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Mr Mende said the attackers at the state TV and radio headquarters had been armed with weapons such as knives, and there was "no chance of them even to maintain their positions, even for a single hour".

"People were frightened when security personnel were firing against these attackers," the minister told the BBC's Focus on Africa radio programme after visiting the RTNC headquarters.

He said the attackers numbered fewer than 100 and that the security forces had killed about 46 of them and captured about 10.

In 1997, Rwandan-backed troops ousted DR Congo's long-serving ruler Mobutu Sese Seko and installed Laurent Kabila - the father of incumbent leader Joseph Kabila - as president.

In a separate incident, a taxi driver told AFP that he had heard about "six or seven shots" from heavy weapons fired at the Tshatshi military camp. The shots were heard between 09:00 and 09:30 local time.

The US embassy in Kinshasa has advised all US citizens not to travel around the city until further notice.

"The embassy has received multiple reports of armed engagements and fighting around Kinshasa… The embassy has also received reports that there are police and military checkpoints and barricades in many places," it said in a statement posted on its Facebook page at 10:00 local time.

At the height of the crisis, France had a force of about 4,500 in its former colony.

The 1,000 French soldiers left in Mali are intended to help fight the al-Qaeda-linked groups still targeting the vast desert northern region.

On Monday, UN peacekeepers found a large cache of explosives while on patrol near the northern town of Kidal.

The Environment Agency said parts of England's north-east coast could see flooding while parts of the south coast - including Portsmouth and Newhaven - were also at risk over the weekend.

Spokesman Jonathan Day added: "The risk of flooding to the coast will continue over the next few days, especially on the south and west coast and along the Severn estuary."

A man was rescued by police in Newquay after going into the sea in the early hours of Saturday morning

Part of a cliff has collapsed into the sea on the East Sussex coast after being undermined by rough seas

In Scotland, flooding was less severe than expected after warnings of a tidal surge on the east coast

There are currently no severe flood warnings - indicating danger to life - in place across the UK.

However, more than 240 flood alerts - meaning flooding is possible, be prepared - are in place in England and Wales, in addition to more than 90 flood warnings.

Prime Minister David Cameron praised the agencies involved in dealing with the storm threat.

He tweeted: "Great work by emergency services & @EnvAgency helping people flooded. 200,000 properties have been protected by flood defences in last 36hrs."

Forecasters have warned of heavy rain in southern England, south-east Wales, Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland.

There is an increased risk of flooding risk to Weybridge and Guildford on Sunday and into Monday and people living along the non-tidal Thames, including Oxford and Osney, could be at risk from Sunday, the EA said.

President Daniel Ortega had said Nicaragua planned to begin construction in May 2014.

He told La Prensa newspaper in Nicaragua that only when the feasibility studies were concluded would it be possible to choose a "definite route".

Several routes were proposed, all of them about three times longer than the Panama Canal, which took 10 years to build and was finished in 1914.

The waterway connects the Caribbean with the Pacific via Lake Nicaragua or Cocibolca, Central America's largest freshwater lake. Its length is estimated at just under 300km (190 miles).

The Nicaraguan government will get a minority share of the profits generated by the canal.

But HKND's owner, Wang Jing, said he had attracted global investors and it was ready to build the canal in less than six years.

Nicaraguan leaders have dreamt of building the canal for over a century.

Nicaragua's announcement comes after a European-led consortium expanding the Panama Canal threatened to halt work unless the Panama Canal Authority met more than $1.6bn (£1bn) in cost overruns.

The tension could rise to a new level on Sunday, when the country will go to the polls in a vote that is strikingly noncompetitive by Bangladeshi standards. The opposition has refused to participate, leaving more than half of the seats in Parliament uncontested.

The country’s main opposition party, the Bangladesh National Party, called the boycott after the government refused to put in place an impartial caretaker government ahead of the elections, which has been customary in Bangladesh since 1996 and is seen as a guard against government manipulation. Protesters have set fire to vehicles and hurled bricks and homemade explosives, demanding that the government hold new elections on terms the opposition accepts.

“Both parties are playing with the lives of common people,” Mr. Islam said.

The violence increased in part when the government began prosecuting figures from Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence for war crimes, handing down death sentences to several leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamic political party. The Awami League has also hardened its view of Begum Khaleda Zia, the Bangladesh National Party’s leader and a two-time prime minister, accusing her of links to Islamist militants.

“We are just protecting her safety. In her house, she is very safe.” Asked what threat Mrs. Zia faced, he said: “Nobody knows. Some miscreants can just shoot at her.”

A low turnout could pressure the government to begin preparing for fresh elections, something that happened after a similar opposition boycott in 1996. Gowher Rizvi, an adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, said it was “almost without doubt” that Mrs. Hasina would call new elections ahead of schedule, noting that an election “loses its luster” when a major party does not take part.

