Many clutched a razor wire fence, desperately searching the crowds on the other side for a familiar face as they tried to discover whether their loved ones were still alive and at liberty, or in another of the camps, where the overcrowded conditions and made worse by poor sanitation, inadequate food and severe water shortages.

The refugees are not allowed to leave the camps even if they are not suspected of being Tamil Tiger fighters. While the Colombo government has said that it will clear the camps during the course of the year, it is anxious not to allow separatist fighters to evade their reach by posing as civilians and simply walking free.

Bhuvaneswari, whose son and two daughters are missing, held photographs through the wire. “Nine members of my family are missing, please help me find them,” she said. “They’ve been missing since the mass exodus on April 20th. When the army entered the safe zone and cut the area in two, we were separated. We don’t know if they’ve been killed by the army or what.”

At “Zone Four”, a camp for recent arrivals, men stripped to the waist were washing themselves in an open drain. One man showed his camp ration card which recorded only two evening meals in six days, while another emaciated elderly man was so weak from an infection that he could not stand or speak and appeared close to death as he lay in a crowded tent.

Many said they had been shelled from their homes in the army’s ferocious advance across the north-east of the island, and they had been forced to flee more than a dozen times before reaching the so-called “no-fire zone”.

Thangaraja, 59, a carpenter, said that his family had moved 14 times since January as the Tigers retreated into the “no-fire zone” on the north-east coast. He said they had been shelled by the army, shot at by Tamil Tigers to stop them escaping, and lost several relatives in the cross-fire.

“My son and daughter-in-law, my brother-in-law, my cousin, all died in shelling attacks. We built bunkers and kept moving from one place to another. Shells were falling everywhere. Four people died in my family while I was there. We just left their bodies in the bunker and filled them in,” he said.

He wants to go back to his home “in freedom”, but his main concern is for other missing relatives. “Lots of my relatives have been injured but we don’t know where they are. We can’t go outside the camp to contact people,” he said.

An army spokesman said that up to 6,000 families had been reunited to date, and that they were working to bring separated families together.

But he added: “At the moment we don’t know how many families are separated or how many disappeared.”

One refugee said that thousands of fleeing civilians were separated from their families when they reached the army check-point, where they were pushed onto buses and taken to different hospitals and camps. Navamani, 43, from Vattuvagal in Mullaitivu district, said she had lost her three children, aged 16,18 and 21, in the chaos.

At Vavuniya’s Zone Two, a few miles down the road, a mother and daughter who had been separated for five months had finally found one another, but were not allowed to embrace.

Kandaswamy, 73, was weeping on one side of the razor-wire, and reaching out to her daughter, Laxmi, 45, who has been in detention since fleeing the final battle earlier this month. She needed all the comfort she could get – four of her five children had been killed in shelling, she said.

The rogue state fired three short-range missiles on Tuesday, and there are suspicions that it may be trying to scare off US spy planes from hovering above sensitive military installations.

“The North is continuing its sabre-rattling,” an unnamed South Korean Defence official told Yonhap, without clarifying the possible intent of the missiles. South Korean intelligence has identified “brisk activity” along the coast line, as the North manoeuvres its arsenal. Pyongyang has also banned all shipping from the region.

Pyongyang continued its fierce rhetoric, accusing the US of hostility and warning that its army and people are ready to defeat an American invasion.

“The current US administration is following in the footsteps of the previous Bush administration’s reckless policy of militarily stifling North Korea,” said the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

As the United Nations Security Council prepares to discuss fresh sanctions and punitive actions against North Korea, Barack Obama, the US president, reassured North Korea’s neighbours that he would protect them in the event of any attack.

Mr Obama telephoned the leaders of Japan and South Korea to repeat long-standing US security guarantees. Mr Obama told Lee Myung-bak, the South Korean president, that the United States will protect his country from any possible North Korean aggression, a South Korean presidential spokesman said in Seoul.

Both leaders agreed that North Korea’s decision to test a second device was “a reckless violation of international law” and that they would seek “concrete measures [at the United Nations] to curtail North Korea’s nuclear and missile activities,” a statement from the US State Department added.

Mr Obama also spoke by telephone with Taro Aso, the Japanese prime minister, with the leaders agreeing to step up co-ordination with South Korea, China and Russia. Mr Obama also reiterated the US commitment to defend Japan, the White House said.

China and Russia have joined the condemnation of North Korea, however both nations have argued in the past that further sanctions and isolation of Pyongyang could be counterproductive in efforts to restart the stalled Six Party talks on nuclear disarmament.

China said yesterday that it was “resolutely opposed” to the test, but weakened the tone of its statement from the strong words it issued in response to North Korea’s first nuclear test in October 2006 – an act Beijing described as “brazen”. It also called for a “calm response” to the crisis and expressed hope that the issue would be resolved through dialogue, a possible indication that China will not permit heavily-punitive sanctions.

