BBC news 2008-12-24 加文本

BBC 2008-12-24


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A report just released in Washington has concluded that the President-elect Barack Obama had no direct involvement in the scandal which has erupted in his home state Illinois around the Governor Rod Blagojevich. It's alleged that Mr.Blagojevich was trying to profit personally from negotiations to fill Mr. Obama's vacant seat in the Senate. From Washington, Jonathan Beale reports.

This report concludes that there was no indication of inappropriate behavior by Mr Obama's advisers. But it confirms that Mr Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, did discuss the Senate seat with the Illinois governor and the governor's staff. The report insists that there was no mention of any personal benefit for the governor. It's also emerged that Barack Obama himself has been interviewed by the federal prosecutor investigating the corruption charges. That fact and the sketchy details of Mr. Obama's own report leave many questions unanswered.

El Salvador has announced that it will end its military presence in Iraq at the end of the month. President Elias Antonio Saca said that when the current United Nations resolution runs out at the end of this year, his country's troops will be withdrawn. El Salvador has had troops in Iraq since 2003.

Army officers in the West African state of Guinea have staged a coup attempt, but civilian and military leaders say they failed to overthrow the government. An army captain early went on National Radio to claim that the government had been overthrown just hours after the death was announced of the long-serving President Lansana Conte. Later, the head of the armed forces, General Diana Kamala, told French Television that the rebel officers were in a minority within the army.

They do not have the unanimous support of the army at present, and I don't know what their real aims are, I don't know if it is simply because they want to take power or because of the economic and political situation in the country, but I think it is a little premature, because the death of the president has hardly been announced before you have people coming and making a statement that they are taking power.

The Iraqi parliament has approved a resolution to allow British and other non-American foreign troops to stay in the country, after their United Nations mandate expires at the end of the year. American forces are covered by a separate agreement. They are to leave by the end of 2011. Here is Andrew Bolton.

The resolution passed after days of turmoil in the Iraqi parliament lets the troops stay until the end of July, next year. The parliamentary unrest had led to delays on the decision, and the agreement finally came shortly after the resignation of the Speaker of the Parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani. Mr. al-Mashhadani, a Sunni, had long been a controversial figure, and Iraqi MPs had been calling on him to stand down over a number of issues. But matters came to a head after he used crude language and insults during a debate last week. Shiite and Kurdish politicians clamored for him to go, and they finally got their wish.

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The Sri Lankan government has rebuffed a call by the campaign group Human Rights Watch for aid agencies to be allowed to return to the north of the country where the army is fighting Tamil Tiger rebels. The government ordered aid workers out in September, saying it couldn't guarantee their safety. The government's human rights spokesman indicated that the order wouldn't be reversed.

A Canadian woman has survived after being buried alive by a snow storm for three days. She went missing after her car got stuck in a blizzard near the town of Ancaster, west of Toronto. The vehicle was found the next day but it took a further two days for a police dog to find her almost completely submerged in the snowdrift. She is now in hospital with hyperthermia. The police attribute her survival to the snow which insulated her from the freezing temperatures. Ray Lau is the police officer whose dog discovered the woman, he says he was amazed to find her still alive.

From a survivability standpoint, the odds were against her, from a search and rescue standpoint, it's a miracle that she is still with us. I really didn't think that it was necessarily search and rescue mission by this point, but she has obvious proved a lot of the probability tables wrong.

Israeli forces say they've killed three Palestinian militants at the edge of the Gaza Strip. They say the men were shot as they tried to plant explosives. There has been no comment from Palestinian officials so far. The shooting is the most serious reported incident since the truce between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist Movement Hamas expired at the weekend.(www.hxen.net)

And President Bush in one of his last acts in office has granted the posthumous pardon to an American who broke the US neutrality law to supply aircraft to Jews fighting for the state of Israel in 1948. The man, Charles Winters, who was not Jewish, served 18 months in prison after working for others to deliver two converted Flying Fortress aircrafts to the Middle East .In 1961, the then-Israeli Prime Minister Golden Mayuf commended Mr. Winters for his contribution to Israel.