“Is it one year? Is it nine months? Is it 15 months? I can’t tell you,” he said.

Unlike malnutrition crises elsewhere in the world, this one has not been connected to specific food shortages or crop failures. In addition, parents are not showing up malnourished, even when their children are.

His colleague Dr. Khan blamed another problem. “The main cause of malnutrition in Afghanistan is lack of breast feeding,” he said. “They see beautiful pictures of milk cartons, and they think it’s better.”

In addition, where women commonly have many children, often with less than a year between them, it is difficult for mothers to provide enough nourishment, by breast or bottle. Ahmed Wali, the 2-year-old Bost Hospital patient with kwashiorkor, is the ninth of 10 children of his mother, Baka Bebi, who is in her mid-30s. She weaned him onto powdered milk mixed with stream water as soon as she could.

Poverty is another factor. In Afghanistan, the poverty line is defined as a total income sufficient to provide 2,100 calories a day to each family member. Some 36 percent of Afghans are below that threshold, according to the Health Ministry.

In 2013, Unicef raised its target for providing therapeutic foods to severe acutely malnourished Afghan children, to 52,144 from 35,181. Therapeutic foods are specially made for the severely malnourished, who have difficulty digesting normal food.

“Managing a feeding system is difficult; there is a long way for Afghanistan to go,” he added. “But even countries like Sri Lanka, with an outstanding health system, are still struggling to manage therapeutic feeding supplies.”

Cases of acute severe malnutrition are running at more than 100 a month, including five to 10 deaths, at Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul, and such cases have doubled since 2012, said Dr. Aqa Mohammad Shirzad, who is in charge of pediatric malnutrition programs there.

Each of the hospital’s 17 beds for severely malnourished patients has at least two patients, and some have three. The malnutrition intensive care ward there has an incubator that does not work, one suction pump and oxygen bottles, for respiratory masks, propped up without stands or proper connection

A 5-year-old boy who weighs less than 20 pounds was being treated recently on a bench because the infusion line would not stretch to a bed. Two window panes nearby were missing glass.

What is clear is that, despite years of Western involvement and billions of dollars in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, children’s health is not only still a problem, but also worsening, and the doctors bearing the brunt of the crisis are worried.

Nearly every potential lifeline is strained or broken here. Efforts to educate people about nutrition and health care are often stymied by conservative traditions that cloister women away from anyone outside the family. Agriculture and traditional local sources of social support have been disrupted by war and the widespread flight of refugees to the cities. And therapeutic feeding programs, complex operations even in countries with strong health care systems, have been compromised as the flow of aid and transportation have been derailed by political tensions or violence.

Perhaps nowhere is the situation so obviously serious as in the malnutrition ward at Bost Hospital, which is admitting 200 children a month for severe, acute malnutrition — four times more than it did in January 2012, according to officials with Doctors Without Borders, known in French as Médecins Sans Frontières, which supports the Afghan-run hospital with financing and supplementary staff.

One patient, a 2-year-old named Ahmed Wali, is suffering from the protein deficiency condition kwashiorkor, with orange hair, a distended belly and swollen feet. An 8-month-old boy named Samiullah is suffering from marasmus, another form of advanced malnutrition in which the child’s face looks like that of a wrinkled old man because the skin hangs so loosely.

Médecins Sans Frontières helped Bost Hospital nearly double the number of beds in the pediatric wing at the end of last year, and there are still not enough — 40 to 50 children are usually being treated each day, mostly two to a bed because they are so small. Nearly 300 other children, less severely malnourished, are in an outpatient therapeutic feeding program.

“It’s quite an unusual situation, and it’s difficult to understand what’s going on,” said Wiet Vandormael, an M.S.F. official who has helped coordinate with Bost Hospital.

The Lebanese officials say the military opened anti-aircraft fire at two Syrian warplanes on Monday after the aircraft bombed a border area close to the eastern Lebanese town of Arsal.

There was no immediate comment from the Lebanese military or from the Syrian government.

The lawsuit, filed earlier this week, cites independent research that, it claims, found Facebook reviews the contents of its users' private messages "for purposes unrelated to the facilitation of message transmission".

"Representing to users that the content of Facebook messages is "private" creates an especially profitable opportunity for Facebook," it says.

"because users who believe they are communicating on a service free from surveillance are likely to reveal facts about themselves that they would not reveal had they known the content was being monitored.

Writing on his blog, security expert Graham Cluley said that if the site was not examining links shared privately, Facebook would be failing a "duty of care" to its users.

Facebook has come under attack over its privacy policies in the past.

In September last year, it faced criticism over a proposed change to its privacy policy which would have allowed ads to be created using the names and profile pictures of Facebook users.

