BBC news 2008-07-16 加文本

BBC News with Jonathan Weekley.

The main candidates for the American presidency Barack Obama and John McCain have set out their foreign policy differences, but both envisage a new focus on Afghanistan, Mr. Obama said that if elected he would withdraw most US troops from Iraq within 16 months, and redeploy some of them to Afghanistan, because that was the central front in the war on terror.

"As president I will make the fight against Al-Qaida and the Taliban, the top priority that it should be. This is a war we have to win. I'll send at least two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, and use this commitment to seek greater contributions with fewer restrictions from our NATO allies."

Mr. McCain said that unlike Mr. Obama, he had always supported the American military surge in Iraq and its success demonstrated how to proceed in Afghanistan.

"I know how to win wars, I know how to win wars, if I'm elected president, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan just as we have turned around the war in Iraq, with a comprehensive strategy for victory, I know how to do that. "

In the face of growing economic uncertainty in the United States, President Bush said America would come through the challenges stronger than before. He was speaking after two of America's main mortgage providers got into difficulties last week and following comments by the head of the American Central Bank that the US economy faces numerous difficulties. Jack Izzard reports from Washington.

Many Americans feel their economy is like a ship sailing in a storm. Today President Bush tried to reassure them they aren’t heading for the rocks. He said America's financial system is basically sound, and urged Congress to prove measures to prop up the struggling mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Earlier, the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke had sounded a bleaker note, predicting low growth and high inflation, but the president insisted that America's economy would emerge from the tough times stronger than ever before.

Europe's biggest carmaker Volkswagen says it's building a new factory in the United States to contract the effects of the Euro's strength against the dollar. In a statement, Volkswagen said the new plant costing nearly a billion dollars would be built in Chattanooga, Tennessee to begin production in 2011. The company said it plans to sell at least 800,000 cars a year in the United States by 2018.

The Israeli President, Shimon Peres, has pardoned a Lebanese prisoner, clearing the last hurdle before prisoner exchange which is to take place on Wednesday with the Lebanese group Hezbollah. Samir Kuntar was convicted of killing four Israelis in an attack in 1979, he's one of five Lebanese prisoners being swapped for two Israeli soldiers, captured two years ago, during the war with Hezbollah. It's widely thought the two soldiers are already dead.(Www.hxen.net)

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The committee that oversees the United Nations Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, CITES is allowing China to import a limited quantity of ivory for the first time since a worldwide ban on its sale was imposed nearly twenty years ago. CITES says China had tightened measures against illegal ivory traders and could buy from four African countries where elephant population has stabilized. Some environmentalists say China should not be given permission as it still has a huge ivory black market.

European Union fishermen are to get help worth up to three billion dollars to cope with soaring fuel prices. The EU Fisheries Commissioner, Joe Borg, said he hoped the cash would provide short-term relief and also build a more efficient fishing fleet for the future. The package comes after protests against the price of fuel by fishermen across Europe.

United Nations food agency has condemned the killing of one of its workers in southern Somalia on Sunday. It was the 5th fatal attack on one of the World Food Program staff in Somalia this year. Peter Smerdon, a WFP spokesman, said continuing violence against aid workers could have disastrous consequences.

"If we can not, and our partners can not, deliver sufficient assistance on the ground in the coming months, we could, well, we fear see a return to similar scenes to the 1992-1993 famine in which hundreds of thousands of people perished mainly because they were cut off from humanitarian assistance by insecurity."

More than two million Somalis currently need assistance because of drought and high food prices.

Two elderly women in the United States have been jailed for life for murdering homeless men in order to collect on their life insurance policies. The two women pocketed nearly three million dollars before they were caught. They had befriended two homeless men on whose behalf they took out life insurance policies. They then murdered the men by staging hit-and-run car accidents.

BBC News.