BBC news 2007-07-06 加文本

BBC 2007-07-06


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BBC World News with Nick Kelly.

Massive demonstrations have been held in cities across Colombia in a nationwide protest against the left wing guerilla group the FARC which is currently holding hundreds of people hostage. The protests come at the civil conflict that enters its 44th year. From Bogota, Jeremy Mcdermott reports.

For three minutes in downtown Bogota, there was an explosion of noise as Columbian shouted, blew with thousand banked parts, calling for an end to kidnapping and violence. There were parallel demonstration across the country with people who couldn’t make it to the main centers coming out onto the streets to show their solidarity with the protest. The trigger for this was the killing last month of eleven politicians who have been held for five years by the rebel. The protests were aimed principally at the FARC with the main kidnappers in the country holding at this moment more than 700 victims.

An independent Cuban human rights group says the number of political prisoners in the country has dropped by more than 20% since Rio Castrol took over running the country last year. But repression is still a problem. In a new report, the Cuban commission for human rights in national reconciliation says up to seventy political prisoners have been freed in the past year continuing a trend. Michael Vase reports from Havana.

According to the report, there are still 246 political prisoners languishing in conditions it describs as subhuman and degrading. The Cuban authorities deny the existence of political prisoners calling them counter-revolution race in the pay of United States. The issue, though, continues to be a major stumbling block to improved international relations, particularly with the European Union which recently tried to reopen the dialogue with the government here.

A mass grave has been found in Afghanistan at a military complex dating from the Soviet occupation of the country in the 1980s. Many of the victims had their arms tied and being blindfolded or gaged, or some skeletons showed signs of gunshot wounds. The senior police officer in Kabul Ali said fifteen rooms had, so far, been opened and several hundred bodies found. “I know a man told us about the grave. He said he worked as a driver when there was a Russian military base here, a base to bring people here. They put them in these rooms, shut the door, and then they put bricks and stones and covered the door with earth.”

The Pakistani authorities have rejected a conditional offer to surrender by cleric who’s leading resistance by radical Islamist students to the army siege of the Red Mosque in Islamabad. The government refused the demand by the cleric Abdula for the guarantee of safety for himself and his family. It said he must immediately release women and children being held in the fortress-like complex. Heavy clashes continued on Thursday with troops blasting holes and water of the compound and students replying with gunfire.

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The Turkish constitutional Court in a surprise move have upheld a controversial reform package paving the way for direct elections for a new president. The package was proposed by the governing AK party which has Islamism roots after secular opposition MPs blocked the elections by parliament of the acts candidate for head of state. Correspondents say the secular opposition and the outgoing President fear that popular election of the president would tip the delegate balance of power in favor of the Islamists.

The International Olympic Committee Meeting in Guatemala has voted to create a youth Olympics, the first will be staged in 2010. Details are still to be worked out. But it will involve about 3,500 young athletes aged between fourteen and eighteen. Our sports correspondent Chris Mathew reports.

Not since the introduction of the winter games in 1924 has the Olympic movement created a major international sports festival. The site for the 2010 youth games will be chosen in February. The IOC President Jack Rogers said the Youth Olympics would help combat the widespread decline in physical activity among the young and the increase in obesity. The idea is to inspire young people around the world to take up sports and to drag them away from their computer screens.

A senior Iranian official has said security forces have seized more than a hundred tons of drugs over the last 3 months. The figures follow a recent report from the United Nations office on drugs and crime, but said that opium production in neighboring Afghanistan was almost 50% up on last year. Afghanistan, now, accounts for most of the world's illicit opium production.

And police in Iraq said that a number of people have been killed in separate attacks across the country, the dead and injured included civilians and members of the security forces. United States military says two of its soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in the capital Baghdad.

BBC world news.