SUDAN: Three aid workers taken hostage in the Darfur region were freed on Saturday after being held by gunmen for over a month.

The joint UN-African Union mission in Darfur said that the three had been released after 32 days in captivity and appeared to be unharmed.

The statement identified one of the three Sudanese workers as an employee of Unicef and two others worked for the Irish humanitarian agency Goal.

INDIA: More than 4,000 people marched at the weekend to demand arrests in the case of a six-year-old girl who was raped while at school.

Two staff members at the private school in Bangalore are accused of the rape.

Police said the girl was assaulted when she left her classroom to go to the bathroom on July 2.

Parents have accused school authorities of trying to “hush up the criminal act.”

GERMANY: A crash involving several buses on a motorway near Dresden killed 10 people and injured 69 on Saturday.

The crash occurred shortly before 2am when
a Polish bus hit the rear
of a Ukrainian bus and then broke through the central barrier, slamming into a Polish minibus travell ing in the opposite direction.

Police said nine people died at the scene, and a 10th person succumbed to injuries in a hospital.

PUERTO RICO: General Electric said at the weekend that it plans to open an estimated $20 million (£11.7m) plant on the US territory’s north coast while closing two other plants.

Construction will begin this year on the facility and the plant is expected to start operating in mid-2015.

The territory is struggling to emerge from a decade-long slump. Its 13.1 per cent unemployment rate is far greater than that of any US state.

AFGHANISTAN: The ballot audit of the run-off round of the controversial presidential election was briefly suspended at the weekend.
“The disagreement was on signatures on data forms. A candidate claimed they were not properly signed,” said an audit commission spokesman.

The audit was suspended on Saturday evening until mid-afternoon yesterday.

Afghanistan is involved in an audit of 8.1 million votes cast on June 14.

INDONESIA: Ex-general Prabowo Subianto, who is widely thought to have narrowly lost this month’s presidential election, will not accept the result until claims of cheating are investigated, an aide said yesterday.

Gerindra party vice-secretary-general Fadli Zon said there was evidence of many instances of cheating.

Asked if he was challenging the credibility of the Elections Commission, Mr Zon said: “Of course.”

TUNISIA: The government has launched a crackdown on mosques and radio stations after a deadly attack on soldiers near the Algerian border.

Fourteen soldiers were killed last week when dozens of Islamist fighters attacked two checkpoints.

“The Prime Minister has decided to close immediately … those mosques where there were reported celebrations over the deaths of the soldiers,” the office of PM Mehdi Jomaa said yesterday.

US: A Florida jury hit the Reynolds Tobacco Co with $23.6 billion (£13.8bn) in punitive damages on Friday in a lawsuit filed by the widow of a smoker who died of alung cancer in 1996.

The damages were awarded to Cynthia Robinson on top of $16.8 million (£11m) in compensatory damages.

“The jury wanted to send a statement that tobacco cannot continue to lie to the American people,” said one of Ms Robinson’s lawyers.