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.

The American and Ugandan scientists have recently spotted a new species of the deadly Ebola virus. 

Back in 2007, wide region in western Uganda was badly affected from the new virus, named Bundibugyo ebolavirus. The scientists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Columbia University, the Uganda Virus Research Institute, and the Uganda Ministry of Health, informed that the new virus is different from all other known Ebola virus species, differing by more than 30 percent at the genetic level.

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  - The number of people being forced across borders into other countries on the African continent is decreasing but those displaced within their states through civil conflicts are on the increase, African Union and United Nations refugee officials said Friday.

One out of five of the world's 15 million refugees are in Africa while 15 million out of 24 million internally displaced people on earth are found on the continent, AU refugee officials told reporters in Uganda.

The AU is organizing a summit of heads of state in Uganda in early March 2009 to explore the causes, effects and solutions to the displacement of people on the continent.