BBC 2007-04-11 加文本

BBC 2007-04-11



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BBC World News, I'm Leon Newence.

A police operation in the Moroccan city of Casablanca against suspected Islamic militants has ended with the deaths of at least four suspects and a policeman in multiple incidents. All suspects were wanted in connection with a suicide bombing at an internet cafe in Casablanca a month ago which killed the bomber and four others. Richard Hamilton reports now from Rabat.

A police chase at dawn across the rooftops of a poor district ended in two men being cornered. One man detonated his belt of explosives, dying instantly, and another was killed by police bullets while resisting arrest. A third man who was apprehended later in the day also died by blowing himself up. Eyewitnesses said he threw himself from the roof. A police officer died of his injuries caused by that explosion. A fourth suspected Islamist died in yet another blast later in the day.

A British woman left infertile by cancer treatment has lost her final appeal to have children using frozen embryos fertilized by her former partner. The woman, Natalie Evans, lost her case at the Grand Chamber of the European Court. Here is our health correspondent Jane Dreaper.

The seventeen judges at the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Howard Johnston had never consented to Natalie Evans using their jointly created embryos alone. The couple had undergone IVF six years ago because a medical problem meant Natalie Evans had to have her ovaries removed. When they split up, Mr. Johnston withdrew his consent for her to use these embryos and the court ruled that his wishes couldn't be overruled by her desire for a child.

The Portuguese President Anibal Cavaco Silva has ratified a new law allowing abortion up to the tenth week of pregnancy. The law aligns Portugal with the rest of the European Union except Ireland, Malta and Poland where most abortions are still banned. The President Silva, who opposes relaxing the law, has recommended further measures to ensure abortion is a last resort.

A project aimed at ending the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan has been launched by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States and the Google Internet company. The museum has put its genocide database onto its website along with satellite images provided by Google of the more than 1,600 villages in Darfur which have been damaged or destroyed. The chief information officer at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, William Swader, gave more details about the aim of the project.

Today for the very first time when any user of Google Earth—over 200 million users of Google Earth—opens it, they will see over Africa the outline of the provinces of Darfur in Sudan on by default. So it's unavoidable you'll see that. And it's a preview of the destruction that has gone on in Sudan through icons that represent the major villages.

World News from the BBC.

President Bush has invited Democratic and Republican party leaders in Congress to discuss the stalemate over funding American forces in Iraq. He said that political differences between the two parties shouldn't prevent resources from reaching the troops. Correspondents say that Democratic party leaders have not ruled out meeting the President next week, but are unlikely to drop their demand for a timetable for troop withdrawal as a condition to the funding.

The Czech writer Egon Bondy has died at the age of seventy-seven. Bondy, a lifelong Marxist, wrote surreal poems and stories that were seen as symbolically critical of the authoritarianism of the communist government in Czechoslovakia. Our art correspondent Lawrence Pollard looks back at his career.

Egon Bondy was not his real name, but the artistic persona adopted by Zbyněk Fišer, who was born in Prague in 1930. He's usually referred to as a surreal or comic poet whose absurd or disturbing content could easily be read as symbolically critical of the communist regime. He continued to attack the arrival of the capitalist free market in Czechoslovakia. But ultimately, he will be remembered for his own lifetime of cultural protest.

A Palestinian minister says his government is doing all it can to secure the release of Alan Johnston, the BBC correspondent who is thought to have been abducted in the Gaza Strip more than four weeks ago. The information minister said the government was deeply sorry and ashamed that Alan Johnston was still being held. No group has publicly admitted having seized him.

And the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said he would meet the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert next week. It will be the first meeting between the two leaders since they agreed during a recent visit by the American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to hold regular talks.

And that's the latest from BBC World News.

Vacabulary

In-Vitro Fertilization：is a technique in which egg cells are fertilised by sperm outside the woman's womb 试管受精

Surreal：adj. unlike reality, esp in having combination;s or strange distortions of thins as in a dream; fantastic; bizarre 超现实的；不现实的；梦幻般的；荒诞的；离奇的：under the influence of the drug my mind was filled with surreal images. 我受了麻醉药的刺激，头脑里充满了稀奇古怪的幻觉。