BBC News with John Jason

Activists in Syria say government forces have killed as many as (130) civilians across the country in an escalation of violence ahead of a ceasefire deadline. Troops were reported to have shelled, then attempted to storm the town of Latamna in Hama province. Jim Muir reports from neighbouring Lebanon.

This was at Latamna, a town in Hama province where torn and (blood-stained) bodies were being piled into pick-up trucks and driven off as distraught town's people looked on. They called it a massacre with several children among the 50 or so dead. Later there was a massive (turnout) and a lot of anger at the funeral, where one dead toddler was held aloft by the crowd. There was more carnage a little further south at Homs, where several embattled quarters where opposition fighters are entrenched, came under (unrelenting) bombardment. The victims weren't all killed by shelling. Activists put video on the Internet which appeared to show a pile of about a dozen bodies at the foot of a blood-stained wall, saying they were summarily executed there.

The wife and friends of the Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi, whose pro-democracy speeches inspired the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, say he's died in exile in the United States. He was 76. Fang Lizhi was an astrophysicist who was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party two years earlier, accused of (stirring up) student unrest.

The army in Pakistan is continuing its efforts to find more than 135 people, most of them soldiers, buried under an avalanche in the Himalayas. Major General Athar Abbas said hundreds of troops were trying to (dig down) through the snow, but it was so deep and covered such a wide area that so far they'd found no survivors. The avalanche engulfed an army base near the Siachen Glacier early on Saturday.

The Vice-President of Malawi, Joyce Banda, has been sworn in as the country's first female head of state following the death from a (heart attack) of her predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika.

"I, Joyce Hilda Mtila Banda..."

"...do solemnly swear that..."

"...do solemnly swear that..."

"...I will well and truly perform..."

"...I will well and truly perform..."

"...the functions of the high office of the president of the Republic of Malawi."

Mrs. Banda took the oath of office at a ceremony in parliament in Lilongwe and was greeted with cheers, applause and (ululation). She urged Malawians to remain united.

Police in Tunisia have fired tear gas to disperse a protest by thousands of unemployed university graduates in the capital Tunis. The interior ministry said the police had been forced to act when protesters tried to (march into) the city's main thoroughfare (in defiance of) a ban on demonstrations there.

Hundreds of people have attended the funeral of a Greek pensioner who shot himself outside parliament earlier this week in protest at the government's austerity measures.