground train line that runs all night at the Weinmeisterstrasse station at 5:45 a.m. when a rail worker tried wake the man up by gently shaking him. Medics were called in but could only pronounce the man dead.

A preliminary investigation showed no indications of the man being murdered. A more detailed autopsy is planned for Monday. 

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Drivers taking a van loaded with 12 occupied coffins to a German crematorium returned from a bathroom break to discover the vehicle had been stolen, local reports said Thursday.

Police in the state of Brandenburg told NBC News that the van was one of three vehicles stolen in the early hours of Monday from an industrial car park at Hoppegarten, near Berlin.

According to local media reports, the drivers were taking a bathroom break on their way to a crematorium in the eastern German city of Meissen when they returned to find their vehicle gone.

And on Thursday afternoon, the thieves were still on the run with their unusual heist.

 “We have not found the bodies yet,” police spokesman Peter Salender told NBC News.

The thieves were apparently unaware that the locked vehicle contained 12 neatly-stowed coffins.

Under the headline “Car Thieves Stole My Mother’s Body”, German mass circulation newspaper Bild on Thursday identified the daughter of one of the deceased.

Officials suspect that a gang may have been supplying stolen vehicles to customers in eastern Europe, since another of the three vans have since been found in the western Polish city of Poznan.

“One of the three vehicles that were stolen at the car park has been found in Poland, but we are continuing to investigate in all directions,” Salender said.

"Given that three vehicles were stolen at the same time and because of the fact that one van was found in Poland already, we are led to believe that this is the work of organized criminals in eastern Europe," Ulrich Scherding, spokesman for the prosecutor's office in Frankfurt/Oder told NBC News.

"Poland has mutated to a transit country for stolen vehicles, so that the vans could end up further east," Scherding added.

According to information obtained by NBC News, the vehicle with the bodies was not equipped with cooling devices.

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An Iranian news agency issued a bizarre apology on Monday for citing a spoof story about President Barack Obama from satirical newspaper, The Onion, as fact.

Fars, the state-backed news source linked to the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), admitted mistakenly republishing an article that claimed rural Americans preferred Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Obama.

The spoof article mentioned a supposed opinion poll finding that 77 percent of rural Caucasian voters "would rather go to a baseball game or have a beer with Ahmadinejad, a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed, than spend time with Obama."

Fars reproduced the article on its website on Friday alongside its usual stories about advances in Iranian military technology and condemnation of Israel. The Iranian version omitted The Onion's description of Ahmadinejad as "a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed." Fars appeared to have taken the story down by about 1 p.m. ET on Friday.

In a statement on its website on Monday, Fars acknowledged the error – but also listed a string of blunders by Western media outlets including the New York Times and the BBC.

"All media, at least those you know like the BBC, CNN, etc., have had many goofs," the statement said.

It also said that it still believed the Onion story was true.

"Although it does not justify our mistake, we do believe that if a free opinion poll is conducted in the US, a majority of Americans would prefer anyone outside the US political system to President Barack Obama and American statesmen," it quoted its own un-named editor-in-chief as saying.

Iran news agency cites Onion story as fact

The statement added: "[Fars] makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of its reports, however very occasionally mistakes do happen."

The statement cited an April 2011 error by the New York Times in which it accidentally republished a spoof image from The Onion in an article about teen magazine, Tiger Beat.

It also cited other "embarrassing blunders over the years" by the BBC, reproducing a list -- originally published by the Daily Telegraph – including an incident in which a weather forecaster was caught on-air flipping the bird to a producer.

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