BBC news 2008-11-21 加文本

BBC News with Ian Purdon.

The United Nations Security Council has voted unanimously to send a further 3,000 peacekeepers to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The mission will have around 20,000 personnel once the reinforcements are deployed. However, diplomats have acknowledged that they don’t know where the extra troops will come from. The former head of UN peacekeeping operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno, called for European countries to make troop commitments.

I think it’s great that the Security Council adopted this resolution today, but Security Council should not think its work ends with the resolution. To deploy quickly forces, I don’t think it can happen if there is not a commitment of the Europeans to provide a bridging force, so it’s going to be a test of whether the Europeans see Africa as a strategic issue for Europe as important as Afghanistan which for me it is or whether they think it isn’t.

US congressional leaders have asked car manufacturers to submit a new viable recovery plan before their request for a multi-billion-dollar bailout for the industry can be approved. The Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the auto giants had failed to convince the American people or Congress that the proposed bailout would be their last. He said they needed to provide more detail of how they would spend the money. The Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said there was a clear requirement for auto industry heads to submit new plans to Congress next month.

Until we can see a plan where the auto industry is held accountable and a plan for viability on how they go into the future, until they show us the plan, we cannot show them the money. And that is really where we are with this.

Meanwhile, the US stock market has plunged again with the Dow Jones Index ending the day more than 5% lower. Analysts said investors panicked over weak economic data and the failure by lawmakers to agree a bailout for car markers. The drop in America follows sharp falls on European markets.

One of the world’s biggest shipping companies has announced that it’s re-routing some of its fleet away from the Gulf of Aden because of the growing threat from piracy off the Somalia coast. The company, A.P. Moller-Maersk, says it will send ships around Africa instead of through the Suez Canal, adding thousands of kilometers to their journeys. The firm’s vice-president, Soren Skou, said they could no longer ignore the growing threat posed by pirates.

The key for us here is not the impact of daily operating costs here now, the key for us is really to get the message across, one that, you know, we really want to make sure that our crews, our ships and the cargos on board are safe and are not subjected to piracy, and two, that this is not a problem that we as one company or our industry of sorts alone can handle. This is a problem that is escalated to a level where a concerted effort at the international level is needed.

World News from the BBC.

A federal judge in Washington has ordered the release of five Algerians held at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre. The ruling was the first since the US Supreme Court gave Guantanamo detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment. In his verdict, the judge said the government had failed to show that the Algerians had plans to travel to Afghanistan to fight US forces. (WWw.hxen.net)

The American ambassador in Zimbabwe, James McGee, has said that nearly 300 people have died of cholera in the country. This figure is much higher than that admitted by the authorities. A document obtained by the BBC confirms this and says that there are another 6,000 suspected cases, half of them in Harare.

Researchers in Poland say that after centuries of mystery they've identified the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus, the astronomer who first suggested that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Adam Easton reports from Warsaw.

The man, who made the key scientific discovery that the Earth orbits the Sun, had lived and worked in Frombork Cathedral on the Baltic Sea coast during the 16th century. For many years, he was a canon, and only carried out his astronomical studies in his spare time. Three years ago, archaeologists dug up a skull and partial remains of a man aged about 70, Copernicus’ age when he died, near an altar at the cathedral. Scientists then matched the DNA from one of the skull’s teeth and a femur bone with two strands of Copernicus’ hair, found in a book once owned by the astronomer now kept in Sweden’s Uppsala University.

Politicians in Chile have voted overwhelmingly against the government pay offer to more than 400,000 public workers who have been on strike since Monday demanding higher wages. The strikers caused major disruption to hospitals, businesses and travel services. The government offered a nine and a half percent pay increase, below Chile’s inflation rate. The Lower House of Parliament rejected the offer.