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Adult mothers who have been allowed to stay with their young children since they were taken from a polygamous sect will be separated from them after DNA sampling is completed next week, a child welfare official said. State District Judge Barbara Walther late Friday ordered that parents and children of the Yearning For Zion Ranch submit DNA samples to help sort out family relationships that have confounded authorities since 416 children were taken into state custody two weeks ago. Sampling is to begin Monday and will probably take several days to complete, said Darrell Azar, a spokesman for Child Protective Services, on Saturday. Results could take more than a month. Once sampling is complete, the agency will begin moving the children from the San Angelo coliseum and fairgrounds to other sites. Child welfare officials allowed adult mothers with children ages 4 and younger to stay together when the state took custody of the rest of the children from the ranch. Now, only mothers younger than 18 will be allowed to remain with their children once the sampling is complete. The welfare agency will also try to keep siblings together, he said. "We're going to make these transitions as easy as possible," Azar said. "We want to keep them together as much as possible so they don't feel they're completely isolated from their culture or the people they know." Child welfare officials have said figuring out how sect members are related has been difficult because of evasive or changing answers members have given them. Families that include half brothers and sisters, and those that include reportedly married first cousins, can be particularly challenging to un ravel.Dr. Arthur Beaudet, chairman of the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said DNA testing can easily deal with these types of complexities. "It's reasonable to say the information (from testing) will give foolproof documentation" as to which parents belong to which children, he said. Although the many unique family ties found in the sect will probably add a level of difficulty for DNA analysts in determining parentage, Beaudet said, the added complexity is still "not a significant concern." A certain number of DNA markers - segments of the DNA with specific genetic characteristics - are tested to determine whether two people are related. Beaudet said that if any uncertainties arise, analysts simply test additional markers. More than 400 children will be tested, but officials have not said how many adults will be tested. Such a considerable amount of DNA testing is not new but is usually associated with trying to identify victims of mass violence or natural disasters. Walther on Friday continued an emergency order giving the state custody of the children after a sometimes chaotic two-day hearing in which the state argued that the teachings of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints jeopardized children. The child welfare agency has said that the sect encourages adolescent girls to marry older men and have children, and that boys are groomed to become future perpetrators. Sect members deny the allegations. Individual hearings will be set for the children over the next several weeks, and the judge will determine whether they are moved into permanent foster care or can be returned to their parents. All of the hearings must beheld by June 5. The custody case is one of the nation's largest and most complicated. The ruling Friday capped two days of testimony that sometimes became disorderly as hundreds of lawyers for children and parents competed to defend their clients in two rooms linked by a video feed. The April 3 raid on the Yearning For Zion Ranch was prompted by a call made to a family violence shelter, purportedly by a 16-year-old girl who said her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. That girl has never been identified.

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A Russian space capsule touched down in Kazakhstan after hurtling through Earth's atmosphere in a steeper-than-normal descent, subjecting the three-nation-crew to severe G-forces and landing hundreds of kilometres (miles) off target. It was the second time in a row - and the third since 2003 - that the Soyuz landing went awry, though none are believed to have caused permanent medical problems for the crews. Saturday's mission saw the return to Earth of South Korea's first astronaut, Yi So-yeon. She spent 10 days in space before joining US astronaut Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko in the 31/2-hour, bone-jarring descent from the international space station. Russian engineers target returning capsules to a landing site near the town of Arkalyk in Kazakhstan's barren north. But after entering the atmosphere, the TMA-11 capsule for some reason began a "ballistic trajectory." That subjects the crew to G-forces more than double what occur under normal circumstances, Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin said. Parachutes then slowed the craft and dropped it onto the Central Asian steppes in a puff of dust around 0851 GMT - 20 minutes late and some 420 kilometres (260 miles) off target. It took another 25 minutes before search helicopters could locate the capsule and determine the crew was unharmed. Medical officials said they were in satisfactory condition, but gave no details. "The most important thing is that the crew is healthy and well," Federal Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov told a post-landing news conference.
"The landing occurred normally, but according to a back-up plan – the descent was a ballistic trajectory." Perminov said engineers would examine the capsule to determine what caused the glitch, though he blamed the Soyuz crew for not informing Mission Control about the unusual descent. Later, Perminov was asked about the presence of two women on the Soyuz, and referred to a naval superstition that having women aboard a ship was bad luck. "You know in Russia, there are certain bad omens about this sort ofthing, but thank God that everything worked out successfully," he said. "Ofcourse in the future, we will work somehow to ensure that the number of womenwill not surpass" the number of men. Challenged by a reporter, Perminov responded: "This isn't discrimination. I'm just saying that when a majority (of the crew) is female, sometimes certain kinds of unsanctioned behaviour or something else occurs, that's what I'm talking about." He did not elaborate. Yi, a bioengineer who was initially an understudy for the mission, travelled to the station on April 10, along with cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko. South Korea paid Russia US $20 million for the flight. In South Korea, several hundred people gathered at the Seoul's Olympic Park to watch together Yi's return on a giant television screen, clapping and cheering after a broadcaster reported the landing. "I'm happy and feel grateful as she safely returned," Yi's mother, Jung Geum-sun, told the SBS television network. "I want to hug her, tell her: 'you worked hard."' Whitson and Malenchenko spent roughly six months performing experiments and maintaining the orbiting station and were replaced by Volkov and Kononenko. They joined American astronaut Garrett Reisman, who arrived last month on the US space shuttle Endeavour. According to the US space agency NASA, Whitson, 48, set a new American record for cumulative time in space - 377 days. It was the second landing in a row of a Soyuz capsule that has gone awry. In October, a glitch sent Malaysia's first space traveller and two Russian cosmonauts on a steeper-than-normal path during their return to Earth. A similar problem occurred in May 2003 when the three-man, Russia-US crew also experienced a steep, off-course landing. It then took salvage crews several hours to locate the spacecraft because of communications problems. Despite the mishaps, the Russian space program has a reputation for reliability. The single-use Soyuz and Progress vehicles have long been the workhorses of the space station program, regularly shuttling people and cargo to the orbiting outpost. They took on greater importance following the grounding of the US space shuttle fleet in the wake of the 2003 Columbia disaster.


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On Saturday evening, a missile strike killed four Hamas militants east of Gaza City, Palestinian medics and security officials said.
The Israeli military confirmed the strike, and said it targeted a group trying to launch rockets.
Their bodies were taken to Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahyiah, northern Gaza Strip.
Earlier on Saturday Hamas bombers attacked an Israeli-Gaza border crossing under the cover of fog, detonating two jeeps made to look like Israeli military vehicles but packed with hundreds of pounds of explosives.
The twin blasts, just hours before the Jewish Passover holiday, wounded 13 Israeli soldiers in what Hamas said was an attempt to break the nearly yearlong blockade of the territory.
Four Hamas assailants died, Israeli officials said.
The attack was the fifth on a crossing by Gaza militants since last week, and Hamas threatened to target the passages again.
Israeli aircraft also fired a missile at a car near Kerem Shalom, killing a mechanic for the Hamas police and wounding four people, Palestinian security officials and medics said.
Hamas said three of its gunmen were killed in Saturday's two Israeli attacks, but released a farewell video of four attackers.
One of the faces was blocked out, suggesting he could still at large.