BBC news 2007-09-02 加文本

BBC 2007-09-02


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...similar comments by the former army chief General Sir Mike Jackson. Allan Little reports.

Right from the beginning, says General Cross, we were all very concerned about the lack of detail that had gone into the postwar plan. General Cross says he has raised these concerns with Mr. Rumsfeld over lunch a month before the invasion of Iraq. He didn't want to hear that message, he says. The US had already convinced themselves that following the invasion Iraq would emerge reasonably quickly as a stable democracy. Earlier General Sir Mike Jackson had told the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph that America's post-invasion plan was "intellectually bankrupt".

Twenty-seven Colombian nationals who are arrested three years ago in Venezuela for plotting against President Hugo Chavez have been released. Mr. Chavez said / he hoped the pardon would help ease tensions between the Colombian government, right-wing paramilitaries and the country's largest left-wing guerilla movement, the FARC. From Caracas, Jane Izzard reports.

At a ceremony in the state of Tachira close to the Colombian border, a Venezuelan minister said the release sent a beautiful message to the world. President Chavez is hoping that this gesture will go down well with all sides in the long running battle between the rebels and paramilitaries in Colombia. Mr. Chavez has offered to act as a mediator. He hopes to arrange an exchange of hundreds of imprisoned rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC for about 45 hostages that they are holding.

Election officials in Jamaica are considering suspending the final day of campaigning following an upsurge in violence ahead of Monday's general election. The authorities have already called off campaigning in the most volatile parts of the country. From Kingston, Doreen Gordon reports.

In the single more serious incident, armed men opened fire on a shop, killing four people. In Kingston, late Friday and early Saturday, three other people were shot and killed. It brings to 12 the number of people killed in political incidents in the past four days. The standard police response is to stop short of labelling them political killings, saying they are investigating them. In a country where on average four people are murdered every day, it is sometimes difficult to separate criminal from political. But in all of the overnight shootings, the dead included activists from the governing People's National Party, the PNP.

A Republican Senator in the US has announced he is standing down at the end of the month after he was allegedly caught soliciting sex with a man in a public toilet. Senator Larry Craig of Idaho has long been an opponent of gay rights. He tried to hold on to his position but bowed to pressure from fellow Republicans to resign.

World News from the BBC.

The exiled former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto says talks on a power-sharing agreement with President Pervez Musharraf have broken down. But she says she will still return to Pakistan very soon to take part in national elections. Ms. Bhutto blamed General Musharraf allies in the governing parties for scuppering a deal.

Diplomats from the United States and North Korea have expressed optimism after a first day of talks in Geneva on the North's nuclear weapons program. The North Korean negotiator Kim Kye-gwan said that he had expected a fruitful outcome from the talks which concluded on Sunday. Washington is pressing North Korea to declare the full range of its nuclear capabilities under the terms of an agreement reached in February and to disable a nuclear reactor it shut down in July. The chief American negotiator Christopher Hill said that normalizing relations with North Korea or DPRK was still being discussed. "We need to continue to discuss the course of US-DPRK relations. The DPRK has a great interest in achieving normalization. We need to make sure that that is understood as a sequenced element in the complete denuclearization."

A plane carrying 19 South Koreans held hostages for 6 weeks by the Taliban in Afghanistan has arrived in South Korean capital Seoul. The 19 were released in stages last week under a deal between the insurgents and the South Korean government. South Korea has defended its decision to negotiate with Taliban and again denied that a ransom had been paid. But a representative of Taliban told the BBC the Koreans had paid $20 million to the militants.

One of Kenya's most prominent politicians has been chosen by leading opposition party the Orange Democratic Movement as its candidate for presidential elections expected in December. Raila Odinga swept aside the challenge of three other candidates. He said the election would be a battle between the status quo and forces for change.

BBC World News.