BBC News with Charles Carroll.

The United States has reiterated that removing the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should be the goal of the negotiations that the United Nations has convened in Geneva in January. A White House spokesman said that a transitional government could be formed as the result of the talks. The UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has asked Syrian parties to name their delegations before the end of the year. Jim Muir is following the developments.

The opposition coalition is trying to insist on prior guarantees that this will indeed be a transition which will involve Bashar al-Assad being out of power almost straight-away as transitional governing body taking all powers, presidential powers included. Whereas of course Mr. Assad has said in a interview quite recently that he sees no reason of why he shouldn't stand for election in 2014. And the regime itself that the fact is, politically, diplomatically and militarily it's in a stronger position than it has been for a very long time, so it's hard to see what its motivation would be to go to Geneva to negotiate its own demise.

A new report by a network of more than 60 human rights groups says that Syrian women are increasingly the targets of violent abuse and torture by government forces and armed groups. The report estimates that since the start of the conflict, 6,000 women have been raped. Based on interviews with victims and medical staff in the first half of the year, the report concludes that there are ever more instances of women being targeted by snipers and used as human shields, often with their children.

President Obama has defended the interim nuclear deal that world powers agreed with Iran in Geneva. Speaking in San Francisco, Mr. Obama said that tough talk did not guarantee US security. Israel and some other US allies are also expressing major doubts. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sending his top security advisor to Washington to discuss the deal. He said that under any permanent agreement, Iran must scrap, what he called, its military nuclear capability.

The Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has spoken on national television to explain why he abandoned a planned agreement on closer ties with the European Union. He told pro-European protesters that economic necessity had forced him to revive dialogue with neighboring Russia. The Kremlin has issued a series of threats and incentives to stop Ukraine signing a trade and cooperation deal with Brussels this week. Thousands of demonstrators have held more protests in the capital against their government's turn toward Russia. David Stern is in Kiev.

Today, the demonstrations were smaller, but they were still well attended. There were confrontations between police and demonstrators. The cause is unclear but it apparently involves hundreds of people. There was teargas used and there was also some physical confrontation between the two sides. Ukraine's imprisoned opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko says that she is going on hunger strike until the president signs the deal.

World News from the BBC.

The Prime Minister of Thailand Yingluck Shinawatra has announced the use of a special security law to counter demonstrators who stormed into government departments during a day of protests across Bangkok. They want the prime minister to step down, claiming she is the puppet of her elder brother the former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, currently in exile. Jonathan Head reports.

Now the protest organizers are calling on their supporters to bring mattresses and base themselves in these ministries. They are suggesting that they may span those protests over the next 2 days. They are not very specific about what their plans are. And there are certainly very significant numbers of people on the streets today. Hard to count them, because they have been in so many different places. But when they were all in one location over the weekend, the number certainly exceeded 100,000.

The UN's health agency says the number of adolescents infected by HIV, the virus that can lead to AIDS has risen by 1/3 in 10 years. The World Health Organization said that more than 2 million people between the ages of 10 and 19 were now living with the virus. It blamed a lack of suitable programs for that age group.

It's emerged that a couple suspected of holding 3 women captive in London for more than 30 years are former Maoist activists. They were arrested last week on suspicion of forced labor and immigration offences. June Kelly reports.

Aravindan Balakrishnan is 73 and from India, his Tanzanian wife, Chanda, is 67. Together in the 1970s, they set up a communist squat in Brixton, in south of London. It's claimed that concerns have been raised with the police about the education of the 30-year-old women, the youngest of the 3, rescued in this constantly developing case.

Scientists in the United States say that mushrooms generate their own weather. Researchers used high-speed filming to study oyster and Shitake mushrooms. They found the fungi released water vapor, cooling the air around them and creating winds strong enough to blow spores into the air and help them disperse.

BBC News.