Meanwhile South Korea has announced that it will join a US-led initiative to curb the trade in weapons of mass destruction, an decision which Pyongyang has previously said it would consider an “act of war”.

The Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), set up by the Bush administration in 2003 and now joined by 90 countries, is aimed at stopping and searching shipping suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction or their related components.

South Korea had retained “observer” status in the initiative in an attempt to preserve relations with its Northern neighbour, however a foreign ministry spokesman said that following Monday’s test Seoul could wait no longer.

Howard’s two free throws with 21 seconds remaining capped a 10-point effort in the extra session as the center, who is nicknamed “Superman”, finished with 27 points and 14 rebounds to help the Magic leave LeBron James’s Cavs facing a stunning series defeat.

“Now it’s time to close it out,” Howard told reporters after guiding his team to a 3–1 lead in the best-of-seven series.

“We have to have the killer instinct. If we want to win a championship this is what it takes.”

James, the League MVP, recorded 44 points to reach the 40-point barrier for the third time in the series, but all those games have ended in losses for the top-seeded Cavs.

James made two free throws with less than a second remaining in regulation time to send the game into the extra session but his three-point attempt to win the contest at the overtime buzzer hit the rim of the basket before bouncing away.

MINNEAPOLIS—Justin Morneau’s three-run homer capped a five-run fifth inning for Minnesota against Boston starter Jon Lester, and the Twins beat the Red Sox 5-2 on Tuesday night.

Notes:@ Crede had X-rays on his right hand, where he was hit by a pitch Sunday. He came out of that game and hasn’t played since, unable to squeeze a bat with much strength. … Clay Buchholz took a perfect game into the ninth inning for Boston’s Triple-A affiliate Pawtucket Monday. Francona acknowledged the concern of prospects like Buchholz growing frustrated by spending too much time in the minors, but said: “If the call-ups were on their schedule, we’d have a 55-man roster.” … Mauer failed to get a hit for just the fourth time in 24 games. He took a foul ball by Kevin Youkilis off the right shoulder in the eighth, but remained in the game. … Ellsbury extended his hitting streak to 21 games, the longest run by a Red Sox player since Kevin Youkilis had a hit in 23 consecutive games two years ago.

A horror film based on the real story of cannibal Armin Meiwes can now be shown in Germany, a court has ruled.

Screenings of Rohtenburg were banned in 2006 after a court ruled the film infringed the convicted 47-year-old’s personal rights.

But a court in Karlsruhe said public interest outweighs his complaint the film would cause him emotional damage.

Meiwes was convicted of murder and given a life sentence in 2006 after admitting partially eating another man.

The film, which was released internationally under the title Grimm Love, starred Mission Impossible: 3 actress Keri Russell as an American exchange student, studying criminal psychology in Germany, who chooses the notorious cannibal case for her thesis.

The makers of the movie argued that Meiwes’ case did no more than provide inspiration for their film in which German actor Thomas Kretschmann plays a cannibal named Oliver Hartwin.

Marketing deal

The court ruled that the producers’ right to artistic freedom, together with Meiwes’ own previous efforts at marketing the gory deed, outweighed his personal rights.

The film did not misrepresent the facts of the case, which were in any case widely known, a court statement said.

Meiwes gave many interviews on himself and the crime and signed a marketing contract with a production company in 2004.

The case has been the subject of a book, several additional films, and songs by Rammstein and Marilyn Manson.

In the real tale that horrified Germany, engineer Meiwes met IT manager Bernd-Juergen Brandes after posting an advert on the internet asking for a willing victim in 2001.

A Frankfurt court sentenced Meiwes, rejecting the argument that his act of cannibalism amounted to euthanasia since Brandes had wanted to be eaten.

It was not immediately clear whether the movie will now be screened in German cinemas.

Facebook has sold a 1.96% stake for $200m (£126m) to a Russian internet firm, a move that values the social networking website at $10bn.

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said he had been impressed by Digital Sky Technology’s (DST) “impressive growth and financial achievements”.

DST has investments in a number of internet firms across Russia and Eastern Europe.

US-based Facebook has more than 200 million global members.

‘Ongoing success’

Facebook said DST would not be represented on its board or hold special observer rights.

“This investment demonstrates Facebook’s ongoing success at creating a global network for people to share and connect,” added Mr Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive.

“A number of firms approached us, but DST stood out because of the global perspective they bring.”

DST’s internet businesses account for more than 70% of all page views on Russian language websites.

It has investments in sites including Mail.ru, Forticom and vKontakte.

The deal comes two years after Facebook sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft for $240m.

General Motors’ bondholders have rejected a key part of the carmaker’s restructuring plan, which makes it more likely to seek bankruptcy protection.

The board will now meet to discuss its “next steps” after a large number of investors refused to exchange their debt for company shares.

