BBC news 2009-10-27 加文本

BBC 2009-10-27


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BBC News with Roy Lamar.

The Afghan President Hamid Karzai has rejected calls to dismiss the head of the country’s Election Commission ahead of next month’s runoff vote. The demand came from Abdullah Abdullah, Mr. Karzai’s rival in the disputed presidential election last August. Mr. Abdullah said that Azizullah Ludin, who was a former presidential advisor had left the institution with no credibility.

In the United States, President Obama said he wouldn’t hurry into a decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan. He was speaking at a naval base in Florida.

"I will never rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm's way, I won’t risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary. And if it is necessary, we will back you up to the hilt."

The President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe has had talks with the Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai about disagreements over their power-sharing arrangement. But the spokesman for Mr. Tsvangirai said that they'd failed to break the deadlock. Karen Allen reports from neighboring South Africa.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s party, the MDC, said the prime minister and President Robert Mugabe were worlds apart and little had been achieved in Monday’s talks. Relations between the partners in the unity government have soured considerably in the past few days. A raid on an MDC office at the weekend is being viewed as a further attempted intimidation by Zanu PF, and the arrest of the chief executives of Zimbabwe’s Association of Non-Governmental Organizations suggests yet further signs of disintegration in the fragile coalition government.

Ministers from the regional bloc SADC will meet later this week in Harare to try to mediate.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States has rescued more than 50 child prostitutes and arrested 60 pimps in an operation that lasted three days. More than 1,000 FBI agents and police officers carried out raids in dozens of cities across the US. Greg Morsbach reports.

The nationwide sting has resulted in some 700 arrests. Those being detained include adults who befriended children in Internet chat rooms and dozens of pimps, men who forced children into prostitution to make money. The FBI says one of the children rescued from a life in prostitution is just 10 years old. Many of them were recovered in police raids at truck stops, casinos and street corners.

A woman who was 13 when she had sex with the American film director Roman Polanski has asked a court in the US to drop all charges against him. Samantha Geimer’s lawyer says that she just wants to be left alone after all the media attention. In 1978, Mr. Polanski was convicted of unlawful sex but left the US before he could be sentenced.

World News from the BBC.

One of the biggest providers of financial services in Europe, the Dutch group ING, says it will split itself into two in order to simplify its operations. With the details, Robert Nisbet.

ING is the Netherlands’ biggest bank and a former star in the European banking heaven. Like many others, it was brought low by investing in the toxic home-loans, mainly in America that precipitated the global economic crunch. Its decision to split itself into its original components, a bank and an insurance company, comes against the background of growing international political and commercial enthusiasm to see large banks broken up, so that they can no longer be considered too big to fail.

Health ministers from around the world have reached broad agreement that swift action needs to be taken to stop hundreds of thousands of women dying every year during pregnancy and childbirth. The meeting organized by the UN in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa recognized that the number of women dying in this way was actually increasing in some countries.

The nephew of the interim president of Honduras Roberto Micheletti has been found dead. The body of the 24 -year-old, Enzo Micheletti, was discovered in a forest in northern Honduras after he was reported missing last Friday. Police say the body was riddled with bullets. Honduras is at the center of a power struggle between Roberto Micheletti’s interim government and the ousted elected leader Manuel Zelayer.

A sister of the longtime Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, has admitted spying for the CIA in the 1960s. Juanita Castro, who now lives in Miami, says for three years she gathered sensitive information for the American intelligence agency. In her memoirs which have been released today, Juanita Castro says that she fell out with her brothers Fidel and Raul, the current president of Cuba, over the killing of several opponents in the early years of the Cuban Revolution.

BBC World News.