BBC news 2008-11-14 加文本

The President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai has called on the international community to use the opportunity of improved  relations with Pakistan for making further progress. In a BBC interview, Mr. Karzai said the fight against the Taliban would be won by strategy rather than just by increasing the number of foreign troops. But Afghans, he said, needed help.

“Afghanistan needs to be supported, and needs to be given the means, the resources, to have a running government, a better administration, and to fight together with the rest of the world, the terrorists that are killing us all. There are resources needed for that, there are expertise needed for that. The Afghan people have given all that they had in this regard, all that was required of us by the international community since the Bonn Agreement has been delivered. ”

The US authorities are holding products from China that contain milk at entry points until they are tested for toxic chemical melamine. The US Food and Drug Administration has warned people against consuming several products from China after finding melamine and another toxic chemical cyanuric acid. Two American health officials are to travel to China next week to discuss food safety and to open food inspection offices in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai.

As world leaders gather in Washington for an economic summit, President Bush has given his strongest defense of free market capitalism since the collapse of confidence in the economic system. Mr. Bush who’s hosting the meeting of 20 developed and emerging economies over the weekend said that the current crisis was not a failure of the free market. From New York, Greg Wood.

This speech presented the outgoing president with a difficult balancing act. On the one hand, he had to concede that problems with the free market system had contributed to the financial and economic crisis, but on the other, he extolled capitalism as the best way of restoring growth and prosperity. “I’m a market-oriented guy,” he said, “except when faced with the prospect of a global financial meltdown.”

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About five million people in southern California have been taking part in the biggest earthquake drill in the history of the US. The exercise aims to prepare the emergency services and public officials to cope with a catastrophic quake of magnitude 7.8. Scientists and engineers devised a scenario in which 1,800 people are killed and a quarter of a million made homeless. Geologists say there’s a 99% chance of such a disaster in the next 30 years.

An organization which campaigns for the rights of indigenous people has said that one of the last known un-contacted tribes in South America is under threat of extinction due to illegal forest development. Survival International said the tribe in Paraguay, known as the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode has been detected apparently fleeing large scale deforestation by bulldozers. The group has called the Paraguayan president to intervene to stop the illegal logging.

A court in Italy has cleared most of the 29 police officers charged with beating protesters during a G8 summit in Genoa seven years ago. The court had been told that Italian police beat defenseless people and left the school in which they stayed looking like a butcher’s shop. David Willey reports from Rome.

The G8 summit in Genoa in July, 2001 was one of the most violent in the history of meetings of leaders of the world’s rich nations. One protester was killed, and evidence of undue police brutality against unarmed demonstrators was given at the last of three major trials arising out of the rioting. The court acquitted the top three police chiefs, charged with instigating brutal behaviour and handed down only minor prison sentences to fewer than half of the remainder of the accused. Many of the police officers on trial are still in service. Some have even been promoted. (WWw.hxen.net)

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