Bogota  - Two Roman Catholic priests were killed by a former student at a boarding school for members of indigenous communities in the Colombian region of Vichada, the authorities said Tuesday in the area on the Venezuelan border.

The priests Gabriel Montoya, 40, and Jesus Jimenez, 45, were shot to death late Monday while they were in the Internet room of the school Mision La Pascua, in the jungle town of La Primavera.

Bogota - Colombia's army said they killed the highest-ranking woman commander of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel group during fighting near the capital, Bogota.

Forensic investigators on Wednesday confirmed the death of Maria Ardila, alias Mariana Paz, last Friday in clashes in the village of San Juan, army chief General Oscar Gonzales said.

Ardila had been a member of FARC for 20 years and was the only woman in the rebel group's 45-year history to be a member of the guerilla's central command.

Bogota  - The latest fighting between Colombian military forces and guerillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) left 11 people dead, authorities said Saturday.

The death toll comprised 10 alleged members of FARC, a Marxist group that has been waging a civil war for 45 years, and one government soldier, the military said in a statement.

Washington, Feb 26 : A four-ton shipment of critical food crops has been supplied to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, as it celebrates its one-year anniversary.

The shipment included almost 90,000 samples of hundreds of crop species, from food crop collections maintained by Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, USA, and three international agricultural research centers in Syria, Mexico and Colombia.

The repository, located near the village of Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, has in one year amassed a collection of more than 400,000 unique seed samples - some 200 million seeds.

Bogota  - Colombian authorities on Wednesday arrested 38 people with ties to former drug lords Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, the brothers who led the Cali cartel and are now imprisoned in the United States.

Colombian Attorney General Mario Iguaran said that their sister, Amparo Rodriguez Orejuela, was among those arrested in raids across Colombia in the so-called Operation Second Generation, as are four children of the two men.

Bogota  - Six bus passengers were shot to death after armed criminals stopped a bus travelling in the south-western province of Narino, officials said Thursday.

The thugs stopped the bus on the road between the provincial capital of Pasto and the Pacific harbour town of Tumaco, police said.

They then boarded the bus and read out names from a list, pulled the people from the bus and shot them. The motive for the attack was not known, but the circumstances indicated that right-wing paramilitary fighters were involved.