BBC news 2009-11-24 加文本

BBC 2009-11-24


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BBC News with Michael Pose.

The cases of four parliamentarians in Britain are being referred to prosecutors in connection with the scandal over excessive expenses claims by politicians. The four have not been named, but the police say they include members of both the House of Commons, and the House of Lords. Rod Watson reports.

The expenses scandal has now taken another turn. The police say they’ve delivered files of evidence on four parliamentarians to prosecutors. It will now be for the prosecution service to decide whether they will press charges. But the very fact, the files have been handed over suggests the police feel potentially at least, there’s a case to answer. So the prospect of an MP or a member of the House of Lords having to appear in court is now a step closer.

Anti-fraud police in Nigeria have set a 2-week deadline for some of the country’s wealthiest people to repay money they’d borrowed from the banks. The police say they’ve acted because many debtors fail to keep their earlier promises to pay back the money. Caroline Duffield reports from Lagos.

This new deadline is the latest attempt by Nigeria’s anti-fraud police to claw back billions of dollars owed to banks here. This summer, Nigeria’s central bank performed an emergency rescue of nine financial institutions that were close to collapse. It had nothing to do with the global financial crisis, and everything to do with corruption in Nigeria. One reason for the bank’s cash crisis was that wealthy customers, who had taken out huge loans, were failing to pay them back.

Microsoft has reportedly offered to pay one of the world’s biggest news empires for exclusive Internet access to its news content. In a move that could signal the end of free news on the Internet. The reports indicate that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation will be paid to remove its material from the Google search engine, and put it instead on Microsoft’s own news service Bing. Ronice Smith reports.

One of the great freedoms afforded by the Internet is free news. However, many news organizations and papers like News Corporation’s Wall street Journal make their money from selling news. These publishers have been struggling to find ways to sell their output online. News papers everywhere are suffering from falling sells. And search engines like Google are often criticized for putting these publishers’ material online, where they can be read for free. Proposals by Microsoft to pay news providers to leave Google will be welcome by publishers especially if this started a trend among other search engines.

Scientists at the CERN, a nuclear research center in Europe, say they have produced the first particle collisions just three days after the Large Hadron Collider was restarted after year-long repairs. Cheers broke out in the control room when beams of sub-atomic particles going in opposite directions collided. The scientists hope to recreate the conditions that existed at the start of the universe.

BBC News.

There’s been an uproar in the Indian parliament over the leaking of a report which implicates senior figures of the Hindu nationalist party BJP in the demolition of a mosque in Ayodhya 17 years ago. The incident triggered riots between Hindus and Muslims across India and led to more than two thousand deaths. An official report on the Ayodhya destruction was given to the government in June. According to leaks in the Indian media, the report names the BJP’s leader LK Adfany and the former Prime Minister Ader Baharig Pyie.

The family of an innocent Brazilian man Shon Shalice Jomanis who was shot dead by police in London two weeks after suicide attacks in 2005, have reached a deal on compensation with the Metropolitan Police. The sum of money involved has not been disclosed. Here’s Rod Broomby.

The armed police unit shot Shon Shalice Jomanasis in the south London station having mistakenly identified him as Hussain Osman. He had fled after attempting to blow up a similar train the day before. The picture of the police operation that’s emerged in the court cases and inquiry scenes is one of the police force scrambling to cope with the new and unforeseen development: what to do about a failed suicide bomber on the run? There were questions about the surveillance operation than there were communication failures, all / in the killing of an innocent unarmed man.

 A Belgian man who was wrongly thought to be in a coma for 23 years has described his joy after doctors realized he was in fact conscious. Medical staff had believed Room Hooben was in a vegetative state after a car crash, but he was simply paralyzed and unable to communicate. His true condition was finally discovered by neurologists using new brain scanning equipment. Communicating through a specially adapted computer, Mr. Hooban said it felt like a second birth. The neurologists believe he may be one of the many wrongly diagnosed coma cases around the world.

 BBC News.