BBC news 2007-11-30 加文本

BBC 2007-11-30

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BBC news with Jonathan Izzard

The United States and Britain have welcomed the announcement by President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan that he plans to lift the four-week-old state of emergency on December 16th. But they urged further action to ensure free and fair parliamentary elections take place in January. One of Pakistan’s main opposition leaders Nawaz Sharif said he would boycott the poll but Benazir Bhutto of the Pakistan People’s Party or PPP said she would participate.

They are taking part under protest. We feel that if we boycott, then the regime won't need to rake and the world will turn around and say the election was fair. So it's important for us to mobilize the support we have and fight in the field and I think if we do that, they will be forced to risk to stop the PPP or they will be forced to make the elections more credible.

The British schoolteacher in Sudan Gillian Gibbons who allowed her class to name a teddy bear Muhammad has been convicted of insulting religion. The court in Khartoum sentenced her to 15 days in prison followed by deportation. She was arrested on Sunday after a complaint to be made against her. Adam Mynott reports from Khartoum.

Gillian Gibbons is understood to have been taken to Omdurman women’s prison in Khartoum where she will serve the rest of her 15-day sentence. While it is not the worst prison in Sudan, it is very crowded and conditions are very far from pleasant. The verdict came as a great surprise including to many people in Sudan but some were deeply offended by the insult to their religion and there have been calls for people to come out onto the streets in protest.

A majority of European Union countries have finally approved key operational proposals for the Galileo satellite navigation project designed to rival the American GPS or Global Positioning System. The much-delayed system has been criticized as an expensive European vanity project. Sebastian Usher reports.

The Galileo system will be made up of 30 satellites beaming navigation signals to ground-control centers in the EU. Spain had been blocking a deal on how the system would be run, demanding to host one of the centers, but a compromise has now been reached allowing the multi-billion-dollar project to move ahead. But it’s already running five years behind schedule. It’s meant to be up and running by 2013, but analysts say by then the American global positioning system may have already established on an unassailable grip on the satellite navigation industry.

Police in London are to decide whether to launch a formal investigation into the legality of donations to the governing Labor Party in Britain just five months after another police inquiry into secret loans to the Party ended. No charges resulted from that probe but it overshadowed the last months of the administration of the former Prime Minister Tony Blair. His successor Gordon Brown has confirmed that his party did not lawfully declare more than a million dollars in donations from a wealthy businessman, a breach of the electoral law.

World News from the BBC.

A subsidiary of the energy giant BP has pleaded guilty to an environmental crime in the United States after it failed to prevent a spill of 20,000 gallons of crude oil in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska last year. The company had already agreed to pay $20 million in fines for the spill in an oil-rich region of Arctic-Alaska called the North Slope.

A new audiotape said to be from the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been broadcast calling on European countries to end their military cooperation with the United States in Afghanistan. Showing in brief abstracts on the Arab television station Al Jazeera, the voice on the tape said that the tide of American power was receding and it was in the interest of Europe’s people to put pressure on their politicians to distance themselves from the White House.

Police in Slovakia say the enriched uranium they seized when they detained 3 people on the border with Hungary could have been used in a dirty bomb which spreads radioactive material. They believe those arrested, one Hungarian and two Ukrainians planned to sell the material. A spokeswoman for the Slovak police, Andra Polichkova, said a potential disaster had been averted by international cooperation.

We are very pleased because we interrupted very very big danger and for us it’s a very big success. Of course, it’s not a success only for Slovakia Republic but for all the Europe. It was in cooperation with the Hungarian Republic.

Last year more than 250 breaches of nuclear security were reported by the UN nuclear watchdog.

Thousands of students have held a final campaign rally in the Venezuelan capital Caracas ahead of a referendum on Sunday on a series of constitutional changes proposed by President Hugo Chavez. The students have been leading the campaign against the proposals, which include a provision to remove the limit on the number of terms President Chavez can stand for office. Correspondents say that no campaign appears to have been gaining strength in recent days.

BBC news.