BBC news 2009-08-19 加文本

BBC 2009-08-19


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BBC News with Mike Cooper.

Officials in Pakistan say the detained chief spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban has confirmed that their leader Baitullah Mehsud is dead. They said the spokesman, Maulvi Omar, acknowledged under interrogation that Mr. Mehsud was killed earlier this month. Maulvi Omar was arrested on Monday. From Islamabad, here's Aleem Maqbool.

The army here is claiming another crucial strike against the Pakistani Taliban. Maulvi Omar was the main spokesman for the organization and a close aide to Baitullah Mehsud, its leader. Pakistani and American officials claimed Baitullah was killed in an air strike earlier this month. Now government sources in Islamabad say Maulvi Omar has confirmed it. Pakistani ministers say they are confident that Taliban is under serious pressure now and its remaining leadership in disarray. But the militant infrastructure here has been built up over decades, and the underlying problems which feed it -- poverty and inequality-- remain.

An international tribunal in The Hague has ruled that Eritrea will have to pay Ethiopia millions of dollars in compensation for damage done during a two-year war between the two countries. Our African editor Martin Plaut reports.

After eight years of legal wrangling, the tribunal made an award across a vast range of issues. For example, it gave a monetary value to the damage suffered by Ethiopians injured during a notorious incident when Eritrean jets dropped cluster bombs on a school in the town of Mekele. But it also awarded Eritreans who lost their homes and properties in Ethiopia when they were seized by the government. In total, Ethiopia was awarded 174 million dollars while Eritrea got 163 million dollars, a net payment to Ethiopia of just over 10 million dollars. The real tragedy is that the money like the rest of the internationally supported peace process was settled very little.

In the latest violence in the run-up to Thursday's presidential election in Afghanistan, the NATO-led forces there say a suicide car bomber has killed ten people in an attack on one of their convoys in the capital Kabul. Hugh Sykes is there.

At about one o'clock in the afternoon here, a suicide car bomb exploded on the main road out of Kabul towards Jalalabad. It's also the road to the sprawling international military base at Bagram. The road's routinely used by Humvee armored cars and other vehicles driven by members of ISAF---International Stabilization and Assistance Force--in Afghanistan. Two suicide bomb attacks in three days demonstrate that determined militants can penetrate Kabul's election security and they are likely to make people nervous about going out to vote on Thursday.

The Uzbek former warlord in Afghanistan, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, has defended his return to the country from exile only days before the presidential election. In a BBC interview, General Dostum said his return was a matter for the Afghan authorities and he'd answer the allegations against him years ago.

World News from the BBC.

The World Health Organization expects a vaccine against swine flu to be available by September or October this year. The organization's Director General Dr. Margaret Chan who's visiting Tanzania said the infected virus necessary for making the vaccine had been developed in the laboratory.  She said it had taken five to six months and now the WHO was working with manufacturers to produce the vaccine.

The International Monetary Fund says a globally economic recovery has begun, but that sustaining it will not be a simple task. Here’s our economics correspondent Hugh Pym.

Last month, the IMF said the global economy was beginning to pull out of recession. Today, its director of research Olivier Blanchard has stated in an article the recovery has started. He continues with a series of warnings about how difficult that recovery may be. He says there should be positive growth in most countries for the next few quarters, but he warns that unemployment will not peak till next year. Mr. Blanchard notes that higher taxation is inevitable because of the costs of the crisis. So the IMF remains cautious. But its views seem to be that the glass may now be half full rather than half empty.

Nigerian anti-corruption police are questioning chief executives of several banks which had to be bailed out by the government last week to save them from collapse. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission have arrested three of the chief executives and they are still looking for two others, one is not in the country. Observers say the anti-corruption inquiry is a landmark because the bank heads had been seen as part of untouchable elite in Nigerian finance. The banks had taken on billions of dollars in bad debt.

Michael Jackson's family have announced that the singer will be buried on what would have been his 51st birthday, the 29th of August. He will be buried in the suburb of Los Angeles at Glendale Forest-Lawn memorial park. Michael Jackson died nearly two months ago of cardiac arrest in circumstances which remain unclear.

BBC News.