Meanwhile, the German government is set to begin a series of meetings later to consider bids for GM’s Europe arm.

Four bidders are currently in the running for Opel and UK’s Vauxhall.

Owner General Motors will have the final say, but the German government’s backing is crucial, as GM would struggle to do a deal without it.

But a spokesperson for UK Business Secretary Lord Mandelson said GM wanted to keep talking with all bidders. All had committed to maintain Vauxhall production in the UK, he added.

Bidding war

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will be meeting GM representatives and US government officials at 2000 BST on Wednesday night.

Her government is being asked to put up hefty loan guarantees for the winning bidder for GM Europe, so its backing could sway US parent GM’s ultimate decision on who to sell to.

This is because Opel has its headquarters in Germany, and 25,000 of the firm’s 50,000 workers are employed in the country.

The four bidders for GM Europe are Italy’s Fiat, Canada’s Magna, Belgium’s RHJ and China’s Beijing Automotive Industry Corporation (BAIC).

With an election looming, Berlin does not want to see too many job losses arising from the takeover.

Magna says it will lay off 2,500 workers in Germany, while Fiat says it will cut 10,000 jobs across Europe, including 2,000 in Germany.

BAIC, however, says it will not cut any jobs for at least two years.

But the takeover will also affect 5,000 Vauxhall workers at plants at Ellesmere Port and Luton in the UK, and there are fears that the German government’s influence could prejudice UK jobs.

Derek Simpson, general secretary of the Unite union in the UK, fears the Germans will support a bid which offers no protection to British workers.

The UK government has said it might consider making a financial contribution to help secure the future of Vauxhall.

Scientists have finished sequencing the mouse genome after a 10-year effort.

The humble mouse is the experimental workhorse in laboratories worldwide, so this high-quality genome sequence will aid in the fight against human disease.

The search for novel treatments could benefit from a greater understanding of the mouse genetic code, which is about 75% similar to our own.

An international team of researchers have published details of the work in the open-access journal PLoS Biology.

The sequence comprises the full complement of genetic material in the nucleus of a cell. It is effectively the genetic “instruction booklet” for a living animal.

The mouse (Mus musculus) becomes only the second mammal after humans to have its complete genome laid bare.

But draft sequences have been published for the chimp, dog, rat, cat, macaque and even the duck-billed platypus

The mouse is the animal most often used to better understand human illnesses and how they develop.

Research carried out using mice has led to advances in the treatment of cancer, diabetes, heart disease and countless other conditions.

Good model

Co-author Professor Chris Ponting, from the University of Oxford, told BBC News the work confirmed that the mouse was an excellent experimental model for human disease.

“Completion of the genome is extremely important in helping us to identify the genes that underpin biology that is the same across all mammals,” he said.

But he said it was also important to separate the genes humans shared with mice from those which differed between them.

About 75% of mouse genes have a single equivalent in humans. But some 5,000 genes arose after the ancestors of mice and humans went their separate evolutionary ways.

“In retrospect, our previous picture of the mouse genome was incomplete,” said Dr Leo Goodstadt from the University of Oxford.

“Only when all the missing pieces of the genomic puzzle had been filled in did we realise that we had been missing large numbers of genes found only in mice, and not in humans.”

The mouse genome sequencing effort began in 1999, and a draft sequence was published in 2002.

The cost, borne by US and UK sequencing centres, is estimated to exceed $100m (£62m).

Some groups oppose animal experimentation, campaigning to ban or limit the animals used.

In the UK, growth in the use of genetically modified (GM) animals – mainly mice – is largely responsible for a steady rise in the numbers of animals used in experiments since 1997.

Professor Ponting, from the Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Functional Genomics Unit at Oxford, said the complete genome could provide insights into the evolution of mammals.

Humans and mice share a remarkable level of similarity, despite having evolved independently for the last 90 million years.

Diplodocus’s impressive neck sweeps along the main hall of London’s Natural History museum, welcoming its visitors.

Now, findings suggest that 150 million years ago the giant may have held its head higher for much of the time.

By studying the skeletons of living vertebrates, Mike Taylor, from the University of Portsmouth, and his team, reshaped the dinosaur’s resting pose.

But there is more than one way to assemble a dino-skeleton, and more than one theory on the sauropods’ stance.

Dr Taylor said he is not suggesting that museums should re-pose their long-necked sauropod skeletons from the current horizontal position to a more upright posture.

“The diplodocus in the main hall vestibule of the Natural History Museum is in a perfectly good posture,” he told BBC News. “It’s one within a whole range of movement that would have been entirely possible.”

But, after studying X-rays of members of 10 different vertebrate groups, Dr Taylor is convinced that when they were not reaching down for a drink, the sauropods stood with their heads held very high indeed.

With their necks aloft, like giraffes, the dinosaurs would have towered up to 15m above the ground.

