The two were relatives of the late Rwandan President, Juvenal Habyarimana, whose death sparked the 1994 genocide.

This case highlights the current failure of UNHCR in Nairobi to provide speedy settlement for refugees whose lives are at risk

Rachael Reilly Human Rights Watch

A UNHCR spokesman told the BBC that the organisation was committed to improving the refugees' security.

Killed in bed

Human Rights Watch, a United States-based group, says the 43-year-old woman was thought to be in danger because she was a "close relative" of Habyarimana.

The children, aged nine and 10, were reportedly found with their throats slit at the centre, which houses 190 refugees.

The group urged UNHCR to take extra precautions to safeguard the refugees under its care.

"This case highlights the current failure of UNHCR in Nairobi to provide speedy settlement for refugees whose lives are at risk," said Rachael Reilly, refugee policy director at Human Rights Watch. 

Corruption scandal

A spokesman for the UNHCR in Nairobi, Emmanual Nyabera, told the BBC's Network Africa programme that the resettlement programme was facing major challenges:

"The first one, which I think is a challenge all over the world, is that the whole idea of resettlement fully depends on host countries," he said.

Receiving countries have tightened their requirements before allowing refugees to resettle there.

The second challenge, Mr Nyabera said, was the disruption caused by a corruption scandal at the UNHCR Nairobi office.

 Mr Nyabera said he was "saddened by what happened" and that the UNHCR remained "committed to giving all the support that is possible to the refugees," especially regarding security.

Mr Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu, was in a plane that was shot down in April 1994, triggering the murder of around 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus by Hutu hardliners. 

Le Pen supporters are conspicuous in some regions

 

By BBC News Online's Sheila Barter in Drancy

For a political party whose candidate has made it to the second round of the presidential election, supporters of the National Front are pretty hard to find - in Paris at least. 

I am totally against fascism, but I think he is right about repatriation

Paris voter

By contrast, the confident, smiling face of Mr Le Pen is everywhere. He is thirsting for the chance to take on Mr Chirac in a televised debate. 

"I can be elected," he told RTL radio. 

"I am counting on the French people. I am the candidate of the people against the candidate of the system.

Le Pen is loud, his supporters quiet

"I am counting on the millions of French people who think that things are not going well." 

I did run across one sympathiser in central Paris. 

"I am totally against fascism," he told me, "but I think he is right about repatriation. 

"People feel afraid to go out - they will attack you even in broad daylight, steal your bag, jump into your car.

Click here for a map of the election results by region

"So much of the crime is committed by black people, Arabs, and now people from Eastern Europe. They should all be expelled - even those born here." 

In search of the men and women who brought Mr Le Pen his first-round triumph - with a total of 4.8 million votes - I headed for Drancy, just north-east of the city.

'Old white people'

It is traditionally a communist fortress, but this time Le Pen took 21%, with Bruno Megret, who is even more right wing, getting 3%. 

You won't find anyone who will admit to it - people are keeping it close to their chest

Middle-aged couple

Drancy is also a place of particular significance in French history as it was from here that 100,000 Jews were sent to Nazi concentration camps.

A memorial in the town says: "Please don't forget the victims."

But as an Algerian man in a cafe opposite the memorial says: "I think perhaps they have forgotten." 

While more than one in five people here voted for the far right, no-one is admitting to it. 

Drancy memorial: Collaborators helped the Nazis deport Jews

"You are looking for old white people," said a young man sitting on the steps of the town hall. 

But when I approach people answering this description, they tell me they are not interested in politics. 

"So you didn't vote?" I ask. 

"Yes, of course I voted," they call back over their shoulders. 

A middle-aged couple walking arm in arm told me I was wasting my time. 

"You won't find anyone who will admit to it," they said. "People are keeping it close to their chest."

Whodunnit?

The hunt for Le Pen voters has turned into something of a political whodunnit - and the best information has come from exit polls. 

His support is spread across age groups and social classes - unlike many of the other parties, which have a concentration at one end of the social or age bracket. 

His support is much higher among men, and among the unemployed - 38% of whom said they had voted for Le Pen, according to an exit poll by Ipsos. 

Perhaps most surprising is the fact that Le Pen's supporters came from across the whole spectrum of political opinion - most of them turning to him as the strongest anti-crime figure. 

Many Le Pen voters were also supporters of other right- and centre-right parties, but the scale of the protest vote sent communists, socialists and hard-left voters his way too. 

