BBC news 2009-09-22 加文本

BBC 2009-09-22


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BBC News with Neil Nunes.

The ousted president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, has returned to his country nearly three months after he was expelled in a coup. He told the BBC that he had crossed mountains to get to the capital. Charles Scanlon has this report from Miami.

Mr. Zelaya’s return took the interim government that replaced him completely by surprise. It strongly denied that he was in the country until confirmation came that he was inside the Brazilian embassy. Mr. Zelaya said he wanted dialogue rather than confrontation with the government that replaced him and with the army. He said that he'd crossed the border and walked over rough country with a small group of companions to get to the capital. Mr. Zelaya has the backing of the United States and Latin American leaders, but the interim government has repeatedly threatened to arrest him should he return.

A White House spokesman has said President Obama has not yet received a request for more troops in Afghanistan and doesn’t expect to for a while because the situation there is still being assessed. On Monday, the Washington Post published a confidential report by the American commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, warning that without an increase in troops, the military effort would fail. Here’s our defense and security correspondent Nick Childs.

Afghanistan has rapidly become Barack Obama’s war. He’s put a lot of focus on it and he’s got a lot riding on it. Objectively, it seems fair for officials in Washington, from the President down, to say that the strategy needs to be right first before they can talk troop numbers. And yet the Obama administration has put a lot of store in General McChrystal as a new commander as well. He too says it’s at least as much to do with strategy as numbers. But he’s also made clear in stark terms that he feels he needs more troops and quickly.

The body investigating fraud in Afghanistan’s presidential election says it will allow just a sample of votes to be recounted from polling stations with reported irregularities. The head of the Election Complaints Commission said that would speed up the process and still give an accurate representation of the vote.

The French Formula One team Renault has escaped an immediate ban from the sport despite admitting trying to fix the outcome of a race. The governing body of world motor racing, the FIA, has handed Renault a 2-year suspended ban for ordering its driver Nelson Piquet Jr. to crash deliberately to help his teammate Fernando Alonso win last year's Singapore Grand Prix. James Munro has this report.

The World Motor Sport Council described Renault’s decision to allow Piquet to crash deliberately at last year’s Singapore Grand Prix as a breach of unparalleled severity, one that endangered the lives of spectators, officials and other drivers. But because Renault had apologized and argued that two senior officials no longer with the team were responsible, Briatore and his former director of engineering Pat Symonds, the council decided to suspend the punishment.

World News from the BBC.

More than a hundred people are reported to have been killed in southern Sudan, when tribal militiamen attacked a village in Jonglei Province. A spokesman for the southern Sudanese army said the attackers overran a security forces base in the village on Sunday and about half of those killed were civilians. The base was later retaken by southern Sudanese soldiers.

On the eve of talks between President Obama and the Israeli and the Palestinian leaders, all sides are playing down the chances of a Middle East peace breakthrough. The meeting will take place on the sidelines of United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. Our state department correspondent, Kim Ghattas, reports from Washington.

The White House is making sure not to raise any hopes about the meeting in New York. Robert Gibbs, the spokesman, said no one had grand expectations out of just one meeting. The point was to build on progress made so far, he added. But there appears to be little of that as well. The administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, Senator George Mitchell, just returned empty-handed from the region, having tried for weeks to get Israel to agree to a freeze on settlement construction and Arab countries to take steps towards normal relations with Israel.

The suspected former military head of the Basque separatist group ETA has been handed over to Spain by the French authorities. Spanish police wanted to question the man, known as Txeroki, about a number of ETA attacks in Spain in 2002.

Voting at the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO on its next director general will go to a fifth and final round. After four rounds, two candidates, the Egyptian Cultural Minister Farouk Hosny and the Bulgarian ambassador to France, Irina Bokova, remains tied with an equal number of votes. Mr. Hosny’s suitability has been called into question because of remarks in which he promised to burn any Israeli books he found in Egyptian libraries. He later expressed regret for the comments.

BBC News.