BBC 2008-05-04
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BBC News with Sue Montgomery.
The Asian Development Bank has warned that the crisis caused by rising food prices is so serious that it could reverse the gains made in reducing poverty across the continent. The warning came from the bank's president Haruhiko Kuroda at the start of its annual conference in Madrid. He suggested that reducing oil subsidies might be one way of finding more money to help alleviate poverty.
"75% of expenditure of the poor would be affected by price inflation. You can imagine how big the impact is likely to be on those poor people. Now, many developing countries in Asia, as well as other part of the world, have oil subsidies, and this is not a very effective way to help the poor people."
A meeting of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe has ended without deciding if its leader Morgan Tsvangirai should take part in a run-off / election against the country's President Robert Mugabe. The Electoral Commission announced in Friday that Mr. Tsvangirai had not won enough votes in March's election to avoid a run-off. Martin Plaut reports.
Delegation from the MDC is to visit South Africa to consult Mr. Tsvangirai before taking a final decision on whether to participate in the run-off. The opposition is angry that this second round is being held at all, claiming Mr. Tsvangirai won the election outright. But with the political violence of the last month, it would be difficult to hold any kind of legitimate vote. The opposition looks to outside intervention to try to improve the political climate. But the government has had its concerns as well, claiming the Britain and the United States have been bankrolling the opposition.
The American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has begun a new mission to the Middle East to discuss the continuing peace efforts towards establishing a Palestinian state. Shortly after arriving in Jerusalem, she talks with the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Kim Ghattas reports from Jerusalem.
The US Secretary of State said she would press the Israelis to refrain from undermining the Palestinian authority and security forces with incursions into areas of the West Bank that are under Palestinian control. While there is no talk of direct pressure on Israel on the issue of settlement activity, it will be raised. Dr. Rice said it was not about putting pressure, but about working through the problems.
The software giant Microsoft has withdrawn its offer for the Internet services company Yahoo because the two cannot agree on a price. The proposed deal failed through because Yahoo wanted more than the amount that Microsoft was willing to offer. Microsoft said it had raised its offer to $33 a share, but Yahoo wanted $37 a share. Microsoft said the economics demanded by Yahoo did not make sense for the company and it had therefore withdrawn its offer.
World news from the BBC.
Representatives of the exiled Tibetan leader, the ** Lama, have arrived in the southern China to meet government representatives for the first time since violent anti-Chinese protests erupted in Tibet in March. Chinese reaction to the protests brought widespread condemnation at the time. The two sides will meet in the southern city of Shenzhen.
The US presidential hopeful Barack Obama has narrowly won the latest contest with his rival Hilary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He defeated his rival by just seven votes in the remote Pacific territory of Guam. Mr. Obama is ahead of Mrs. Clinton in the overall count of delegates.
At least 18 prisoners have been killed in a fight at a jail in Honduras. It happened when a group of inmates who had been transferred from another jail were set upon by inmates with knives and guns. Police were called in to help restore order. The violence is blamed on overcrowding and gang rivalry among prisoners. From Miami, Warren Bull.
Violence is not uncommon in the overcrowded prisons of Honduras where just as in the streets, gangs known as Maras try to gain control. Human rights organizations believe one answer would be to speed up the sentencing of remount prisoners, which will cut overcrowding in the jails. But Honduras is a poor country with limited resources and then it concerted attempt to tackle the endemic violence both inside and outside the prison system could take decades to bear results.
It's (the) 30th anniversary of a computer phenomenon that has become the bane of tens of millions of computer users worldwide. On the May 3rd, 1978, what's considered to be the very first unsolicited spam email was sent. The sender was a marketer promo defunct American computer company and it reached only around 400 recipients. Since then, spamming has become highly sophisticated. It can slow down or crash computers across continents.
BBC news.
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