This is the World News from the BBC in London.

A former Serbian police chief has been jailed for 27 years for his role in the murder of more than 700 ethnic Albanians in Serbia's province of Kosovo in 1999. Vlastimir Djordjevic was convicted by the international tribunal in The Hague on four counts of crimes against humanity. Mark Lowen reports.

The court found that Mr Djordjevic as Serbian deputy interior minister and chief of the public security department during the war played a crucial role in what's called a joint criminal enterprise. That is a common plan to kill over 700 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and drive hundreds of thousands from their homes in order, as the court put it, to alter the ethnic balance in Kosovo. The judge concluded that police officers under the defendants' control committed the crimes, and that Mr Djordjevic himself tried to

conceal

the bodies of those killed by ordering their transfer to sites in Serbia, where they were buried in mass graves.

A senior United Nations official for Afghanistan says the security situation there is worse now than at any time since the overthrow of the Taliban 10 years ago. The UN humanitarian coordinator for Afghanistan Robert Watkins said that aid agencies now had regular access to just 30% of the country, and the Nato troops surge appeared not to have improved things.

"While Nato is

claim

ing that it has

turned the corner

that it has taken the offensive and that the insurgency is now on the defensive, we still see these very difficult security problems, and there have been also an unprecedented number of attacks against humanitarian workers."