Facebook undertook to change the wording in the wake of a legal action launched in 2011 which saw it pay $20m to compensate users who claimed it had used their data without explicit permission.

BUT should Mr. Hong be recognized as a war hero?

BUT should Mr. Hong be recognized as a war hero?

“I’m convinced that I was a savior to the allied forces,” he said.

Hezbollah, a Shiite movement, has sent fighters to support the Syrian Army, while Lebanon’s Sunnis largely support the Syrian rebels, and some have shipped them weapons or crossed the border to join them on the battlefield.

Despite the attack’s apparently political nature, it struck civilians hardest.

While the neighborhood is residential, Hezbollah dominates the area. Posters of the group’s armed members who have died in battle adorn lampposts, and the group’s media office and construction company are nearby, as is the Lebanon office of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group.

The March 14th coalition, which includes the Future Movement, said in a statement that each victim was “a martyr mourned by all Lebanese.” The head of the Future Movement, Saad Hariri, a former prime minister, said that those killed were victims not only of terrorism, but also of “the involvement in foreign wars, especially the Syrian war.” Although the Future Movement officially disavows the use of violence, some members have smuggled arms to the Syrian rebels, and its leaders have lost ground to hard-line clerics who call for attacks on Hezbollah.

In a video statement last week, a cleric acting as a spokesman for the Abdullah Azzam Brigades said the group would not stop its bombings until Hezbollah withdrew its fighters from Syria and the Lebanese authorities released youths jailed for militant activities.

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said in speeches that the group is fighting in Syria against takfiris, meaning Sunni extremists who consider their opponents infidels. He has called them a threat not just to Shiites, but to the entire region.

Mr. Kuon said that government forces were massing to carry out a counterassault, but that the rebels had the strength to hold the strategic city. There was no sign of a cease-fire, he said. “As I’m talking to you right now there is sporadic fighting” in a separate oil-producing state as well, he added.

Diplomats in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, worked to get the two sides talking, with the aim of negotiating a cessation of hostilities before the cycle of violence descended into a full-scale civil war. The Ethiopian foreign minister said that talks were expected to start Thursday morning between delegations of the opposing sides.

David Nash, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in South Sudan, said it was hard to know how many people had gathered on the riverbank for safety, estimating a total of about 70,000. “As far as we know it’s the biggest displaced-person population in South Sudan,” Mr. Nash said. “So far a big proportion is women and young children, so they’re the most vulnerable.” In cities like Juba and Malakal, civilians have taken refuge on United Nations bases, but the people here in Awerial were spread out in the open along the river. There was little in the way of shelter, and most people were sleeping under trees. As night fell, dozens of small cooking fires sparked to life, and scores of babies wailed into the evening hours.

Proud realists, neither man put much stock in the “democratic tsunami” that, in the fantasy of neoconservative true believers like Wolfowitz, the Iraq war would send sweeping out of Baghdad to engulf the Middle East. Instead they put their faith in “American leadership” and the restoration of American power through a decisive demonstration of American strength.

Rumsfeld is first and foremost a patriotic midwesterner, a politician who nourishes in his soul a primordial and undying belief in the manifest need for, and rightness of, American power. To him this truth is self-evident, imbibed at an Illinois breakfast table. Who do we want to lead in the world? Somebody else? The idea is plainly inconceivable.

As for the occupation—well, if democracy were to come to Iraq it would be the Iraqis themselves who must build it. There would be no occupation, and thus no planning for it. Rumsfeld’s troops would be in and out in four months. As he told a then adoring press corps, “I don’t do quagmires.”

He was smart, brash, ambitious, experienced, skeptical of received wisdom, jealous of civilian control, self-searching, analytical, domineering, and he aimed at nothing less than to transform the American military. The parallels with McNamara are stunning.

month after month in his arrogance and tenacity he would deny an insurgency had taken root. Month after month, as the shortcomings of the army he had sent into Iraq—too small, too conventional, not configured or equipped or trained to fight an insurgency and thus fated in its impotent bludgeoning to make it ever worse—became impossible to deny, he would go on denying them, digging in his heels and resisting the change he had to know was necessary.

Thatcher said something else that's particularly interesting in this discussion. She said there's no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families. And so what we begin to see is the emergence of a kind of ethic, a survival of the fittest ethic that legitimates the most incredible forms of cruelty, that seems to suggest that freedom in this discourse of getting rid of society, getting rid of the social-- that discourse is really only about self-interest, that possessive individualism is now the only virtue that matters. So freedom, which is essential to any notion of democracy, now becomes nothing more than a matter of pursuing your own self interests

I want to echo something that FDR once said, When he said that, you know, you not only have to have personal freedoms and political freedoms, the right to vote the right to speak, you have to have social freedom. You have to have the freedom from want, the freedom from poverty, the freedom from-- that comes with a lack of health care.

