departure

does not suggest he's made a

breakthrough

.

A further eight Libyan senior army officers have

defect

ed from the forces supporting Colonel Gaddafi. They're now in Italy. They said they were among 120 military personnel who had left Libya over the past days.

The lawyer for the former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic says he's filed an appeal against his transfer to The Hague war crimes tribunal to face charges of genocide. Mark Lowen is in Belgrade.

The son of Ratko Mladic, Darko, has until now updated waiting journalists

regularly

about his father's condition on leaving the war crimes court. But today, he told reporters he didn't want to make a public comment

in the presence of

his children, the grandson and granddaughter of Ratko Mladic, who visited the war crimes suspect in custody for the first time. Mladic's lawyer has now posted an appeal against Mladic's extradition to The Hague by mail

rather than

filing it in person. It's a way of buying a little more time for his client, who he claims is too sick to be transferred to the international tribunal to stand trial for genocide and other war crimes.

World News from the BBC

A judge in Spain has ordered the arrest of 20 military officers from El Salvador for the killing in 1989 of six Jesuit priests and two women. The priests, five of whom were Spanish, their housekeeper and her daughter were shot dead by soldiers during El Salvador's civil war.