BBC news 2009-07-16 加文本

BBC 2009-07-16


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BBC News with John Jason.

A prominent Russian human rights campaigner who documented abuses in Chechnya has been murdered. The body of the activist Natalya Estemirova was found in the neighboring region of Ingushetia with gunshot wounds to her head and chest. Witnesses said she’d been kidnapped outside her home in the Chechen capital Grozny on Wednesday morning. The Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said he was outraged at the murder. From Moscow, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes.

The body of Natalya Estemirova was found dumped in the forest near the border between the Russian republics of Chechnya and Ingushetia. In recent months, she’d been gathering evidence of a campaign of house burnings by government-backed militias. Natalya Estemirova was a close friend of the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Together they had investigated kidnappings, torture and extra-judicial killings by Russian forces fighting the Islamic insurgency in Chechnya.

The American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said America’s offer to engage with Iran is not open-ended. In a major foreign policy speech in Washington, Mrs. Clinton warned that Iran could face greater isolation over its nuclear program.

"Iran can become a constructive actor in the region if it stops threatening its neighbors and supporting terrorism. It can assume a responsible position in the international community if it fulfills its obligations on human rights. The choice is clear. We remain ready to engage with Iran, but the time for action is now. The opportunity will not remain open indefinitely."

Mrs. Clinton also said the US has admired the energy of Iran’s recent presidential election, but was appalled by the way the Iranian government had quelled protests over the disputed ballots.

Almost 170 people have died in a plane crash in Iran. The Russian-made jet operated by Caspian Airlines crashed shortly after taking off on a flight to Armenia. Jon Leyne reports.

The plane was a Tupolev aircraft on its way from the capital Tehran to Yerevan in Armenia. Sixteen minutes into the flight, it disappeared from the radar. One witness described how it plummeted from the sky, possibly after engine problems or a fire on board. State TV has been showing pictures of a huge crater gouged in the earth, the scattered ruins still smoldering. It’s clear no one could have survived. Iran has a notoriously bad air-safety record. Because of sanctions imposed by the United States, Iran relies on an increasingly aging fleet of airliners and has trouble buying spare parts.

The government of Nigeria has welcomed a 60-day ceasefire, declared by the main militant group in the country’s oil-rich Niger Delta region. But the Minister of Defense General Godwin Abbe said that the group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta or MEND, have no right to demand that the military withdraw from parts of the region. MEND, which is fighting for oil revenues to be distributed more widely, said it hoped the ceasefire would lead to talks with the government.

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Reports are coming in from the United States of a shooting incident in Washington. Police are said to have shot a suspect to try to flee after his car had been pulled over a few blocks from the Capitol building which houses the US Congress. The suspect was taken to hospital, but there’s no word on the person’s condition. Some of the entrances to the Capitol building were sealed off. Details are still coming in.

General Motors’ offshoot in Brazil is to spend more than a billion dollars to develop two new models for the Brazilian market. GM in Brazil says it’s funding half the development costs from its own resources and half will be lent by state banks. From Sao Paulo, Gary Duffy reports.

GM in Brazil is financially independent of the company in the United States, and at the moment, its fortunes seem to be in a much healthier state as well. Last year the company sold a record number of cars in South America’s largest country, and executives say they hope to exceed that target in 2009. Now in a further sign of confidence in future sales, the company is to spend around one billion dollars, developing two new models which it says will be based on Brazilian engineering and design. GM in Brazil has also been keen to stress that there will be no dependence on products from the United States.

A smoker in the United States has accidentally bought the world’s most expensive packet of cigarettes at a cost of 23 quadrillion dollars. The man, Josh Muszynski told the BBC he was alarmed to discover his debit card bill for the cigarettes bought at a petrol station in New Hampshire was more than the US national debt. His bank eventually accepted that the 17-digit purchase had been a mistake and refunded his money the next day.

The US Defense Department says it won’t ban troops from smoking in war zones despite of a report recommending a tobacco-free military. A Pentagon spokesman said the troops were already under enough stress fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the department didn’t want to take away one of the few outlets they had to relieve it.

That’s the latest BBC News.