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A senior UN official says its peacekeepers failed the victims of mass rape in eastern DR Congo, and says the numbers affected are double the previous estimate.

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Afghan boys dressed in women’s clothes and sexually abused

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A small US church planning to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in New York is facing international condemnation.

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Experts from the US space agency Nasa speak about tips they have given 33 trapped Chilean miners to maintain their psychological health.

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Connaught provides a wide range of services including property management for the public sector

Property and environmental services giant Connaught is expected to formally enter administration later, putting thousands of jobs at risk.

The company, which specialises in social housing, said late on Tuesday it was “in the process of appointing administrators”.

However, it added that some subsidiaries would not be affected and would continue to trade “as normal”.

Earlier, the firm said it had failed to secure funding to pay £220m of debt.

Connaught employs almost 10,000 people. Trading in the company’s shares was suspended on Tuesday.

Reports suggest that rival firms, such as Mears, are ready to step in to take over some of Connaught’s contracts.

“The board is saddened to announce that it is in the process of appointing partners from KPMG as administrators of Connaught and its subsidiary, Connaught Partnerships, which comprises its social housing division,” the company said in a statement released on Tuesday.

It added that its other main subsidiaries, Connaught Compliance, National Britannia Holdings, Fountains and Connaught Environmental are not being placed into administration, and “will continue to trade normally”.

In an earlier statement, Connaught said it believed the funding it needed from its lenders to continue operating would “not be forthcoming”.

Connaught provides a wide range of services, including property management for the public sector and affordable housing projects.

It is also involved in waste management, cleaning and forestry services.

Connaught ran into serious difficulties in recent months after it became clear that a number of contracts would be loss-making.

In June, it warned that public spending cuts, designed to reduce the government’s budget deficit, would impact 31 projects, reducing its revenues by £80m this year.

This hit, it said, would push the company into the red for this year.

Shares in the Exeter-based company, which began life in 1982, have lost about 90% of their value since late June.

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Examples of “good” dancing and “bad” dancing

Scientists say they’ve carried out the first rigorous analysis of dance moves that make men attractive to women.

The researchers say that movements associated with good dancing may be indicative of good health and reproductive potential.

Their findings are published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

“When you go out to clubs people have an intuitive understanding of what makes a good and bad dancer,” said co-author Dr Nick Neave, an evolutionary psychologist at Northumbria University, UK.

“What we’ve done for the very first time is put those things together with a biometric analysis so we can actually calculate very precisely the kinds of movements people focus on and associate them with women’s ratings of male dancers.”

Dr Neave asked young men who were not professional dancers, to dance in a laboratory to a very basic drum rhythm and their movements with 12 cameras.

Dr Nick Neave explains what makes for good moves on the dance floor

These movements were then converted into a computer-generated cartoon – an avatar – which women rated on a scale of one to seven. He was surprised by the results.

“We thought that people’s arms and legs would be really important. The kind of expressive gestures the hands [make], for example. But in fact this was not the case,” he said.

“We found that (women paid more attention to) the core body region: the torso, the neck, the head. It was not just the speed of the movements, it was also the variability of the movement. So someone who is twisting, bending, moving, nodding.”

Movements that went down terribly were twitchy and repetitive – so called “Dad dancing”.

Dr Neave’s aim was to establish whether young men exhibited the same courtship movement rituals in night clubs as animals do in the wild. In the case of animals, these movements give information about their health, age, their reproductive potential and their hormone status.

“People go to night clubs to show off and attract the opposite sex so I think it’s a valid way of doing this,” Dr Neave explained.

“In animals, the male has to be in good physical quality to carry out these movements. We think the same is happening in humans and certainly the guys that can put these movements together are going to be young and fit and healthy.”

Dr Neave also took blood samples from the volunteers. Early indications from biochemical tests suggest that the men who were better dancers were also more healthy.

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