---

The people on board the rig went inside and locked their doors

Dick Filgate, ChevronTexaco

However, 45 were released on Tuesday and negotiations were taking place to free the others. It is not known how many foreign workers are still on the rig.

The hostage takers are demanding contract jobs. 

The incident happened on Sunday, although details have only just been released. 

The rig is about 8km (5 miles) off the town of Escravos. 

"They mobilised a bunch of boats and people, and occupied one of the drilling rigs," Mr Filgate said. 

Workers not threatened

"The people on board the rig went inside and locked their doors." 

He said the youths did not appear to be armed and the workers did not feel threatened. 

ChevronTexaco spokesman Fred Gorell, speaking from San Francisco, said: "We are encouraged by an agreement that was reached today for 45 workers on the rig to leave.

"We hope negotiations will bring swift and peaceful resolution to the occupation."

Nigeria is one of the world's largest producer of oil. 

Oil installations are often subject to hostage taking and acts of sabotage in Nigeria, where local communities feel they have been exploited by oil companies and successive Nigerian governments 

Workers are rarely harmed by kidnappers, who usually demand jobs or other compensation.

In March 2000, 32 Shell workers at a natural gas plant in the Niger Delta were held hostage for five days by youths demanding the company improve a local road.

By Dominic Hughes  In Sydney

The five-day trial of Peter James Knight - described by the prosecution as an obsessed anti-abortion protester - at times descended into farce.

Conducting his own defence, the 48-year-old sometimes addressed the court in a shrill scream. 

Knight refused to confirm his name, age or last address and for two months after his arrest he was known simply as "Mr X".

Court outburst

He faces a maximum penalty of life imprisonment and is expected to be sentenced on Wednesday by the Supreme Court. 

He claimed the shooting of Steven Rogers, the security guard at the East Melbourne clinic, was an accident. 

But the prosecution said that when he walked into the clinic on 16 July last year he had planned a massacre of staff and patients.

As well as 14 rounds of ammunition, he was equipped with 16 litres of kerosene, three cigarette lighters and gags for the mouths of his victims.

When challenged by Mr Rogers, Knight shot him before being wrestled to the ground by two bystanders.

On being found guilty, Knight shouted at the court "you will be made to pay the penalty".

Officers simultaneously raided 75 addresses across the country, with large amounts of computer equipment seized for examination.

The number of arrests is unclear, but includes a 15-year-old boy and people involved in care work, teaching and medicine.

Operation Magenta was the result of a six-month investigation and concentrated on people who use internet chat rooms to advertise and trade in child abuse images.

It's important to realise that behind every image of child porn is a child who has been sexually abused

NSPCC

Police said they believed many of those involved in swapping images may also be directly responsible for child abuse.

Detectives were able to make use of specialist equipment to trace computers being used by people entering the chat rooms anonymously.

Among the arrests were seven in Wales, six in London, two in Manchester, two in Cheshire and one in Merseyside.

The number is expected to rise as the contents of the computer hard drives and disks are examined.

'Immense damage'

The raids were co-ordinated by Hertfordshire Constabulary's Child Protection and Investigation Unit and the Abusive Images Unit from Greater Manchester Police.

In Scotland, the operation involved the Strathclyde, Northern, Tayside and Grampian forces.

Strathclyde Police said it had executed five warrants and Grampian Police searched a house in the Banchory area, near Aberdeen.

In Northern Ireland, police seized two computers and a number of disks during a search of a house in Antrim town.

The NSPCC says the effects of abuse last into adulthood

Supporting the police raids NSPCC policy advisor Christine Atkinson said: "It's important to realise that behind every image of child porn is a child who has been sexually abused.

"The NSPCC knows that children suffer not only the sexual abuse, but suffer again knowing that their abuse has been recorded and that those images are now available around the world via the internet."

Inspector Keith Tilley, head of the Hertfordshire unit, said he was also concerned about the close link between those distributing and making the images.

He said some child abusers were known to have started by looking at pictures on the internet.

'New insight'

Following the raids Inspector Tilley said: "What we are also mindful of... is that potentially there could be a child at risk of abuse."

He said a risk assessment would be carried out on any adults with access to the computers seized, adding: "The message is that these people are a danger to children."

Detective Inspector Terry Jones of Greater Manchester Police said officers were particularly concerned about how young some of those involved were.

He insisted that police were up to the challenge of tackling child abuse on the internet, despite its prolific growth.

