Hello to you and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service.

We're coming to you live from London. I'm Sean Lay. It's good to have your company this hour.

Later we're going to be talking about new research which may give hope to those who suffer from anosmia.

That's not having a sense of smell. We'll be home from one sufferer whose condition

could have proved fatal. I suffered a head injury when I was 22 and I lost my sense of

smells as a result of that. At the time, in the context of what could have happened, it didn't seem

like the biggest deal, but it had an impact on my life in all sorts of ways. I came close to

blowing myself up when I nearly lit a cigarette in a kitchen

that was full of gas that I couldn't smell.

And, you know, to this day, I'm unable to detect odours

and I am not connected to the world around me

in the way that so many of us are.

We'll have more on that story a little later in the programme.

But first on news now, in recent month, there have been hopes that the long-running

insurgency in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo could be drawing to a close.

The government has long accused its neighbour Rwanda of training and financing the M23, a rebel group notorious for its use of

extreme violence. The UN calls it a Rwanda-backed group. In Washington, at the end of June,

the two governments signed a peace agreement pending a final deal. Less than a month later,

however, M23 members conducted a massacre of Hutus. That's the finding of a new report published on Wednesday from the Independent Organization Human Rights Watch.

Clementine de Montjoy is the lead author.

The M23 carried out mass killings over the period of several weeks throughout the month of July.

As you said, over 140 civilians were killed, although there's

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