BBC 2007-04-21 加文本

BBC 2007-04-21



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BBC World News with Fiona McDonald.

With ballot papers only now being sent to polling stations ahead of Saturday's presidential and parliamentary elections in Nigeria, tensions have been further heightened by heavy fighting in the oil-rich Delta region in the southeast of the country. From Abuja here is David Bamford.

The head of Nigeria's election commission Maurice Iwu went on national television to explain why ballot papers for tomorrow's presidential elections are only now starting to be distributed around the country. He said this was part of the commission's intentional strategy to keep the election material out of Nigeria until as late as possible, so it could not be tampered with. Some sixty million ballot papers have been arriving by the plane load from South Africa where they were printed. And as well as the logistical difficulties, there has been another spate of fighting. Earlier in the week, soldiers were clashing with Islamist militants in the north. Now, there has been a new battle, this time in the far south in the Niger Delta region.

A human rights group in Somalia says more than 110 people have been killed in the capital Mogadishu in fighting over the last three days. Ethiopian troops supporting the transitional government have been involved in heavy clashes with Islamist insurgents and clan militias based in the city.

The twelve candidates in France's presidential election have wound up their campaigns ahead of the first round of voting on Sunday. Official campaigning for the first round closed at midnight on Friday after which reporting of opinion polls is prohibited by French law. Caroline Wyatt reports from Paris.

Nothing is ringing out of the final election rallies for Segolene Royal and Nicolas Sarkazy as both candidates try to outflank the far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen whose ideas on patriotism and national identity have seeped into the main stream of this campaign. The other key issue has been the economy for the French despondent over unemployment amid rising cost of living. But Sarko and Sego, as the two main candidates known, have proved deeply divisive figures, giving the centrist, Francois Bayrou, a broad appeal that's made the outcome impossible to predict.

A stand-off of the NASA Space Center in Houston in the American city of Texas has ended after a gunman who entered the building shot a hostage and then himself. A second hostage was released. Earlier, a NASA spokesman Alir Betele told the BBC there was no danger to any NASA operations.

Our understanding is, it, it's isolated to one particular office building. Right now and, and the campus itself has locked down. People are pretty much being asked to stay in their current location and again there's no other, you know, threat to ongoing operations and mission control in Huston which is, you know, involved in international space station with our Russian partners. There is no effect operation there, that's still our working just fine.


This is Fiona McDonald with the latest World News from the BBC.

A group of Mohocks have caused chaos to the national rail network after they blocked the main railway line linking Canada's largest city of Toronto to the capital Ottawa. The indigenous groups have parked a bus across the tracks in a protest / over land which they claim as their own. The protest leaders said they would occupy the site for forty eight hours.

The United Nations Tribunal for Rwanda has rejected a request to prosecute the Rwandan president Paul Kagame for alleged complicity in the assassination of his predecessor, an event that unleashed the genocide of 1994. The court ruled that it did not have the jurisdiction to accept such a request as it was up to the prosecutor to decide who should be investigated. Mary Harper reports.
President Kagame may have escaped the special court for Rwanda. But he is not free from the shadow of justice. Attempts to link him with the assassination of his predecessor will not go away, especially those initiated in France. It was the indictment by a French judge of nine of Mr. Kagame closest associates at the end of last year that served as the basis for the request for his prosecution. Rwanda's severed diplomatic ties with France as a result of the indictments, and earlier this week the Rwandan government asked the International Court of Justice to quash the French arrest warrants.

The rival political heavy weights in Ukraine, the president and the prime minister have each spoken of a possible compromise to end the current deadlock between them. President Viktor Yushchenko said he was ready to suspend his decree dissolving parliament which precipitated the crisis although he again insisted on the need for a snap election. He was speaking after talks with Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych who, for his part, told supporters he believed disagreements could be resolved within the coming week although this would depend on the ruling from Ukraine's Constitutional Court on the legality of the president's decree.