DI Jones said 12 child porn images were seized in 1995, compared to 41,000 in 1999 and many more now. "We have just stopped counting," he added.

"The internet has made child abuse images commonplace. We are getting a new insight into what's going on behind closed doors and it's very disturbing."

DI Jones added: "Instead of being locked away in a council estate or wherever, they are effectively coming out to use the internet - and that's when we get them."

The 34-year-old woman, who is known only as "Mrs U", had asked the Court of Appeal in London to overturn an order granted to a Bristol fertility clinic in January allowing it to destroy her husband's sperm samples.

However, three judges dismissed her appeal on Wednesday.

The Centre for Reproductive Medicine in Bristol had said that Mrs U's 47-year-old husband withdrew his earlier consent for posthumous use of his sperm.

Mrs U claimed that her husband, who died unexpectedly last year from asthma, had withdrawn his consent under duress from a member of the medical profession. 

We can only guess at the feelings of someone who has suffered as Mrs U has suffered

Lady Justice Hale

Britain's most senior female judge Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, rejected Mrs U's claims in January but ruled the samples should not be destroyed until the woman had a chance to appeal.

However Lord Phillips, sitting with Lord Justice Mummery and Lady Justice Hale, have now granted the clinic permission to destroy the sperm samples.

Lady Justice Hale said: "We can only guess at the feelings of someone who has suffered as Mrs U has suffered, but we can sympathise and even empathise with them.

"There is a natural temptation to try to bend the law so as to give her what she wants and what she truly believes her husband would have wanted.

"But we have to resist it."

Vasectomy reverse

She said that the question for the court was whether the centre had "an effective consent for the continued storage and later use of these sperm".

Lady Justice Hale said that without the consent, it was "unlawful for them to continue to keep it."

Mrs U and her husband married in 1993. Mr U had two children from a previous marriage and later had a vasectomy.

The couple wanted to have a family and Mr U underwent an unsuccessful operation to reverse the vasectomy.

In September 2000, Mr U had a successful operation to remove his sperm but Mrs U's later treatment was unsuccessful.

Her husband died before she had a chance for a follow-up appointment.

In a similar case, Diane Blood gave birth to a baby boy three years ago after sperm was taken from her dying husband.

She won a two-year battle in 1997 when an appeal court ruled that under European law she could take the sperm to Belgium for IVF treatment.

The cloned animal, called Princess, was the last female in one of only four bloodlines of Gloucestershire Old Spots in North America. 

Several attempts at getting offspring from Princess through natural breeding and artificial insemination had failed, NewScientist.com reports.

Cloning produced three piglets, born via a surrogate mother, after just one embryo implantation round.

Genetic diversity

 Two of the clones, now a couple of weeks old, are alive and appear healthy; one was accidentally killed by the surrogate.

Scientists see a role for pig clones as organ suppliers for human transplants

But for Robyn Metcalfe, founder of the Kelmscott Rare Breeds Foundation in Maine, cloning was the obvious way to salvage a bloodline that might have otherwise gone extinct in the US.

"We're fully aware that cloning won't increase genetic diversity, but in this one case, if we can reproduce Princess by cloning, we can bring that diversity back," he told NewScientist.com.

Don Bixby, director of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, said cloning "might help for these dead ends, but it's not something we would normally choose". 

Difficult procedure

 He said there was some evidence suggesting that a percentage of cloned animals might suffer from genetic defects. 

The company behind the Princess cloning said the project showed how much more efficient it had made pig copying.

After fusing skin cells from Princess with donor eggs to create the clones, only one implantation procedure was required. The surrogate sow was implanted with between 100 and 150 embryos and a successful triplet pregnancy resulted.

When scientists first began their attempts to clone pigs, they found it extremely difficult to get the surrogate mothers - which give birth to litters - to carry the implanted embryos.

The world's first pig clones were born on 5 March, 2000 - four years after Dolly the sheep clone's birth.

The animals, one female and two male, hatched from nine eggs, which travelled 108 times around the Earth on a seven-day flight that ended on 1 April.

Chinese scientists will study the chickens to see if their biology has been affected in any way by the time their eggs spent in space.

They are well-suited to this end, being of a particularly pure native Chinese bloodline, Xinhua news agency quoted the head researcher, Yang Ning, as saying.

He said the chicken's hatching was also evidence of the sophistication of the life support systems on board the spacecraft, the third of China's unmanned vessels launched in preparation for its manned programme.

