BBC News with David Austin

French and Malian forces are reported to have captured the Islamist rebel stronghold of Gao, the most populated town in northern Mali. It’s the biggest military success in the two-week operation against the al-Qaeda-linked insurgents occupying the country’s vast northern expanse. Hugh Schofield reports from Paris.

After punishing series of air strikes on Jihadist’s positions in Gao, Malian and French forces took first the airport and a strategic bridge over the River Niger but later we’re able to confirm they’ve taken control of the town. The Defense Ministry here in Paris said that Gao’s mayor who’s been in the capital Bamako since the town fell to the Islamists early last year has been flown back in. Malian officials spoke of scenes of joy on the streets of Gao though also of some looting. Chadian and Nigerien forces meanwhile are poised to push out from the Nigerien border, about 200 kilometers to the south, in order to reinforce the French and Malians.

There’s been rioting in the Egyptian city of Port Said after a court sentenced 21 people to death for their part in deadly violence at a football match in the city last year. Hospital sources there say at least 30 people have been killed. Aleem Maqbool reports

The families and supporters of the defendants all from the city attacked the police, who fought back. Hundreds are now known to have been injured in the clashes and a shocking number have been killed including police officers. It was horrific violence in that city a year ago that started all this. At the end of a football match home supporters attacked visiting Al-Ahly fans who said they were blocked from getting out of the ground. Over 70 were stabbed, clubbed and kicked to death.

Officials in Afghanistan say a suicide attack in the provincial capital Kunduz has killed at least ten policemen including the city’s head of counterterrorism Abdullah Maray and another high-ranking police officer. At least 21 people, most of them civilians were injured. Bilal Sarwary reports from Kabul.

The attacker was driving a motorbike and targeted the counterterrorism chief in the heart of Kunduz city. The area was packed with civilians and police at the time of the attack. Afghan officials in Kunduz province say the assassinated counterterrorism chief Abdullah Maray was behind the killing and capture of key Taliban leaders and few commanders. Mr. Mari was a member of the northern lines and a key ally of the vice president Massoud Fahim.

A leader of a landless movement in Brazil Cicero Guedes has been killed in Rio de Janeiro state. He was shot dead in the early hours of Saturday as he was cycling home. He was killed near a former sugar plant which members of the MST landless movement have occupied. Non-governmental organizations say the number of landless activists killed over the past years has fallen but that the number of death threats issued against them has almost tripled.

World News from the BBC

The former socialist Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Milos Zeman has won the country’s first ever direct presidential election.

“I promise that as a president chosen by the citizens through direct election, I will try to be the voice of all the citizens.”

With 55% of the vote, Mr. Zeman beat his rival, the foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg.

Ethnic Kachin rebels fighting the Burmese army in northern Burma say they’ve lost a major strategic post outside their headquarters on the Chinese border. Our correspondent Jonathan Head is following events from neighbouring Thailand.

For more than a week, the Burmese army has been trying to take the hilltop of KIA in battles reminiscent of the First World War. Hundreds of Burmese troops have stormed at the forested slopes backed by intense artillery barrages that at one point dropped more than 1,000 shells in just two hours on the trenches held by Kachin soldiers.

This is territory the Kachin independence army has held for more than 50 years but heavily outgunned have now been forced to pull back. That leaves the Kachin headquarters in Laiza just three kilometers away. With no more lines of defence, tens of thousands of civilians, many already displaced by the fighting are preparing to flee across the border into China. Jonathan Head reporting

The hacker activist group Anonymous says it’s hijacked the website of the United States Sentencing Commission which is responsible for federal sentencing. The group says its action is to revenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an internet activist who committed suicide earlier this month. Before the website was taken down, Anonymous posted a message saying it had infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information which it’s threatening to make public. Mr. Swartz was facing hacking charges before his death.

Those are the latest stories from BBC News