A spreading cholera outbreak in rural Haiti threatened to outpace aid groups as they stepped up efforts hoping to keep the disease from reaching the squalid camps of earthquake survivors in Port-au-Prince.

GUNMEN in eastern Congo opened fired yesterday on a private plane carrying international aid workers at a landing strip. The workers escaped and were later rescued, workers from the International Medical Corps told the Associated Press.

The top UN envoy in Congo said two peacekeeping patrols were not informed by villagers that mass rapes were taking place and the United Nations is now working to improve communications and prevent any recurrence.

RWANDAN and Congolese rebels gang-raped nearly 200 women and some young boys over four days within miles of a UN peacekeepers’ base in an eastern Congo mining district, an American aid worker and a Congolese doctor said yesterday.

Mass graves were being dug on a hillside north of Haiti's capital today using earth-movers to bury 10,000 earthquake victims as relief workers warned the death toll could increase.

US MILITARY helicopters swooped down on Haiti’s wrecked presidential palace to deploy troops and supplies yesterday as a huge international relief operation to earthquake survivors gained momentum.

FOR two days, Ticia Vital refused doctors’ pleas to allow them to amputate her festering left leg, even as the gangrene spread and the alternative became death.

Islamic militants with alleged links to al-Qaida looted two United Nations compounds in southern Somalia and said they would ban three UN agencies from operating in areas they controlled.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s government today refused rebel leader Laurent Nkunda’s demand for direct talks to solve the crisis in eastern Kivu province, where tens of thousands of desperate refugees were receiving international aid.

International envoys converged on eastern Congo to help end some of the worst violence in years as thousands of anxious, hungry refugees struggled to get home amid a fragile ceasefire.