He said it was fortunate that chickens of both sexes hatched, because this would allow researchers to breed them and study the offspring.

You can't be going around having hugely promiscuous sex all over the place and hope that you won't be affected

Thabo Mbeki

In an interview with the Star newspaper, Mr Mbeki promised to take the lead in fighting Aids.

He has in the past been criticised for questioning the link between the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and Aids and refusing wide access to anti-retroviral drugs, saying they are costly and toxic.

The interview follows a cabinet meeting last week that resulted in a policy shift on Aids.

Loud message

In the interview on Wednesday Mr Mbeki promised to provide strong leadership on the pandemic.

Mr Mbeki's policy frustrates health services

The president told South Africans: "You can't be going around having hugely promiscuous sex all over the place and hope that you won't be affected by something or other."

Correspondents say Mr Mbeki's stand suggests that the government has decided to step up its fight against HIV/Aids in a country where it affects almost five million people - over one South African in nine.

U-turn

Last week's cabinet meeting stopped short of acknowledging the link between HIV and Aids as a fact - but it said in a statement it would act on the "premise" that the human immunodeficiency virus caused Aids.

The cabinet also reversed a ban on the treatment of rape victims in state hospitals with anti-retroviral drugs, saying they would be allowed if patients accepted the risk they posed. 

Source: Medical Research Council

Aids activists hailed the turnaround as a significant policy shift, but urged the government to make up for lost time.

Mr Mbeki clashed last year with the state-funded Medical Research Council over Aids and said crime and poverty were the biggest killers. 

The council said in a report that Aids would kill up to seven million people by 2010 if the state continued its policies on treatment and prevention.

Former scrap metal dealer David Morris, 39, of Craig Cefn Parc in the Swansea Valley, denies murdering three generations of the same family at their home in Clydach, near Swansea, almost three years ago.

The Swansea Crown Court trial was halted after two days on Tuesday, when a male juror collapsed while viewing video footage of the murder scene.

A new jury - including eight of the original jurors - was sworn in and the trial restarted when it became clear he could not continue. 

The judge criticised the jury system in England and Wales, which does not allow alternate jurors to take over in such circumstances. 

Brutal attack

Grandmother Doris Dawson, 80, her daughter Mandy Power, 34, and her granddaughters Katie, 10, and Emily, eight, were found beaten to death in the Kelvin Road home they shared on 27 June 1999.

The new jury has been shown the video footage of the murder scene, filmed by police shortly after the victims were discovered.

Prosecutor Patrick Harrington QC said the attack was so brutal it could only be described as a "massacre" in which the skulls of all four victims were crushed. 

He said Mrs Power, who was battered 38 times with an iron bar, had been the focus of the attack.

David Morris denies four counts of murder

Both she and Mrs Power's two children were probably killed as witnesses, the prosecution alleged.

Mr Harrington said Mrs Power had become a "sexual adventurer" who indulged in lesbian relationships, after the break-up of her marriage.

Although in a settled relationship with former policewoman Alison Lewis at the time of the attack, the court heard Mrs Power had previously been involved with Mr Morris's girlfriend, Mandy Jewell.

Mr Morris had been angry at the way the relationship had broken up although he had never approved of it, the court heard.

He later told police he had had a sexual relationship with Mrs Power in the weeks before her death.

Fires started

Mr Morris matched the killer's profile due to a number of character traits, Mr Harrington alleged.

He was someone with a tendency for violence, known to Mrs Dawson and the children, and was a smoker who was right handed.

He said Mr Morris was "forensically aware", adding that the initial investigation had been hampered by false leads.

Five fires deliberately started at the house by the killer had almost destroyed the evidence.

Mr Morris initially denied that a gold chain found at the murder scene belonged to him, but admitted only days before the trial that it was "probably his". 

Mrs Lewis, her police officer husband and his brother came under the "false finger of suspicion" when they were held and questioned by police one year after the killings, the court heard.

All were later released without charge.

'Awful irony'

Mr Harrington also told the court that the murder weapon - a four-foot metal pole - had been kept at the Kelvin Road house due to an "awful irony".

He said it had been left there by a former occupant, in case his wife needed to protect herself at home.

"When he moved out he left it behind. The awful irony is that the implement was intended, if it was to be used, to be a defensive weapon," Mr Harrington said.

"It actually became the murder weapon in this case."

The case continues.