This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Nick Miles and at 13 hours GMT on Thursday the 9th of May, these are our main stories.

Human Rights Watch says the paramilitary rapid support forces in Sudan may have committed genocide in West Darfur.

A former Saudi intelligence officer tells the BBC that Saudi Arabia has permitted the use of lethal force to clear land for a futuristic

desert city.

And Japan is to start hunting Fin Wales whose conservation status is described as vulnerable.

Also in this podcast, can an amputee become an astronaut?

One man is training exactly for that.

In the capsule, the g-load is going straight down the line of my femur,

so pushing the socket onto my residual limb.

All that and under the hammer Shirley Bass's glittering collection of jewels.

But first, in conflicts, the people who often suffer most are not the armed factions but the

civilians stuck in the middle nowhere is that more true than in West Darfur in

Sudan for more than two decades the Masalit people there, a black African

ethnic group, have been targeted by Arab factions. Now there are warnings from Human Rights

Watch that the attacks may amount to genocide.

The charges against the rapid support forces and their Allied militias which have been

involved in a civil war against the government.

The report focuses on the West Darfur city of Elginina,

where it says thousands of civilians were killed last year.

Here's Jean-Baptiste Galapin from Human Rights Watch describing one of the worst

incidents. The column came under attack early in the morning on June 15th by the

...