BBC news 2008-08-01 加文本

Ten days after his arrest in Belgrade, the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has made his first appearance before the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague. He heard the 11 formal charges against him, relating to the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s, including one count of genocide and five counts of crimes against humanity. Mr. Karadzic waived his rights to legal representation. He also told the judge that he’d been offered a deal in 1996 by Richard Holbrooke who was the US assistant Secretary of State at the time. Mr. Karadzic said that the deal meant he would escape international justice if he stepped down.

In 1996, my representatives, statesmen and ministers were presented with an offer by Mr. Richard Holbrooke on behalf of the United States of America, according to which I had to withdraw from public life, I had to make certain gestures, and in return, the US said they would fulfill their commitments. This was on behalf of the United States of America.

Mr. Holbrooke, who negotiated the peace deal that effectively ended the war in Bosnia, flatly denied that any deal had been struck with Mr. Karadzic.

Well, this is an old and completely false story put out by Karadzic after he disappeared from public life. This is the first time I've actually heard it and it's quite hilarious, there was never any deal to give him immunity from capture. It was simply that NATO failed to capture him, that is NATO’s failure, not a deal.

The United Nations Security Council is meeting to renew the mandate of the joint UN-African Union peace keeping force in Darfur. The vote has been complicated by demand from the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to be indicted for genocide in Darfur. From UN headquarters in New York, Laura Trevelyan reports.

The interests of peace and justice in Darfur have become entwined in a diplomatic row. What should have been a straightforward vote to renew the mandate of the Darfur peacekeepers has turned into an argument about President al-Bashir of Sudan accused by the prosecutor of International Criminal Court of committing genocide in Darfur. African countries want the UN Security Council to use its powers to delay the court’s work for a year, arguing that indicting the Sudanese president will undermine peace in Darfur. Britain, France, the US and Latin American countries don’t want to do this, saying justice must prevail.

Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger has ordered 22,000 state workers to be laid off and 200,000 to have their wages slashed. American’s biggest state is facing a budget deficit of more than 15 billion dollars. And legislators are struggling to agree a standing plan for the current year. Mr. Schwarzenegger apologized to state workers but said he had no choice.

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The President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, says he will nationalize one of the country’s largest banks, the Bank of Venezuela, as part of his program of taking public control of key assets. Mr. Chavez said he would take over the bank after learning that its owners, the Santander Group in Spain, intended to sell it to another Venezuelan bank. In the past two years, Mr. Chavez has increased state control over the oil, telephone, electricity, steel, and cement industries.

Two MPs from Britain’s governing Labor Party have called for the Foreign Secretary David Miliband to be sacked for disloyalty to the Prime Minister. The MPs said Mr. Miliband’s article in a British news paper, in which outlined his vision for the future of the Labor Party undermined Gordon Brown. On a BBC program, Mr. Miliband denied he wanted to stand against Gordon Brown, saying it was a huge honor to serve as Foreign Secretary, but he failed to defend the Prime Minister. Geraldine Smith is one of the MPs who called for Mr. Brown to sack Mr. Miliband. 

well, I think, you know, Gordon Brown has got to display the strength that we all know he possesses. If David Miliband, you know, was, was placed back on the backbenches, then I think he would become the nonentity that he was before his accelerated promotion.

Aid agencies operating in Afghanistan have warned they may not be able to work in parts of the country previously seemed as safe because of what they called a considerable escalation in conflict. A statement issued on behalf of one hundred Afghan and international non-government organizations reported a 50% increase in insurgent attacks compared with last year. 19 aid workers have been killed this year.