BBC news 2009-10-26 加文本

BBC 2009-10-26


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BBC News with Gaenor Howells.

Police in Baghdad say two car bombs have killed more than 130 people and wounded more than 500. It’s the deadliest attack in Iraq since 2007. From Baghdad, Gabriel Gatehouse reports.

Less than a minute after one huge car bomb hit the Justice Ministry, another exploded near the local governor’s office. The bombers struck one of the busiest times of day and in one of the busiest parts of Baghdad, in the heart of the city’s administrative district and right next to the Green Zone. The destruction was immense. Hours after the explosions, rescue workers were still sifting through the rubble and the wreckage, looking for bodies and survivors. Hospitals struggle to deal with the wounded as ambulances brought in more and more casualties as the day went on, so the death toll mounted.

International inspectors have begun their task of examining a uranium enrichment facility in Iran that's raised new suspicions in the West about Tehran’s nuclear program. The Iranians had kept it hidden from view until
recently. Here is our Tehran correspondent Jon Leyne.

The UN inspectors carried out the first what would be 3 days of inspections on the site just north of the holy city of Qom. What they would have seen is a cavern inside the mountain inside the military base. Iran says the plant was meant to be the second enrichment plant, to back up the publicly-declared
facility in Natanz. One Iranian legislator said the inspectors’ visit showed that Iran’s nuclear activities were transparent and peaceful. If Iran did have anything to hide, it’s had more than a month to hide it after the plant was first made public. In any case, western intelligence experts believed the plant was only being constructed and had not yet been used to enrich uranium.

An international meeting on climate change has heard that the prospects of saving the world’s coral reefs now appear so bleak that plans have been drawn up to freeze samples to preserve them for the future. The meeting in Denmark took evidence from researchers who say most coral reefs won’t survive even if tough new regulations on the green house gas emissions are put into place. Matt McGrath reports from Copenhagen.

Legislators from 16 major economies have been meeting here in the Danish capital to try to agree the way forward on climate change. One of the issues they have been considering is what to do with coral reefs which make up less than a quarter of one percent of the ocean’s floor. Yet for around 500 million people worldwide, they are a key source of food, income and coastal protection. At this meeting, politicians and scientists have been acknowledging that global emissions of carbon dioxide are rising so fast that we are losing the fight to save coral and the world must develop an alternative plan.

Egyptian authorities investigating a rail crash that left 18 people dead say it was caused by water buffalo on the track. The Egyptian Health Ministry said that the driver of the train heading to Fayoum made a sudden stop when he spotted the animal, the second train then plowed into the back of the first at full speed. The investigation continues.

World News from the BBC.

The United Nations has called on the West African regional group ECOWAS to impose tougher sanctions on Guinea and Niger. UN officials said ECOWAS should also free the assets of the 2 countries’ leaders and impose travel restrictions on them. Niger’s Information Minister said the UN officials were ill-intentioned. Guinea was suspended from ECOWAS in January after a military coup while Niger was suspended last week after President Mamadou Tandja refused to postpone elections.

The Venezuelan President Hugo Chaves has called the Colombian defense minister mentally retarded, the remarks are likely to further strain the already tense relations between the neighboring countries. From Caracas, Will Grand reports.

President Chavez rarely pulls his punches when it comes to criticizing his opponents and on an occasion, the political discourse descends into plain insult. This was the case when the Venezuelan leader responded to a recent statement by the Colombian Defense Minister Gabriel Silva in which he attacked Venezuela for allegedly turning a blind eye to drug trafficking flights taking off from its territory.

He’s mentally retarded, said President Chaves, he must be. President Chaves went on to say that the Colombian government did whatever the United States demanded of them. The background to this conflict lies in a decision by Colombia to grant the US access to seven military bases on its soil.

The Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his challenger Doctor Abdullah Abdullah have both ruled out a power-sharing deal before the runoff vote in the fourth coming presidential election. Less than a week after bowing to pressure to accept a second round, President Karzai said that not holding one round would insult democracy. However, the BBC Kabul correspondent says that many Afghans and some people in western governments still hope the two will do some kind of deal with the winter coming and the Taliban threatening to disrupt the second round.

BBC News.