BBC news 2009-02-05 加文本

BBC News with David Austin.

Two senior judges in Britain have made a scathing attack on the American authorities for putting pressure on them to withhold information about how a British resident currently held in Guantanamo Bay was treated. The material relates to allegations that the suspect Binyam Mohamed was tortured. The High Court judges said they'd been told that if the evidence was published, the Americans would withdraw intelligence cooperation with Britain. The BBC's Danny Shaw reports.

Lawyers for Binyam Mohamed asked the court to release reports by the US government about his detention in Pakistan and his treatment by or on behalf of the Americans. But the judges said it was not in the public interest to release the documents because there was a real risk the Americans would reduce the intelligence provided to the UK as a result. The court criticized the US government, saying it did not consider that a democracy would expect a court in another democracy to suppress such material.

President Obama has announced that he will limit the salaries that can be paid to executives whose companies get financial aid from the government. He said incomes will be capped at half a million dollars because the government had to ensure that taxpayers weren't funding excessive compensation in the financial sector. Mr. Obama said executives should not be rewarded for failure.

We all need to take responsibility. And this includes executives at major financial firms who turned to the American people hat in hand when they were in trouble, even as they paid themselves customary lavish bonuses. As I said last week, this is the height of irresponsibility. It's shameful.

The British government's cultural organization, the British Council, has suspended operations in Iran following what it says was intimidation of its staff by the Iranian government. From Tehran, here is Jon Leyne.

The British Council says pressure from the Iranian government has been growing for the last two years. No British staff have been granted visas. That left the Council with just 16 Iranian staff in Tehran. When two of them tried to leave the country in December, they had their passports confiscated. Then all of the staff were called in by the Iranian government when, according to the council, it was suggested to them that they should resign. They were gone, so there is no one left to run the office. There's been no comment yet from the Iranian side.

Jon Leyne reporting.

The Vatican has ordered a bishop who holds controversial views on the Nazi Holocaust to recant before he can be fully readmitted into the Roman Catholic Church. The Bishop Richard Williamson who is British has denied that gas chambers existed, and suggested that Nazi Germany murdered no more than 300,000 Jews. In a statement, the Vatican said it hadn't known about Bishop Williamson's views when it agreed to lift his excommunication which was imposed on an unrelated matter 20 years ago.

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An Israeli army investigation into the killing of three daughters of a Palestinian doctor has concluded that they died when an Israeli tank fired two shells into his home during the recent offensive in Gaza. The army said it opened fire on what it called suspicious figures in the doctor's house who it believed were directing attacks by nearby Palestinian militants. The doctor had worked in Israel treating patients with fertility problems.

German and American media reports say that one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals, Aribert Heim, died in Egypt almost 17 years ago. He was known as Doctor Death for the deadly experiments he performed on inmates in a concentration camp in Austria. Tristana Moore reports.

According to reports in the German media, Aribert Heim was living in Cairo when he died in 1992. He'd converted to Islam and he was known to locals as Tarek Hussein Farid. But he was also one of the world's most-wanted Nazi war criminals. Aribert Heim was a ruthless Nazi doctor who committed atrocities against hundreds of Jews and other prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. The German public broadcaster ZDF claimed that it found Heim's passport, bank statements, letters and application for residency in a hotel room in Cairo.

The United Nations says it intends to investigate the assassination of the former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto more than a year ago. Speaking in Islamabad, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he would very soon establish a commission to probe the attack on Benazir Bhutto which happened at a campaign rally ahead of Pakistan's general election.(www.hXen.com)

The fossilized remains of a giant snake, longer than a bus have been discovered in South America. The fossils were uncovered in an opencast coal mine in Colombia. Researchers believe the reptile lived 60 million years ago and snacked on animals the size of a cow. They said the reptile named Titanoboa must have weighed more than a ton. 

And those are the latest stories from BBC.