THE CONTROVERSIAL British security firm Sandline won a court battle in Australia yesterday against the Papua New Guinea government over unpaid fees of $18m (pounds 11.3m).

WHEN IT comes to colourful language, members of the Berinmo tribe have a strange way with words.

Three husbands, five children and a string of disastrous jobs have left my friend Lulu skint

SANDLINE International, the controversial British mercenary company, is to be paid more than $30m (pounds 20m) compensation by the government of Papua New Guinea after a bitter international court battle.

THE FORMER deputy prime minister of Papua New Guinea may have received a "corrupt and improper" payment in connection with the contract to employ the British mercenaries Sandline International, an inquiry has found.

ROMEO AND JULIET ROYAL ALBERT HALL, LONDON

PUTTING RECIPES TO THE TEST WITH RICHARD EHRLICH

Australian veterans who monitored British nuclear tests in the outback in the Fifties yesterday called on the Australian government to launch a study into birth defects and illnesses they say were caused by radiation.

Violence is spreading in Papua New Guinea, as lack of opportunity and access to modern weaponry exacerbate traditional tribal tensions. Our correspondent explains how the rascals are worse than they sound

Warring factions on the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville signed a truce yesterday but said a lasting agreement lay in the hands of political leaders.

Hundreds of tribal people have died of starvation and millions more are at risk from a chronic drought on the huge tropical island of New Guinea. Severe frost following a six- month dry period, caused by the meteorological phenomenon El Nino, has wrecked crops. Richard Lloyd-Parry reports from Mount Hagen.

The Nine Lives Of Naomi Mitchison by Jenni Calder Virago pounds 20

New Zealand gave a positive progress report from the first week of peace talks it is hosting for rival factions in a nine-year secessionist war on Papua New Guinea's Bougainville Island.

The promise of a physical theatre company so physical that the performers are left black and blue had an undeniably ghoulish charm about it. The reality, however, was sufficient to turn the voyeur inside all of us into a bit of a wimp. The performance began with a woman wearing a backless evening gown seated on a chair. A man entered and proceed to slap her back with the palm of his hand, very hard indeed. As he slapped, the skin reddened until the beginning of a bruise began to form (in truth, it was already there, courtesy, presumably, of the previous performances on the tour). He slapped some more until you felt that someone in the audience must say something, or at least walk out, but no-one did. There was no music, no lighting effects, nothing save an actress getting physically abused.