Congo

The rebels targeted churches on Christmas Day. Men were killed first, often stripped of shirts and pants, and then bound with their arms behind their backs. Rather than waste bullets, the attackers hacked victims in the back of the neck with machetes or shattered their skulls with sticks. "It happened step by step," said Joseph Kpayajadia, 58, a farmer who hid in the grass and saw his son being killed.

A genetic analysis of a biopsy sample recently discovered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has led researchers to conclude that the virus that causes AIDS has existed in human populations for more than a century, according to a study released Wednesday. The study, led by evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona in Tucson, puts the date of origin at around 1900, which is 30 years earlier than previous analyses.

An uneasy calm returned Thursday to this battered Congolese city as a tenuous cease-fire halted clashes and nervous residents struggled to resume their regular lives. Many of the thousands of panicked people who fled regional displacement camps a day earlier and stormed into Goma, a city in northeastern Congo, began traveling back to the nearby camps.

Tutsi-led rebels tightened their hold Saturday on newly seized swaths of eastern Congo, forcing tens of thousands of frightened, rain-soaked civilians out of makeshift refugee camps and stopping some from fleeing to government-held territory. Aid organizations said they were increasingly worried about a lack of food and shelter.

The road to Gen. Laurent Nkunda's latest territorial conquest was lined with signs of the rebel leader's growing power, but also of the devastation his insurgency has wrought. Rebel fighters in stolen government jeeps patrolled past deserted army camps. A column of traumatized civilians, many of whom have been displaced three times in the last week, filed past decomposing bodies of government soldiers in the road.

Villagers who had fled fighting in this rebel-held town trickled home Thursday to find the bodies of more than a dozen men in civilian clothes in and around mud huts, and they accused rebel leader Laurent Nkunda's forces in the slayings. New York-based Human Rights Watch accused a pro-government militia called the Mai Mai as well as the rebels of deliberately killing civilians in Kiwanja and said U.N. peacekeepers nearby had been unable to protect them.

Renewed fighting broke out Saturday between rebels and soldiers in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, as a U.N. special envoy flew in for emergency talks and said President Joseph Kabila was ready to meet his main rival. Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo met Kabila late Friday and said the Congolese leader "did not give anything that I would call conditions" for holding talks with rebel leader Laurent Nkunda.

This might be the unluckiest city in the world, a onetime resort playground for the wealthy doomed by a string of human and natural disasters that recall biblical scourges. Lobuta Colletta has borne witness to Goma's decline. First from a comfortable home and now from a cramped shack, the mother of eight has seen mass murder and cholera, volcanic eruptions and civil war. "This part of the country must be cursed," she says. The troubles are back.

The U.N. Security Council on Thursday authorized increasing the number of peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo by as many as 2,785 military personnel and 300 police. Now it's up to the United Nations peacekeeping operations to recruit volunteers from among the armed forces of member states. The majority of the 17,000 soldiers already in the region are Indian or Pakistani.

Thousands of civilians fleeing fighting in northeastern Congo streamed into Uganda on Thursday, most after walking several days. The U.N. refugee agency said 13,000 refugees had crossed the border near Ishasha in 48 hours -- 10,000 on Thursday alone. Most were from villages in the Rutshuru district of the Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu province. "The rebels attacked my village.