Kampala - Thousands of Congolese refugees continued to pour into neighbouring Uganda on Saturday after rebels seized two border towns in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, UN and Ugandan military officials said.

Around 2,000 Congolese refugees crossed the border between Friday night and Saturday morning, Ugandan army spokesman Captain Tabaro Kiconco told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The civilians began fleeing renewed battles around mid-week and 13,000 had entered Uganda by Thursday.

Kampala - Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony was Saturday expected to sign a peace deal to end Uganda's 20-year rebellion although doubts remained whether he would turn up.

Talks to end the rebellion by the Lord's Resistance Army, which left thousands dead and displaced almost two million civilians, began in mid-2006 under the mediation of the southern Sudanese government.

Officials were Saturday waiting for Kony in the jungle village of Ri Kwangba in South Sudan.

Kampala- It may not be quite as bad as the Three Bears returning home to find Goldilocks sleeping in one of their beds, but Ugandan villagers returning to the villages they abandoned during the East African nation's civil war are being met with a rather large surprise.

"Elephants are moving into the villages," says Sam Mwandha, operations director for the state-owned Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA).

Much of Uganda's northern region lies in the so-called elephant corridor, a vast tropical flat terrain that adjoins southern Sudan.

Kampala - Nearly half of the thousands of inmates in Uganda's overcrowded prisons are on remand for sexual offences involving relationships with under-age girls, a government newspaper reported Saturday quoting senior prison officers.

Of the country's 20,000 inmates, 47.7 per cent face defilement charges, having been arrested on suspicion of having intercourse with girls under the age of 18, The New Vision newspaper said. A person convicted with defilement serves a life sentence under Ugandan law.

Deputy Commissioner General of Prisons James Mwanje said that the prisons are severely over-crowded because 11 per cent of the remand prisoners are being held beyond the constitutionally required limit of 18 months.

Kampala- If the current annual increase in the number of HIV infections in Uganda go unchecked then the country's economic growth rate will be halved by 2025, medical authorities warned Thursday.

The number of people getting infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has been on the increase in the impoverished East African country, from a yearly average of
90,000 before 2002 to the current 130,000.

Kampala  - A British man, distraught after learning that his wife had left him for another man in London, threw himself into a river over the weekend and was mauled by waiting crocodiles, police officials in Uganda confirmed Monday.

Stephen Morgan, 51, left a suicide note before jumping to death into the Murchison Falls of the river Nile, about 260 kilometres from the Ugandan capital Kampala, District Police Commander Alex Twebaze said by telephone Monday evening.