Nairobi  - The United Nations children's agency UNICEF Tuesday condemned the recent stoning to death of a 13-year-old Somali girl for adultery in the port town of Kismayo, which was taken over by Islamist insurgents in August.

The girl, Aisha Duhulow, was last week stoned to death for adultery under Islamic law, or sharia. Initial reports said that the girl was in her twenties.

UNICEF said that reports indicated the girl had not committed adultery, but been raped by three men while walking to visit her grandmother in the capital Mogadishu.

Washington/Chicago  - Hundreds of US voters waited patiently in serpentine queues Tuesday to vote in the country's historic election. Many had started lining up before dawn, some braved pouring rain to cast their ballot.

Officials were prepared for an unprecedented turnout as voters delivered their verdict on Democrat Barack Obama, 47, and his Republican rival John McCain, 72, after the longest and most expensive campaign in US history.

Madrid- A Spanish court has rejected an appeal by the sister of
Spain's crown princess to block the media from airing images of her,
her companion and her baby.

Telma Ortiz had appealed a lower court's May ruling that it could
not block the airing of images of Ortiz, since she and her partner
participated in so many public acts, a reference to various royal
family events.

London - Britain's Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which is in line to benefit to the tune of 20 billion pounds (31 billion dollars) from a government bail-out programme, Tuesday unveiled more write- downs and signalled that it expected to make its first annual loss ever in 2008.

The beleaguered Edinburgh-based lender said bad debt charges and write-downs totalled 206 million pounds in the third quarter of 2008, in addition to 5.9 billion pounds in the first half of the year.

Amman- The Jordan Phosphates Mines Co., one of Jordan's two main mining firms, scored a nearly 600-per-cent increase in profits in the first nine months of the year, Chairman of the JPMC Board of Directors Walid Kurdi said Tuesday.

Kurdi put the firm's net profits in the first three quarters of the year at a record of 203.6 million dinars (288 million dollars), compared with 31.3 million dinars in the same period of 2007.