BBC 2007-04-27 加文本

BBC 2007-04-27



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The United States Senate has approved a bill that would set a deadline for the beginning of the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. The bill, which had already been passed by the House of Representatives makes future war funding dependent on the first troops being pulled out of Iraq this autumn. The White House has confirmed that President Bush will veto the measure. Vanessa Heaney reports from Washington.

Congress is now on a collision course with the President. In a close vote, fifty-one to forty-six largely along party lines, the senate has passed the controversial funding bill. This provides $124 billion for continuing the war in Iraq on the condition that troops start withdrawing from Iraq at the beginning of October with a goal of completing a pull-out by next April. President Bush has strongly rejected the timetable for withdrawal, saying he will not accept surrender dates for the war. He has said the bill would tie the hands of the military, depriving them of the means to succeed.

The NATO alliance has said it's gravely concerned by Russian moves to suspend participation in an arms treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe. President Putin appeared to link his decision with American plans to put elements of a new missile defense system in Poland and Czech Republic. Here is our diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marks.

“The NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer says that the Russian announcement was met with grave concern, disappointment and regret, now that’s not quite a diplomatic broadside, but it certainly is a strong repulse to what he's seen as a really rather worrying Russian step. It shows that dealing with Russia is going to be much more difficult and that matters because Russia is a member of the Quartet trying to bring peace to the Middle East and vitally Russia is a key player in the efforts to trying persuade Iran to give up its plans to enrich Uranium.”

The official route of the Olympic torch for next year’s games in Beijing has run into political controversy. The itinerary would take the torch from Taiwan to the Chinese territories of Macao and Hong Kong. Taiwan, which China regards as a breakaway province, has rejected that. Steve Jackson reports.

Plans to bring the Olympic torch to Taiwan were always going to be controversial given the differences between China and Taiwan over the island's status. Within hours of the route being announced, Taiwan’s Olympic committee had angrily rejected the arrangements. The chair of the committee issued a statement saying Beijing was trying to incorporate Taiwan into the domestic part of the torch relay thereby belittling the island status.

Gunfire and mortar rounds have continued to echo through the streets of the Somali capital Mogadishu as Ethiopian troops and their Somali allies try to drive insurgents and militias from the city. The Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Ghedi had earlier said that most of the fighting had ended and it was now safe for residents to return. A local human rights group, which monitors civilian casualties, said nearly sixty people had been killed in fighting on Thursday.

World News from the BBC.

The Algerian armed forces say they have shot dead a leading figure in the North African branch of Al-Qaeda. The Algerian news agency said the suspect Samir Moussaab was killed during a clash with the army on Thursday. Samir Moussaab was described as the coordinator and second in command of the group known as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

A group of scientists says it discovered what caused the catastrophic bout of global warming that took place 55 million years ago. The temperature rise caused mass extinctions and subtropical temperatures in the Arctic. Writing in the journal SCIENCE, the scientists say it was triggered by a massive volcanic eruption. Neal.Bouldler explains.

Scientists have long known that 55 million years ago there was a big rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases matched by an equally big rise in ocean temperatures. What they did't know was what caused it. Now a team of scientists from Denmark and the United States claimed they found the real reason. They say massive volcanic eruptions and lava flows, the same volcanic activity which drove Europe and Greenland apart, heated up sediment, decayed organic matter and released some 2,000 gigatons of carbon into the oceans and atmosphere. The result, global warming.

A power cut in Colombia is affecting more than 60% of the country including the capital Bogota. Traffic lights were out causing chaos on the roads and trading was set temporarily suspended by the stock exchange in Bogota. The authorities have ruled out a rebel attack, saying that the blackout was caused by a technical failure.

The British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has fulfilled his ambition to find out what it feels like to be weightless. Especially modified plane carrying the professor who is virtually paralyzed by motor neuron disease took off from Florida in the US and flew for more than an hour, performing a series of dramatic dives over the Atlantic. Professor Hawking and the crew were able to float in zero gravity for periods up to thirty seconds.