BBC News with Julie Candler
A United Nations-backed court has found the former President of Liberia, Charles Taylor, guilty of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, murder, rape and terrorism. The court in The Hague said Mr Taylor was criminally responsible for supporting the Revolutionary United Front rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone during the civil war in the 1990s. He'll be sentenced next month. Mr Taylor's lawyer described the trial as politically motivated. From The Hague, Peter Biles.
The prosecution had wanted to show that Mr Taylor was the key figure in arming and supporting the rebels in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s. The trial chamber said Charles Taylor's influence fell short of command responsibility, but on all 11 charges he was found criminally responsible for aiding and abetting the rebel forces and planning crimes. The judges also said there had been a continuous supply of diamonds from Sierra Leone provided to Mr Taylor in exchange for weapons.
Reacting to the verdicts , the chief prosecutor Brenda Hollis called it a historic day for the people of Sierra Leone. Alpha Sesay is a human rights lawyer there.
"In the eyes of very many people in Sierra Leone, Mr Taylor has always been guilty. There's excitement. I mean there's confusion, of course, about the findings of the trial chamber : what does it mean for him to be found guilty of aiding and abetting and not command responsibility was? In the eyes of some other people, a guilty verdict is a guilty verdict, and so a lot of people are really excited in Sierra Leone."
The United States said the judgment delivered a strong message to all perpetrators of atrocities that they would be held accountable.
Coordinated bomb attacks on newspaper offices in two Nigerian cities have killed at least seven people. It follows a warning to journalists last month from the militant Islamist group Boko Haram not to misrepresent it. Mark Lobel reports from Lagos.
In the capital Abuja, a car carrying explosives sped through the gate of ThisDay newspaper's offices and entered the building. Following an explosion, several people were killed, and parts of the building and printing press were destroyed. Around the same time in Kaduna state, a man was forced from his car after arousing suspicion as he approached offices which house three newspapers, including ThisDay. In the ensuing drama, the driver threw an explosive from the boot. Several people were killed, and the bomber was arrested.
The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says he's gravely alarmed at reports from Syria that the government was continuing to shell populated areas. He said the UN ceasefire monitors had reported that the Syrian government was in contravention of the peace plan it had agreed to and which had been endorsed unanimously by the Security Council.
A suicide car bomb attack on a coffee shop in the central Iraqi province of Diyala has killed at least eight people. Police said more than 15 people were wounded in the attack, which happened on a mainly Sunni village on the outskirts of Baquba, some 60km from the capital Baghdad.
World News from the BBC
The US military in Afghanistan says a man wearing Afghan army uniform has killed an American soldier in the southern province of Kandahar. An Afghan military spokesman said the gunman himself was killed when US troops returned fire. The Afghan spokesman said he was an Afghan special forces officer. The incident happened late on Wednesday night.
A prominent environmental activist in Cambodia has been shot and killed in a confrontation with military police in a threatened forest region. The man, Chut Wutty, was travelling with two journalists in the southwest of Cambodia where he'd been helping local people organise protests against land concessions. Guy De Launey has more. There have been suggestions that military police ordered the reporters to delete images from their cameras, but Mr Wutty objected.
Precisely what happened next is unclear, but shots were fired, and the environmental activist was fatally wounded. A military police spokesman said that one of his officers was also killed and had been doing his duty. Mr Wutty was one of the most outspoken activists in Cambodia. He was well-known for his work with indigenous tribes protesting about the destruction of sacred spirit forests by economic land concessions granted to well-connected companies.
A United Nations expert on landmines has reportedly said that unexploded cluster munitions have been found for the first time in Sri Lanka. The Associated Press news agency says it has seen an email from the expert, Allan Poston, saying small bombs from the weapons were discovered in the north of the country, near to where a child was killed in an explosion last month. The government has denied that it ever used bombs during the civil war with Tamil Tiger rebels.
The European Space Agency has signed a contract to send a spacecraft closer to the Sun than ever before. British firms have been given the task of building the solar orbiter to withstand temperatures of around 500C.
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