BBC news 2008-08-08 加文本

BBC News with Ian Perdon.

A day after being convicted of supporting terrorism, Osama bin Laden's former driver, Salim Hamdan, has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison by a US military jury at Guantanamo Bay. From there, Kim Ghattas reports.

The sentence is a dramatic snub to the Bush administration. It was announced after just over an hour and a half of deliberations. The jury of six military officers in the military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay sentenced Salim Hamdan to 66 months in prison including time served. This leaves Osama bin Laden's alleged driver with only five months left as a convict. But Mr. Hamdan can now still be held indefinitely as an unlawful combatant in the US administration's war on terror.

Fighting between Georgian forces and separatists of the breakaway region of South Ossetia has resumed just hours after the two sides agreed to observe a ceasefire and hold talks to end the conflict. The Georgian government said it launched a military operation aimed, as it put it, at neutralizing separatist fighters attacking civilians. From the Georgian capital Tbilisi, Mathew Collin reports.

The ceasefire has broken down completely. Officials on both sides say a massive firefight is now taking place. Eyewitnesses have told the BBC, they've seen columns of Georgian troops on the road to the region. Officials would not say what the operation was intended to achieve, but the Georgian government has never recognized the separatists as a legitimate authority in South Ossetia, and it's often vowed to regain control.

The governing coalition in Pakistan says it intends to oust President Pervez Musharraf from power. At a highly charged news conference, the leader of the largest party in the coalition, Asif Ali Zardari, accused the President of incompetence and said he was standing in the path of democracy. Mr. Zardari said it was imperative that  impeachment proceedings should begin. Mark Deven reports.

No one has ever tried to impeach a Pakistani president before. The leaders of the governing coalition said that President Musharaff, whose policies they blame for plunging Pakistan into turmoil, should be impeached immediately. Asif Ali Zardari, speaking under the portrait of his assassinated wife, Benazir Bhutto, said that Musharaff simply had to go. But the coalition gave no date when this all might start. And there is doubt to whether they have enough seats anyway in Parliament to dislodge him. And the president' supporters in Parliament have said they would fight any attempt to remove him.

World leaders and VIPs have been arriving in Beijing amid tight security for the opening on Friday of the 2008 Olympics. President Bush flew in from Thailand where he earlier criticized China's human rights record, but said he wants just the focus during the games to be on the sport. Meanwhile, 40 athletes taking part have written to the Chinese President expressing their concerns over Tibet.(Www.hxen.net)

World News from the BBC.

Scientists in Switzerland have announced that the world's biggest atom collider will start operating next month. The machine buried in a circular tunnel under Geneva cost about 8 billion dollars to build, and will use 50,000 tons of super-cooled electromagnets to accelerate beams of tiny particles to near the speed of light, and smash them together at intense levels of energy.

Forecasters in the United States predict that the current Atlantic hurricane season will be more violent than usual. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that up to eight new hurricanes will form by the end of November. And it says up to five of these will be major. Here is Jack Izzard.

People living near the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean may be used to hurricanes. But this year, they could be battening down the hatches more than usual. One person was killed and millions of dollars worth damage was caused by two hurricanes in July, Bertha and Dolly. Now America's top climate agency warns that many more could be on the way. July saw the Atlantic's third most active weather systems on record, leaving meteorologists with the task of deciding if this is a spike or part of a longer trend towards more extreme weather.

The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas has announced the release of another batch of detainees from the rival Fatah party in Gaza. The Hamas administration in Gaza City said 150 people detained in recent days had been freed, including a senior Fatah leader.

Researchers in Germany say, for the first time, they've made a perfect map of the DNA of a prehistoric Neanderthal, a breakthrough they say will help to reveal further how modern humans evolved. The scientists say they've sequenced the mitochondrial DNA from a 38000-year-old bone. The results they said showed that Neanderthals had undergone fewer evolutionary changes than modern humans, making them less adaptable and leading to them dying out.
BBC News.