BBC news 2009-06-05 加文本

BBC 2009-06-05


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BBC News with Ian Perton

A British Cabinet minister has announced his resignation and called for the prime minister to resign for the good of the governing Labour Party. The Work and Pension Secretary James Purnell said Gordon Brown’s continued leadership made a future election victory by the opposition Conservative Party more, not less likely. Mr. Purnell’s departure follows resignation announcements by four other ministers in the past three days, but he’s the first openly to ask Mr. Brown to step aside. Naomi Grimley reports.

The news broke as soon as polls closed for the local and European elections. James Purnell made his announcement in a letter to the Times newspaper. He calls on Gordon Brown to stand aside, so that the Labour Party has a credible chance of winning at the next election. Mr. Purnell’s surprising move increases the risks for Gordon Brown although another Minister Caroline Flint has come out and backed the Prime Minister despite rumors suggesting she too might resign.

An exit poll after the European elections in the Netherlands suggests that a far-right party has won almost 15 percent of the vote, coming second after the governing Dutch coalition party, the Christian Democrats. The Freedom Party, or PVV, is led by Geert Wilders, a creator of a controversial film highly critical of the Koran. He was banned from entering Britain earlier this year. Around 375 million people across the 27-nation European Union are voting over several days.

There’s been a generally positive reaction to President Obama’s announcement of his vision for the future of the United States’ relations with the Muslim world and for the progress towards peace in the Middle East. In his speech in Cairo, Mr. Obama spoke about the unbreakable bond between America and Israel, but also forcefully pointed out that Palestinians too had legitimate aspirations for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own.

For more than 60 years, they've endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endured the daily humiliations, large and small, that come with occupation.

The Israeli government issued a brief statement stressing that its own national security remained its top priority. Many Palestinians openly welcome Mr. Obama’s words, but Hamas in the Gaza Strip while praising the change in tone, criticized Mr. Obama for specifically rejecting only Palestinian and not Israeli violence. Many Americans, too, welcomed the President’s word, but the BBC North America editor says his overtures to the Muslim world are seen as potentially risky, raising expectations for change and a potential undermining of American power and influence.

World News from the BBC

In Ireland, Roman Catholic religious orders in Ireland found to have abused children have agreed to pay more compensation to the victims. Shawn Fanning reports.

A controversial deal in 2002 cut the amount of compensation the Roman Catholic orders were required to pay to victims in the Irish Republic are just under 118 million dollars. The taxpayer has funded the bulk of the damages to more than 12,000 victims. Now after a meeting with the Prime Minister Brian Cowan, the orders have agreed to make additional contributions and allow an independent audit of their assets, but further meeting is to take place in 2 weeks to determine the amounts the orders will provide.

Police in Thailand say the American actor David Carradine has been found dead in a Bangkok hotel. Jonathon Heads reports from Bangkok.

According to the police, the body of the 72-year-old actor was found this morning by the maid inside the wardrobe of his five-star hotel room. They would not give the cause of death, but they say there was a cord around his neck and other parts of his body, and that he’d been dead for several hours. His profile in Hollywood had risen recently following his starring role in Quaintant Tarentino's two-part film Kill Bill.

A Brazilian helicopter crew has retrieved the first pieces of the wreckage from the Air France plane that disappeared last Saturday off the coast of Brazil with 228 people on board. The wreckage includes a cargo pallet and two flotation buoys. Air France has told the relatives of those who were traveling on the flight that everyone on board is presumed to have perished.

Three Iranian men living in England have been jailed for buying military equipment on the Internet auction site, Ebay and smuggling it to Teheran. A court in London heard that the items included spare parts for F14 fighter jets. The men were caught when customs officers at Heathrow airport intercepted a consignment of oxygen cylinders, supposedly for medical use.