World News from the BBC

The United States says it expects China to move quickly to allow the legal activist Chen Guangcheng to travel abroad. The Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who's in Beijing, welcomed China's offer to let Mr Chen apply to study overseas. American diplomats have been allowed to talk to the activist at a Beijing hospital where he's been held since leaving

sanctuary

in the US embassy.

The United Nations refugee agency says thousands of people in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo have been displaced by fighting between government troops and forces loyal to the

renegade

General Bosco Ntaganda. The UN said that since Sunday nearly 20,000 people have fled towards the regional capital Goma, and that about 1,000 people a day are crossing the border into Rwanda.

The disgraced former newspaper tycoon Conrad Black has been released after serving a three-year prison sentence in the United States for

defrauding

investors. The Canadian-born businessman was convicted of fraud in 2007 for taking millions of dollars from the media company Hollinger International without board approval. After his release, Mr Black was flown to Canada, his country of birth, which has granted him a one-year temporary residence visa.

The American musician and rapper Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys has died in New York. He was 47 and had cancer. Yauch, who went by the stage name MCA, founded the influential hip-hop group with two friends in the 1980s. The Beastie Boys sold more than 40 million records with hits including Fight for Your Right to Party.