BBC news 2008-05-28 加文本

BBC 2008-05-28

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BBC News with Nick Kelly.

The South African government has decided to set up refugee camps around the country for foreign migrant workers who fled the recent wave of anti-immigrant violence. The holding camps will house up to 70,000 people. Our Africa editor, Martin Plaut reports. (Www.hxen.net)

 According to Aid Agencies, the South African government will give the first indication of high plans to cope with the crisis on Wednesday afternoon. The agencies say seven places of safety will be established across the country. Families displaced during the attacks will be removed to these holding camps, taking them away from the increasingly insanitary conditions of the temporary shelters, set up around police stations and municipal buildings. But there is a real concern in the aid community that the South African government has little experience in running what are likely to become semi-permanent refugee camps and that establishing such camps could come back to haunt the country for many years to come.

 Brazil's new Environment Minister Carlos Minc has taken up offices. International concern grows over pressure inside the country to sanction development in the Amazon rainforest. Mr Minc. has promised to maintain the priorities of his predecessor Marina Silva who was… over difficulties she encountered implementing President Lula da Silva 's environmental agenda. The Brazilian government has recently been emphasizing the need for economic development in the Amazon in the light of rising food and commodity prices.

There is further evidence that famine is getting worse in parts of Southern Ethiopia after the failure of recent rains, the World Food Program says 16,000 severely malnourished children a day are coming into emergency feeding centers. Elizabeth Blunt reports from Addis Ababa .

The magnitude of the crisis caused by the failure of this year's early rains is now becoming apparent. The first to suffer was the lowland pasturists who depend on those rains to refresh the grass for their animals. After that, the landless laborers, without a midseason crop to plant and harvest, there was no work and no pay. Now even normally comfortable farming families are suffering. Many parts of southern Ethiopia normally get 2 or more crops a year. But now they have nothing to eat until the next main harvest in September.

Portugal has joined calls for the European Union to take action on rising fuel costs as concern increases about the impact record prices are having on economic growth. The Portuguese Economy Minister Manuel Pinho said at an urgent debate full action was needed among EU members. Earlier in the day the French President Nicholas Sarchozy has been asking for EU's permission to reduce value-added tax on fuels to counterbalance high world prices. "It is not a promise I want to make, it is an idea and I ask our European partners the following question: If the price of oil continues to rise, shouldn't we suspend the value-added tax on the oil price?"

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 The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has unveiled the development plan to invest almost $12 billion in the Kurdish dominated southeast of the country. Pam O'Toole has the details.

 "It’s a huge project. Over the next five years, billions of dollars will be pumped into a region which has long been recognized as the poorest in Turkey. Echoers / hoping such investment will weaken the PKK insurgency. The move has been welcomed by some Kurdish businessmen in the region. But some Turkish Kurdish politicians clearly regard it as too little too late, accusing the government of election nearly ahead of a local poll next March. "

The Prosecutor General in Russia Yuri Chaika has said that each year staff at every level of his own department wrongly charge thousands of people with criminal offences for their own political or financial gain. He told the conference on compensation that corrupt prosecutors were leaving a trail of wrecked lives. He said more than five thousand cases failed last year because the evidence was fabricated.

Germany has inaugurated a memorial to honor the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. Very few homosexuals who survived ever received compensation from postwar German government and laws issued by the Nazi's to persecute gays stayed in force in Germany until 1969. At the ceremony, Berlin's mayor Klaus Wowereit who is himself a gay, said it was no surprise that the victims were not honored earlier.

"This is symptomatic for a society like the postwar Germany world was, a society which did not acknowledge a group of people were designated, only because they’ve chosen another way of life and because this distorted relationship towards homosexuality was dominant until just recently in west, as well as in east Germany." The monument is situated close to a memorial for the six million Jewish victims of the holocaust.

BBC News.