BBC news 2009-09-11 加文本

BBC 2009-09-11


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BBC News with Ally Macue.

The Election Complaints Commission in Afghanistan has begun invalidating some of the votes cast in last month’s Presidential Election. The commission said it was excluding votes cast at more than 70 polling stations in the south and east of the country where it had found clear and convincing evidence of fraud. Nearly all the votes were for President Hamid Karzai, but the American envoy to the region Richard Holbrooke told BBC Newsnight it was too early to reject the vote in its entirety.

You know not all the people of Afghanistan were able to vote, and as I said many many times before this election, there are imperfect elections throughout the west as well and holding elections under these conditions is a very brave thing to do. So let’s see what happens before we jump to any conclusions.

The American carmaker General Motors says it has agreed to sell a majority stake in its European subsidiary Opel to a Canadian-Russian consortium. The deal has been welcomed by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel whose government has offered financial support for the new owners. From Berlin, Steve Rosenberg reports.

General Motors is selling its European operation to Magna, the Canadian car parts supplier, which is backed by the Russian bank Sparebank. It's this consortium which has pledged to keep open all four Opel plants in Germany. That is good news for the 25,000 workers employed there, and for Mrs. Merkel, with the general election in Germany just over two weeks away.

The White House has announced that more than a million jobs were created in the United States after the introduction of a multibillion-dollar stimulus package earlier this year. But it acknowledged that unemployment was still rising and could hit 10% by the end of 2009. Unemployment figures in August reached 9.7%, the highest rate in 26 years.

President Obama has told the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown of his disappointment at the release of a Libyan man convicted for the bombing of an American airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie 20 years ago. The matter was raised in a telephone conversation between the two leaders. A spokesman for Mr. Brown said he’d explained to President Obama that the release of the bomber Abdelbaset Al Megrahi had been a decision for the Scottish authorities. Adam Brooks reports from Washington.

The President’s spokesman Robert Gibbs, when asked about the conversation, said that President Obama considered it a mistake to release Al Megrahi at the time and he still considered it a mistake. The American government has expressed the sentiment before with varying degrees of anger but it is notable that Mr. Obama decided to make the point directly to Gordon Brown. The US government feels that its position on the matter of Al Megrahi’s release was ignored and it also had to respond to absolute fury on the part of many of the families of the American victims of the Lockerbie bombing.

Adam Brooks reporting from Washington.

World News from the BBC.

A close aide to President Ahmadinajad of Iran says his country will not give up its nuclear program but is willing to work with the international community to eliminate nuclear weapons. In an interview with an American newspaper Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi said Iran’s latest package of proposals offered cooperation in resolving problems in Afghanistan and fighting terrorism.

The United Nation’s Children’s Agency UNICEF has said that child mortality has declined sharply since 1990, thanks to better prevention methods for malaria and action to reduce mother-to-child AIDS virus transmission. Imogen Foulkes has this report.

In 1990, 12.5 million children under the age of five died. In 2008 that figure was down to 8.8 million. It is a reduction but UNICEF says the rate of decline is grossly insufficient and nowhere near fast enough to reach the United Nations Millennium Goal of a 2/3 reduction by 2015. The two leading causes of death are pneumonia and diarrhea, preventable and treatable illnesses and 99% of child deaths occur in the world’s poorest countries.

Rioting supporters of a traditional king in Uganda have shut down the capital Kampala. Angry youths from the Buganda tribe block streets with burning barricades and threw stones at police, who responded with tear gas. At least seven people are reported to have died. The violence started during a demonstration against government attempts to stop the king of Buganda from visiting a region of Uganda where it was feared his presence could lead to unrest.

Japan has launched a new type of unmanned rocket and cargo module to carry supplies to the International Space Station. The rocket blasted off successfully from the Japanese space center on Tanegashima Island in the Pacific Ocean.

BBC News.