Nairobi/Kinshasa - A rebel Tutsi general has called a ceasefire after four days of fighting in which his forces routed the Congolese National Army and came on the verge of taking the major eastern town of Goma.

General Laurent Nkunda told the BBC Wednesday night that he was calling a ceasefire to prevent panic in Goma and requested government forces do the same.

The French ambassador to the United Nations, Jean-Maurice Ripert, said he hoped the ceasefire "would stand" and called on Nkunda to cease hostilities from Thursday morning.

Sydney

Washington, October 30 : A team of researchers from three American educational institutions has found that voting decisions are more associated with the brain''s response to negative aspects of a politician''s appearance than to positive ones.

Research collaborators from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Scripps College, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa say that this seems to be true particularly when voters have little or no information about a politician aside from their physical appearance.

Washington, October 30 : UC San Diego computer scientists have written a piece of software that can process pictures of keys from nearly all angles, and calculate the number and depth of cuts on them, which is all one requires to make a duplicate key.

“We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret,” said Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering who led the student-run project.

“Perhaps this was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone’s keys from a distance without them even noticing,” he added.

Lockhart, Australia - The wheat on Colin Weise's 513-hectare property near the town of Lockhart in Australia's south-east is ripening to a biscuit brown.

"It's the wonder crop. If they were weeds, they'd be dead," he said approvingly.

The crop has received hardly any rain this year and in October it should be tall, heavy and dark green rather than knee-high, feathery and fawn.

Taipei - Taiwan prosecutors on Thursday requested a 14-month prison term for a city councilman after charging him with inciting a mob to attack a visiting Chinese official last week.

"Through radio broadcasting, the defendant Wang Ting-yu publicly incited the public to rally at the venue where Zhang Mingqing visited and led the mob in applying violence by pushing Zhang, resulting in Zhang being shoved to the ground and injured," prosecutor Lee Ching-wen said.

"For this, we are seeking a sentence of one year and two months in prison against the defendant," she said.