BBC News with Sue Montgomery

Forensic scientists in Switzerland say the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat may have been poisoned. In a report published on the Al Jazeera and Guardian newspaper websites, the experts said Mr.Arafat's bones showed polonium levels at least 18 times the normal level. His widow said the results proved that he was assassinated. Imogen Foulkes reports.

The reports from the Lausanne Institute of Radiation Physics is a 100 pages long, its conclusion that the Yasser Arafat's body contained unexpectedly high-levels of radioactive polonium which could support the theory that the Palestinian leader was poisoned. There have been rumors that he may have been poisoned ever since his death in 2004. The Swiss institute was unavailable for comment, but its report does contain some words of caution, the length of time passed between Mr. Arafat's death and the examination and the possibility that some of the material like examined may have been contaminated.

The militant group al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb says it killed two French journalists last week in the northern Malian town of Kidal. The group said in a statement the killings were in retaliation for French and African military action in Mali. Thomas Fessy reports.

The statement says the French and new peacekeepers are committing daily crimes against the people of Mali and Muslims in the northern region. This killing, the statement reads, remain just more price to pay for the French crusades. Fighters loyal to Abdelkrim Tarki, a senior commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb are believed have sent this statement. It remains unclear whether those who shot the two journalists died have set out to kill them or instead want to kidnap them for a ransom.

A court in Ivory Coast has sentenced 15 former executives from the country's coffee and cocoa regulators to prison sentences of 20 years each. The defendants known as the Cocoa Barons were ordered to pay million of dollars in fines for embezzling tax revenues, 50 others were acquitted.

A member of the militant African American Black Panthers who hijacked the plane 30 years ago and forced it to fly to Cuba has returned the United States where he still faces a prosecution. William Potts says he wants to face the US justice system. Here's Vanessa Buschschluter.

In 1984, William Potts, a militant with a Black Panther party boarded the plane from New Jersey to Florida. He pulled a gun - hidden in a plaster cast - and forced the pilot to fly to Cuba where he expected to be welcome with open arms and beginning guerrilla training. But instead, the Cuban authorities convicted him of air piracy and sentenced to jail for 13 years. After he served the sentence, Potts settled in Havana.

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The Columbian government negotiators and Farc rebel leaders say they reached an agreement on the left-wing group’s future political role at peace talks in Cuba. Both sides agreed and guaranteed for the creation of new political parties, once a final accord is reached to end the 50-year conflict.

Polls have closed in Tajikistan in presidential elections which in certain to confirm the incumbent President Emomali Rakhmon in office for another seven years. He's been a leader in the central Asian country of eight million people since 1992 and is very likely to defeat the five little known candidates who run against him.

Scientists say the threat of another asteroid strike like the one that hit Russia earlier this year is much higher than was previously thought. A study published in a scientific journal Nature found that space rocks as big as a house are hurtling into the earth’s atmosphere with surprising frequency, most were undetected because they explode over remote areas over the ocean. The lead scientists in the study, Professor Peter Brown from Western University in Ontario, Canada, says early warning systems need to put in place.

Having some sort of system that scans the sky almost continuously looks for these objects just before they hit the earth, that probably is something worth doing. And in the case of Chelyabinsk, you know, a few day's to week's warning would have been valuable. If there a reason to be able to tell people, not look out the windows, to get close the windows when it even happened.

Police in Brazil are investigating reports that the Canadian pop singer Justin Bieber has been photographed painting graffiti in a wall in Rio de Janeiro. Local media said members of the teenage idol's entourage told the police that Justin Bieber had been authorized by the city council to paint in the wall although not the one that appears in the photographs. Correspondents say that if found guilty of defacing a building, the singer could be sentenced to up to a year in prison.

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