BBC 2009-02-23
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BBC News with David Legg.
An explosion in a busy tourist district in the Egyptian capital Cairo has killed at least one person a French national and wounded more than 20 others including many foreigners. Reports say a bomb was thrown from a balcony into a crowded open-air cafe. The area Khan el-Khalili is a major tourist attraction. From Cairo, Christian Fraser reports.
The target was a group of tourists who were sitting outside a hotel cafe close to the Ohasayid Mosque. The bombers are thought to have gone to an upper floor of the hotel, from where they dropped crude home-made explosives. There is no indication yet of who might have been behind this bombing. But this is a tense time in Egypt. The government has come under a lot of criticism for its reaction to the war in Gaza and it has plenty of enemies.
European leaders meeting in Berlin have agreed on the need for sweeping changes to the global financial system. They want tougher regulation of all financial markets and products including controversial hedge funds. The leaders were meeting to agree a common position ahead of a meeting of the world’s leading advanced and developing nations in London in March. The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said a global new deal was needed.
"We decided that the international institutions should have at least five hundred billion dollars to enable them not just to deal with crises but to enable them to be able to prevent crises. We’ve also decided that we want to see a greater role for the World Bank in helping the poorest countries of the world. We also want to see, as part of the stimulus to the world economy, a global green deal, in other words, that a lot of the resources that are invested, are invested in a low-carbon economy for the future".
Details are emerging from Washington of plans by President Obama to halve America’s ballooning budget deficit by 2012. The president's officials say Mr. Obama will set the target when he announces his budget this week. They say he’ll fund the cut by raising some taxes and reducing troop numbers in Iraq as well as by making the administration more efficient. Barack Obama’s first move as president was to borrow another trillion dollars to fund his stimulus package.
The African Union says 11 of its peace-keepers all from Burundi have been killed in an attack in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The AU said that the soldiers had been under intense mortar attack from insurgents for the past five days, Caspar Leighton has more.
The AU peace-keepers are meant to be helping to stabilize Somalia while a political solution is found to the country's eighteen-year-long civil war. Islamic insurgents have been gaining more and more ground and now control most of Somalia. The understrength AU force has become increasingly embattled. Some insurgents have voiced support for a newly installed government. But the hard-line Islamist al-Shabab group which claimed today's attack has vowed to fight on.
This is the world news from the BBC.
The Anglican archbishop of Sudan has called on Britain and the United States to help track down the rebel leader of the Lord's Resistance Movement Joseph Kony and help bring him to justice. Archbishop Daniel Deng said the task appeared beyond the abilities of the governments of the region. Attacks by the rebels since the end of December have killed more than a thousand people and driven nearly two hundred thousand from their homes.
A senior Republican senator in the United States Richard Luger has called the American policies towards Cuba ineffective. Senator Luger, the leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Washington’s approach had failed to achieve its stated purpose of promoting democracy on the island. He said political changes in Cuba had created an opportunity for the US to reevaluate its relationship with Havana.
Hollywood is counting down to this year’s American Film Academy Awards, the Oscars. The British film Slumdog Millionaire, the story of a Mumbai orphan’s journey from rags to riches is the hot favorite to win best film. Final preparations are being made for the event of the Kodak Theater where last year the famous red carpet had to be shrouded in a plastic canopy because of heavy rain. The man responsible for the red carpet area Joe Louis says he hopes this year’s event should run smoothly. (www.hXen.com)
"The biggest challenge? I think, you know, I don’t know that there is[are] many challenges unless the weather changes. If the weather changes, then our challenge is just to stay ahead of it, to keep people safe and keep people dry. If the weather does not change, our challenge is really just flow and execution."
Two notorious Greek criminals have escaped from jail by helicopter for the second time in three years. The men, Vassilis Palaiokostas and Alket Rizai used a rope ladder thrown by a helicopter to break out of the Korydallos prison near Athens. They were due to go on trial shortly charged in connection with the first helicopter escape in 2006.
BBC News.
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