BBC news 2007-07-24 加文本

BBC 2007-07-24


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As much of central and western England suffers its worst floods for 60 years, emergency workers are desperately trying to stop an electricity substation being swamped, threatening power supplies to a quarter of a million people. A spokeswoman for Britain's National Electricity Network Sara Harris explained how they'd managed to protect the substation so far. "The situation at the moment is stable. We've worked extremely closely with the armed forces, fire brigade, navy, RAFT, trying to stop the water from penetrating into our site. And what we've done is build one kilometer wall around the site to stop the water flowing through. "

The British government's Emergency Planning Committee met to discuss the crisis as experts said the next few hours could be crucial in determining whether the substation is forced to shut down. Meanwhile, countries in southern Europe are in the grip of a heat wave. Serbia's Ministry of Agriculture said farmers would lose nearly thirty percent of their annual harvest because of the high temperatures. At least fifteen people are reported to have died in Romania as a result of the extreme heat. Emergency First Aid centers have been set up.

In Greece, two pilots were killed when their firefighting aircraft crashed while tackling a blaze. Mark Braben has more details.

The yellow twin-engined Canadian water-bombing aircraft was trying to stop a fire destroying a village on the island of Vivia when in thick smoke it flew into a hillside, narrowly missing several houses. The pilots are thought to have died instantly. Describing the air crew as real heroes, Greece's Public Order Minister Vyron Polydoras said they had attained immortality through their self-sacrifice.

American veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have filed a class action lawsuit against the United States government over delays in disability pay and mental healthcare. Groups representing thousands of servicemen are suing that the Department of Veteran's Affairs, accusing it of breaking the law by not dealing with hundreds of thousands of medical claims.

Climatologists have announced they found the first concrete evidence of the impact of human activity on global patterns of rainfall. They said industrial emissions have brought more rain to Northern Europe and Canada and less to Sub Sahara Africa and parts of Asia. Matt Mcgrath has more details.

A team of international researchers compared actual observations of rainfall change over the past 75 years with trends predicted by 14 computer models. The comparison showed general agreement about overall average rainfall levels. But the scientists found significant increases and decreases in some parts of the world that could only be explained by man-made global warming. So while the Sahara region of Africa has seen a strong decrease in rainfall in recent decades, in parts of Northern Europe and Northern Canada, there has been an increase of about ten percent in precipitation.

World News from the BBC.

Lawyers for the jailed former military leader of Panama Manuel Noriega have asked a Court in the United States to block a request to extradite him to France when he's released in September. France wants General Noriega to serve out a sentence imposed in his absence in 1999 after a French court convicted him of money laundering. However, General Noriega's lawyers say he is a prisoner of war and must be repatriated under the Geneva Convention.

European Union leaders have congratulated the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his election victory. Calling it a mandate for the reforms, the EU wants Turkey to complete to join the bloc. The French president Nicolas Sarkozy welcomed Mr. Erdogan's victory despite France's longstanding opposition to Turkey's attempts to join the EU. Mr. Erdogan, whose party has Islamic roots, emphasized that he would respect Turkey's Secular constitution.

The president of Kosovo Fatmir Sejdiu has said his province will not declare unilateral independence from Serbia. After talks in Washington with the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Sejdiu said that while a formal breakaway from Belgrade was inevitable, it would be done in close partnership with friendly countries. A state department spokesman C said Dr. Rice's stressed the importance of pursuing a diplomatic route. "One of the things that we have counseled for all parties is that it is in nobody's interest to try to short-circuit the diplomatic process. There is a last thing anybody wants to see, is a renewed outbreak of some of the deep violence we've seen in that part of the world before."

The European Union has taken the first step towards sending a force to Chad and the Central African Republic to halt the violence spilling over from the Sudanese conflict in Darfur. European Foreign Ministers' meeting in Brussels authorized their military staff to draft plans to support a proposed United Nations' peacekeeping mission in the area.

BBC World News.