BBC news 2009-03-13 加文本

BBC News with Fiona McDonald.

The disgraced American financier Bernard Madoff has admitted swindling investors out of tens of billions of dollars in what has been called the biggest ever fraud of its kind. He pleaded guilty in New York to 11 charges, including money laundering and theft. He is still awaiting sentencing. Here is our North America business correspondent Greg Wood.

For 20 years, Bernard Madoff misappropriated billions of dollars from clients pretending to invest it, but in fact recycling it through an elaborate system of fund companies in the U. S. and London while taking a big cut for himself. He hired numerous employees, many of whom had no relevant experience to transfer money and gave the impression that he was running a legitimate investment business. At the same time, a carefully tended aura of exclusivity and philanthropic work created the respectable image which allowed him to go undetected for so long.

A U. S. official has said that Mexican drug gangs are the biggest organized crime threat facing the United States. Roger Rufe of the Department of Homeland Security said there were plans to send troops of the National Guard and the Department of Defense, or DOD, to the border if other agencies became overwhelmed. He told a congressional panel that the US did not want to militarize the border with Mexico, but would do so if necessary.

"Our contingency plan is designed to address escalating levels of violence, should that happen. The way that the plan is set up is that we would exhaust all the resources the federal government [is] short of, DOD and National Guard troops, before we would reach that tipping point, and we are working very closely in a planning process right now with our brethren in the National Guard and the Department of Defense to make sure we are ready when the time comes."

The medical charity, Medecins Sans Frontieres, is pulling the bulk of its workers out of the Darfur region of Sudan where they'd been helping hundreds of thousands of displaced people. The decision follows the abduction of three MSF workers on Wednesday night. Last week, Sudan expelled more than a dozen aid groups after an International indictment was issued against President Omar al-Bashir for alleged war crimes in Darfur. Karen Allen reports.

The three people kidnapped included a Canadian nurse, an Italian doctor and a French coordinator. They were snatched at gunpoint from their offices in Saraf Umra 230 kilometers west of El Fasher in North Darfur on Wednesday night. The Sudanese government source said that based on the information from the guards it released, it was an unknown group that had seized the foreigners. Banditry is common right across the Darfur region, but given the current tensions between aid agencies and the Sudanese government, questions have been asked as to whether the kidnapping was politically inspired.

The crew of the International Space Station have briefly taken refuge in their Soyuz capsule because it appeared there might be an impact with a cloud of debris. The American space agency said the debris later passed the space station without any impact.

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A British economist Nicolas Stern has warned leading climate scientists that the potential future impact from global warming has been grossly underestimated and that some governments have still not grasped the dire consequences for humanity if they don't act quickly. Lord Stern, who produced an influential report on the threat of climate change in 2006, was speaking at an international meeting of scientists in Copenhagen. He said that without rapid action to cut carbon, temperatures would increase by five degrees Celsius and many areas would be made uninhabitable by rising sea levels.

"You'd see hundreds of millions of people, probably billions of people, who would have to move, and we know that that would cause conflicts, so we would see as it were a very extended period of conflict around the world decades or centuries as hundreds of millions of people move. So I think it's very important that we understand the magnitude of the risk we are running."

A court in Belgrade has handed down the maximum 20-year jail sentence to seven former Serb soldiers involved in one of the worst massacres of Croatia's War of Independence, the summary execution of some 200 Croatian prisoners of war. The victims were taken from hospital to a farm near the eastern Croatian City of Vukovar in November 1991 and shot dead. The case was seen as a test of the Serbian judiciary's readiness to punish Serbs guilty of atrocities.

Scientists in the United States say they've developed a coating material that heals its own scratches when exposed to sunlight. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers say the material could be used for scratch-free cars, furniture or even bio-medical products. They say the material comes from a substance called chitosan, found in the shells of crabs. Sunlight allows the substance to draw molecules back together after they've been ruptured, smoothing the scratches out, sometimes in less than an hour.

BBC News.

Glossary:

swindle: If someone swindles a person or an organization, they deceive them in order to get something valuable from them, especially money.

misappropriate: If someone misappropriated money which does not belong to them, they take it without permission and use it for their own purposes.

aura: An aura is a a quality of feeling that seems to surround a person or place or to come from them.  =air

philanthropic: A philanthropic person or organization freely gives money or other help to people who need it.

contingency: A contingency plan or measure is one that is intended to be used if a possible situation actually occurs. (www.hXen.com)

short of: If you are short of something or if it is short, you don't have enough of it.

brethren: You can refer to the members of a particular organization or group, especially a religious group, as brethen.

bulk of: The bulk of something is most of it. =majority