BBC News with Sue Montgomery

Opposition leaders in Ukraine have denounced an agreement that the President Victor Yanukovych signed with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Moscow.Mr.Putin has agreed to buy $15bn-worth of Ukrainian government bonds and taken a third of the price Russia charges Ukraine for gas.The Ukrainian opposition leader and former boxer Vitali Klitschko told pro-European demonstrators in Kiev that Mr.Yanukovych was betraying the country's independence.David Stern reports from Kiev.

Mr.Klitschko has said he will challenge Mr.Yanukovych in presidential elections which the opposition hopes to move up by one year to the spring of 2014.Mr.Klitschko who on Tuesday retired his boxing title said he would meet Mr.Yanukovych in the ring.Opposition leaders also demanded to know what Ukrainian president offered Moscow in return for the loans and gas discount deal，details in which are still unknown.

A British minister has said that a London surgeon who died in detention in Syria had in effect been murdered by the Syrian regime.Foreign office minister Hugn Robertson said that it was clear that doctor Abbas Khan had met his death in circumstances that were at best extremely suspicious.

The fact remains that he went to Syria,to help the people of Syria who affected by the civil war,there is no excuse what so ever for the treatment that he has suffered by the Syrian authorities who have in effect murdered a British national who was in that country to help people injured during their civil war.

A Syrian government official told the BBC that the surgeon had hanged himself,but his family don't believe it.Doctor Khan was in prison in Syria for more than a year and died shortly before he was to be released.

Hospitals in Syrian second city Aleppo have been overwhelmed by casualties after several days of government air strikes on rebel areas.The humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontiers says the attacks in which helicopters have been dropping barrels of explosives have stretched the Aleppo medical resources to breaking point.

In Italy,a political row has erupted over the treatment of migrants at a reception center on the island of Lampedusa.Images purportedly filmed in secret show detainees being forced to strip while a camp worker hoses them down.The man who took the picture says staff routinely insult the migrants,here's Alan Jonhston.

The footage was shot on a cellphone by a Syrian refugee at the camp,and now his images have been aired on an Italian television.They show migrants queuing up in a crowded,open-air courtyard,one after another in cold winter conditions.In front of everyone else they have to strip completely naked,there's no privacy at all,then a camp employee hoses them down.The mayor of Lampedusa has said the island and Italy as a whole should be ashamed.

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The government of South Sudan says the former Vice President Riek Machar has fled the capital Juba with soldiers have backed what it says was an attempted military coup.The head of a military hospital in Juba said that 66 soldiers have been killed in clashes on Sunday.The United Nations in Juba says as many as 13,000 civilians have taken shelter in UN compounds.The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called on the South Sudanese government to protect all civilians regardless of ethnicity.

North Korean has cleared much of the archive on the website of the state news agency and main party newspaper amid concern it's trying to manipulate historical record.A search for the leader's uncle and former mentor,Jang Sung-taek who was executed last week found only one article in which he's vilified as a traitor and counterrevolutionary.Almost all articles published before October this year have disappeared.

Australian geologists summoned the hunt for precious minerals in Antartic say they have for the first time discovered the deposits of the igneous rock that yields diamonds.Here's Matt McGrath.

Diamonds have been found in every part of the world apart from the frozen continent of Antartica.Now researchers say they've discovered a type of rock called kimberlite as known to contain diamond deposits.Even if the rocks in Antartica turn out to be rich in diamond,there's a legal ban on the exploitation of minerals there for commercial purposes.However,countries that haven't signed the Antartica Treaty could in theory attempt to recover the icy gems.

Prostitutes in the Netherlands have gone to courts to fight for the same pension rights as footballers who can put up to 5,000 Euros a month tax-free into their pension plans.Their lawyer say that like footballers,prostitutes do difficult physical work in the prime of their lives and their careers don't tend to last long.

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