Russian forces have recaptured Chechnya but rebels continue to wage deadly hit-and-run attacks on the Russian troops

Russian forces have recaptured Chechnya, but rebels continue to wage deadly hit-and-run attacks on the Russian troops.. The grim task of identifying up to 170 skiers who died in an Austrian resort tunnel fire was beginning today. The grim task of identifying up to 170 skiers who died in an Austrian resort tunnel fire was beginning today. Britons are believed to be among the dead trapped in the narrow funicular train tunnel taking skiers to the slopes of Kitzsteinhorn, near Kaprun, Downing Street said.Prime Minister Tony Blair has vowed to provide all possible assistance to the Austrian authorities and has offered his deepest condolences to Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel.But no British tour operators or families have yet alerted the Foreign Office about Britons who failed to return from a day's skiing."We don't know the scale of what we are dealing with yet," a Foreign Office spokeswoman told PA News.British consular staff were arriving at the resort today, where 30 medical and recovery experts from Austria and Germany were due to begin the harrowing process of identifying the dead.Volunteers have compiled a list of approximately 2,500 skiers who travelled up to the glacier slopes yesterday before the tragedy, and must now trace the names to find who did not come down, it was reported.Austrian police say it could be at least two weeks before all the deceased are identified and work to shore up the cabin will have to be completed before any recovery work can begin.Captain Harald Hofmann, of the federal police in Salzburg, said: "The cabin burned down and the metal melted. We will only be able to identify them from rings, X-rays and dental work."Austrians, Britons, Germans and Americans are feared to be among the dead, many of whom were thought to be children or teenagers.Rescuers said the blaze incinerated everything but the train's metal base, while the passengers were "burnt to ash" by the time they reached the scene.Eighteen Austrian and German survivors were taken to hospital with cuts, bruises and the effects of smoke inhalation. Many were reported to have saved themselves by smashing out windows in the cable-driven train.Three people in a station at the top of the railway were also killed by poisonous fumes, police in Salzburg said.It is thought the rail tunnel acted like a chimney, sucking up air and turning a small fire into a raging inferno.

Those who survived had escaped by running down the tunnel, away from the fumes.Salzburg Red Cross commander Gerhard Huber said there were up to 170 victims. Half were Austrians and the rest were from other countries.The Foreign Office said two emergency helplines have been set up for concerned relatives on 0043 654 720 000 and 0043 662 8144 300.. The immediate fate of one of Earth's great migrations, the 3,000 mile journey made by two billion monarch butterflies, has been secured by a pioneering conservation agreement. The immediate fate of one of Earth's great migrations, the 3,000 mile journey made by two billion monarch butterflies, has been secured by a pioneering conservation agreement. The Mexican government has agreed to pay farmers to conserve the forest where the monarch spends each winter, in an attempt to halt legal and illegal logging that has reduced the forest's size by 44 per cent in 15 years.The monarch became a symbol of the environmental movement last year when it was found that its caterpillars are seven times more likely to die from eating milkweed plants carrying pollen from genetically altered corn plants. But the insects are also under threat from the widespread destruction of their winter migration grounds.Every autumn some two billion monarchs migrate from Canada and the US to winter in the high-altitude balsam fir forest 70 miles west of Mexico City. Colonies of four million per acre carpet the area orange before heading back north in April.There are fears that the shrinking forest is affecting migration patterns and could precipitate a population crash, with the creatures risking extinction in 50 years.The new Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, supported by a conservation fund worth £3.5m, will cover 140,000 acres..

Never mind that Alman Spence, the pastor at the Home of God Miracle Temple, is busy replastering one of the crumbling walls in his tiny church. He is glad to have someone willing to hear his story at last He tried telling the police but they were not interested. Never mind that Alman Spence, the pastor at the Home of God Miracle Temple, is busy replastering one of the crumbling walls in his tiny church. He is glad to have someone willing to hear his story at last. He tried telling the police but they were not interested. On election day last Tuesday, when Mr Spence, 71, went to his polling station in this mostly black neighbourhood of West Palm Beach, he spotted two men loitering outside holding stacks of what appeared to be ballot papers. It was not clear what they planned to do with them, but it seemed that something fishy was going on."I called the police as soon as I got home," Mr Spence says, "because these must have been bogus ballot papers or something." He speculates that they might have been pre-punched and later smuggled into a ballot box in the station.Nobody is following up his claims.

But then there have been so many stories of polling screw-ups here in South Florida - some suggesting nothing more than ineptitude, others pointing to fraud and intimidation - that clearing them all up would probably defy even the elections-monitoring department of the UN.Most attention so far has been focused on the design of the so-called "butterfly ballots" that had names for candidates confusingly laid out on either side of a central column of holes that voters had to punch. More than 19,000 ballots from the 531,000 cast in this county had to be thrown out because they had been punched twice.But the fiasco did not stop there. Add up all the irregularities that have been reported and you might conclude that Florida's democracy is dodgier than Cuba's.Many of the complaints have come from African-Americans, who are pressing en masse for a revote in Palm Beach County and elsewhere. They are expected to turn out in huge numbers for a protest in Miami tomorrow, urged on by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the president of the Rainbow Coalition. Attracted like a moth to a flame by any controversy involving black rights, Mr Jackson was already in the state by Wednesday.He insists that scores of blacks were prevented from voting across the state. Most commonly, it seems, they were turned away from polling stations because their names had mysteriously vanished from the electoral rolls.Sometimes people went to the advertised location of polling stations only to find them shut. Others were allegedly sent away at 7pm when they were still queueing.