Living model

Dr Taylor and his colleagues found that the necks of mammals and birds – the only modern groups that share the upright leg posture of dinosaurs – are “strongly inclined” vertically.

“Our approach was embarrassingly straightforward,” said Dr Taylor. “We looked at real animals, and at the whole animal.”

Bones can only give us so much information, he explained, and the soft tissue in the animal’s huge neck could “enable greater flexibility than the bones alone suggest”.

Some of the earliest reconstructions of sauropod skeletons – in the late 19th and early 20th Century – were posed with erect necks, so the idea is not new.

“It’s largely in recent years that this view has changed,” Dr Taylor said.

“But we can be confident that they held their heads upright.”

Many scientists, however, still maintain a more horizontal view.

And a recent paper, published by Australian scientist Roger Seymour in the journal Biology Letters, went even further.

It suggested that the creatures would not actually be able to lift their heads up to eat from high trees, because this would raise their brains so far above their hearts that their blood pressure would have to be elevated to a dangerous – possibly lethal – level.

But Dr Taylor is not swayed by this argument.

“There are some [living animals] where the heart is able to exert much greater pressure than Seymour’s equations predict [is possible]. We don’t see why that couldn’t also be true in sauropods.”

Heads up

Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist from London’s Natural History Museum, thinks the sauropods were likely to have been able to lift their heads high, but he remains unconvinced that would have been their “resting posture”.

“It would require lots of muscular activity, and put a lot of strain on their hearts,” he said.

Dr Barrett explained that, since it is impossible to know how thick the pads of connective tissue between the dinosaurs’ vertebrae were, it is difficult to estimate how much of a role this tissue, along with muscles and tendons, played in the animals’ range of movement.

“Sauropods are bizarre,” he told BBC News. “There is no living animal built in the same way.”

So, although the study of living animals’ skeletons is very valuable, he added, “finding a model to explain the biology of these creatures is not that easy”.

Survivors of childhood cancer have a higher life-long risk of developing a new form of the disease, a study shows.

The Journal of the National Cancer Institute study blames potent therapies rather than genetics, and is the first to show the risk is so long-term.

The study of 50,000 also found those diagnosed after 1975 appeared to have a slightly higher risk of cancer as treatments became more aggressive.

But they also led to a big improvement in child cancer survival rates.

A team from the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Copenhagen studied 47,679 people who were diagnosed with cancer before the age of 20, between 1943 and 2005. They were drawn from the cancer registries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

In all, they were three times more likely to develop a new cancer than their contemporaries – and the risk remained even as people approached their seventies.

Among survivors, the generation diagnosed between 1975 to 2005 were more likely to have developed second cancers at comparable ages than either the generation treated between 1960 and 1974, which saw first-generation chemotherapy, and the period before 1960, with no chemotherapy at all.

This increase occurred despite the advances in radiation treatment in which doses were markedly reduced, leading the team to point the finger at chemotherapy – either as an independent factor or one which exacerbates the carcinogenic effects of radiation.

Brain tumours were found to affect survivors more than the general population, due to the susceptibility of the brain to cancer treatments.

“What we need now is two-fold: new treatment ideas to decrease the risk of later effects, and much better surveillance of childhood cancer survivors during adulthood,” said Dr Jorgen Olsen, who led the research.

“Cancer treatments don’t just increase the risk of other cancers, but can lead to all sorts of other problems – from cardiovascular to reproductive.”

Making changes

Dr James Nicholson, a paediatric oncologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge welcomed the research as one of the most comprehensive studies yet, but stressed change to treatment was already afoot.

“We have known about this for a while, and we are now in a position where we can decrease the intensity of treatment in many cases and still get the same results.

“But a study like this does raise awareness of the problem. If it means alarm bells ring earlier when there are symptoms in people who were treated for cancer as a child that would be a very good thing.”

Judith Kingston, a consultant at Barts and the London, said the paper highlighted the importance of following-up survivors to learn about the long-term effects and to investigate how treatments might be modified.

“However for the children with “bad” or high risk tumours, we still need to give intensive chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy to effect a cure and this intensive therapy will come at the cost of potentially increasing that child’s risk of developing a second cancer,” she said.

“I am afraid it is a problem we have to recognise, be alert to and warn the parents about, but the risk needs to be put into perspective, as it affects a small minority of patients, whilst the majority of children will continue to lead healthy lives after treatment for childhood cancer.”

Ed Yong, Cancer Research UK’s health information manager, said: “More and more children are surviving an early fight against cancer and this study suggests that they still have a slightly higher risk of different cancers later on in life.

“Even so, when a child is diagnosed with cancer, the priority must be to save life. Thanks to research, over the past few decades we have seen tremendous improvements in the treatment of childhood cancer.

“In the 1960s, only a quarter of children who were diagnosed with cancer survived for more than five years. Now around three quarters survive.