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BBC news 2012-03-08

BBC News with Gaenor Howells

The United Nations humanitarian chief Valerie Amos has been to the devastated district of Baba Amr in the Syrian city of Homs. She spent about 45 minutes there with members of the Syrian Red Crescent assessing the humanitarian needs of residents who survived weeks of shelling by government forces. A Red Cross spokesman, Sean Maguire, told the BBC that they've encountered fewer people than they'd expected.

"The key issue really for us is where is the population and what are their needs now. We get a sense that they fled, they're elsewhere. Last week, the Free Syrian Army were saying there were about 4,000 people left, out of a population that may at one point have been as high as 100,000."

Six British soldiers have been killed by a huge bomb explosion in southern Afghanistan. Their deaths take the number of British service personnel killed in the country to more than 400. Quentin Sommerville reports from the British base at Lashkar Gah in Helmand province.

The men had been known as two-vehicle convoy in what was described as a routine patrol. Not long after leaving their base, they left the main highway, crossing open ground. It's a common tactic. It was twilight when a massive explosion tore through their Warrior troop carrier. The fire burnt for hours. The wreckage of the vehicle and the remains of the six soldiers have now been returned to base. The burnt-out hull of the Warrior appears to indicate that it was hit by a huge Taliban improvised explosive device, one of the largest seen in the area. One senior officer said this isn't a change in insurgent tactics; it was just rotten luck.

The government of Sudan has rejected allegations of crimes against humanity made by the former head of the United Nations in Sudan. Mukesh Kapila accused Sudan of ethnic cleansing against the Nuba population in Southern Kordofan, where there's been fighting between the Sudanese military and rebels. However, a Sudanese official, Rabie Abdul-Atti, told the BBC that its air force sorties were targeting the rebels whom he accused of committing human rights abuses.

Forbes magazine says there are now a record 1,226 billionaires on its annual rich list, compared with 140 when it was launched 25 years ago. The Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim, who's worth an estimated $69bn, tops the list for the third year in a row followed by the software magnate Bill Gates and financier Warren Buffett. No Indian billionaires are in the top 10 this year, and the only Chinese one is the Hong Kong property magnate Li Ka-shing. Steve Forbes explains why.

"Well, what it tells us is there's a lot of churn, there hasn't been a lot of growth in the economy in the last year. The number of billionaires went up 16, but yet some regions go down: China went down a little bit; Russia went down because of weak commodity prices. But the fact the matter is there hasn't been a lot of real vigorous growth in the world, and that's reflected on the list this year."

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The man who admits carrying out a massacre in Norway last year has been formally charged with acts of terrorism and premeditated murder. Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing extremist, is due to go on trial next month. Last July, he killed 69 people in a shooting rampage and eight others in a bomb attack. Norway's state prosecutor Svein Holden says it's unlikely that Breivik would ever be released.

"The defendant has committed very serious crimes of a dimension with no previous experience of in our society in modern times. In his opinion, his actions were justified. And it is likely that he would commit crimes of a similar nature again."

An international group of scientists has established the complete genetic blueprint of the gorilla, one of mankind's closest relatives. The researchers found that 15% of the human genome is closer to that of gorillas than it is to chimpanzees - our closest relative of all. Our science correspondent Pallab Ghosh has more.

Initial studies of the gorilla genome have shown that our species separated from gorillas 10 million years ago, much earlier than some scientists thought. Another discovery is that something in their genes prevents gorillas from suffering from dementia - a finding that researchers could study further to help them find a cure for senility. But the ultimate prize for the research community is to discover just what it is that makes us uniquely human.

Armenia says it will not take part in this year's Eurovision Song Contest, which is being hosted by Azerbaijan. The head of Armenia's Eurovision delegation, Gohar Gasparyan, said it didn't make sense to send people to a country where they'd be met as enemies. In the 1990s, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

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