How do you get a discourse governing the country that seems to suggest that anything public, public health, public transportation, public values, you know, public engagement is a pathology?

Individualize the social, which means that all problems, if they exist, rest on the shoulders of individuals.

that the government-- the larger social order, the society has no responsibility whatsoever so that-- you often hear this, I mean, if there--I mean, if you have an economic crisis caused by the hedge fund crooks, you know and millions of people are put out of work and they're all lining up for unemployment, what do we hear in the national media? We hear that maybe they don't know how to fill out unemployment forms, maybe it's about character.

I think that what we haven't seen before is an attack on the social contract, Bill, that is so overwhelming, so dangerous in the way in which its being deconstructed and being disassembled that you now have as a classic example, you have a whole generation of young people who are now seen as disposable.

young people can't turn anywhere without in some way being told that the only obligation of citizenship is to shop, is to be a consumer. You can't walk on a college campus today and walk into the student union and not see everybody represented there from the local banks to Disneyland to local shops, all selling things.

Where are the public spaces for young people other learn a discourse that's not commodified, to be able to think about non-commodifiable values like trust, justice, honesty, integrity, caring for others, compassion. Those things, they're just simply absent, they're not part of those public spheres because those spheres have been commodified.

Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.” Why that metaphor, zombie politics? HENRY GIROUX: Because it's a politics that's informed by the machinery of social and civil death.

It's a death machine. It's a death machine because in my estimation it does everything it can to kill any vestige of a robust democracy. It turns people into zombies, people who basically are so caught up with surviving that they have no-- they become like the walking dead, you know, they lose their sense of agency-

This casino capitalism as we talk about it, right, one of the things that it does that hasn't been done before, it doesn't just believe it can control the economy. It believes that it can govern all of social life. That's different. That means it has to have its tentacles into every aspect of everyday life. Everything from the way schools are run to the way prisons are outsourced to the way the financial services are run to the way in which people have access to health care, it's an all-encompassing, it seems to me, political, cultural, educational apparatus.

as the social state is crippled, as the social state is in some way robbed, hollowed out and robbed of its potential and its capacities, what takes its place? The punishing state takes its place. You get this notion of incarceration, this, what we call the governing through crime complex where governance now has been ceded to corporations who largely are basically about benefiting the rich, the ultra-rich, the big corporations and allowing the state to exercise its power in enormously destructive and limited ways.

we kill the imagination by suggesting that the only kind of rationality that matters, the only kind of learning that matters is utterly instrumental, pragmatist. So what we do is we collapse education into training, and we end up suggesting that not knowing much is somehow a virtue. And I'll and I think what's so disturbing about this is not only do you see it in the popular culture with the lowest common denominator now drives that culture, but you also see it coming from politicians who actually say things that suggest something about the policies they'd like to implement.

Rick Santorum is not-- is kind of a, you know, an obvious figure. But when he stands up in front of a body of Republicans and he says, the last thing we need in the Republican party are intellectuals. And I think it's kind of a template for the sort of idiocy that increasingly now dominates our culture.

I think intellectuals are-- there are two ways we can describe intellectuals. In the most general sense, we can say, "Intellectuals are people who take pride in ideas. They work with ideas." I mean, they believe that ideas matter. They believe that there's no such thing as common sense, good sense or bad sense, but reflective sense.

how we learn what we learn and what we do with the knowledge that we have is not just for ourselves. It's for the way in which we can expand and deepen the very processes of democracy in general, and address those problems and anti-democratic forces that work against it.

I think the real issue here is, you know, what would it mean to begin to do at least two things?

one is to develop cultural apparatuses that can offer a new vocabulary for people, where questions of freedom and justice and the problems that we're facing can be analyzed in ways that reach mass audiences in accessible language. We have to build a formative culture

Secondly, we've got to overcome the fractured nature of these movements. I mean the thing that plagues me about progressives in the left and liberals is they are all sort of ensconced in these fragmented movements

here's the contradiction I hear in what you're saying. That if you write about a turning toward despair and cynicism in politics. Can you get movements out of despair and cynicism? Can you get people who will take on the system when they have been told that the system is so powerful and so overwhelming that they've lost their, as you call it, moral and political agency?

to be different than it is now, rather than romanticizing hope and turning it into something Disney-like, right, it really has to involve the hard work of A) recognizing the structures of domination that we have to face, B) organizing collectively and somehow to change those, and C) believing it can be done, that it's worth the struggle.

I refuse to become complicitous. I refuse to say--I refuse to be alive and to watch institutions being handed over to right wing zealots. I refuse to be alive and watch the planet be destroyed. I mean, when you mentioned-- you talk about the collective imagination, you know, I mean that imagination emerges when people find strength in collective organizations, when they find strength in each other.