World in brief

Three jet off to space station

Kazakhstan: A three-man crew blasted off from the Baikonur space centre today on board a Soviet-designed Soyuz craft destined for the International Space Station.

Nasa astronaut Joseph Acaba and Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin will stay at the space station for four-and-a-half months.

Russia's space agency says the craft is due to dock on Thursday morning and will join the three astronauts currently staying at the orbiting laboratory.

Man hanged for scientist killing

Iran: Authorities hanged a man today for assassinating a nuclear physicist in 2010.

Majid Jamali Fashi was found guilty of killing Massoud Ali-Mohammadi and receiving cash and training from Israel's Mossad.

At least five Iranian nuclear scientists, including a manager at the Natanz enrichment facility, have been killed in recent years.

Iran has accused Mossad, the CIA and MI6 of being behind the assassinations.

Secret prison still in use

Iraq: People are still being held illegally at a Baghdad prison that the government was supposed to have shut down in 2011 after allegations that detainees were tortured and abused there, a New York-based human rights group warned today.

Elite Iraqi troops controlled by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki run the Green Zone facility as well as two other secret jails in Baghdad where detainees are interrogated by judicial investigators, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

HRW activist Joe Stork said: "Iraqi security forces are grabbing people outside of the law, without trial or known charges, and hiding them away in incommunicado sites."

Breivik court scene of self-immolation

Norway: An unidentified man set himself on fire today outside the courthouse where neonazi Anders Behring Breivik is being tried on terror charges for a bombing and shooting massacre on July 22.

Police operations leader Finn Belle said that the man doused himself in an inflammable liquid and set himself alight outside the entrance to the building.

"The man received burn injuries and was transported to Oslo University Hospital," Mr Belle said.

He said the man's identity or the motive for his actions were not immediately clear.