BBC news 2009-12-05 加文本

BBC 2009-12-05

BBC News with Ally Macue.

The draw for next year's Football World Cup in South Africa has taken place in Cape Town. The 32 countries that qualified for the finals now know who they will be playing. With the details, here is our sports news correspondent Alex Capstick.

South Africa will launch the first World Cup on African soil with a match against Mexico in Johannesburg. The host nation have also been pitted against Uruguay and France. Brazil who will start as one of the favorites have been drawn in a tricky looking group comprised of Portugal, North Korea, and Ivory Coast regarded by many as Africa's best chance of winning the tournament. Another difficult group includes Germany, Ghana, Australia and Serbia. The draw was relatively kind to the other top teams. The European champion Spain were handed one of the easiest groups. They will face Switzerland, Honduras and Chile.

The army in Pakistan now says 35 people were killed in an attack on a packed mosque near the headquarters of the Pakistani military in the city of Rawalpindi. 16 children were among the dead along with several senior army officers. Our correspondent Orla Guerin sent this report from Rawalpindi.

In a sacred place, there was a scene of carnage, worshippers were slaughtered like animals, one eyewitness said. According to survivors, the attackers fired at anyone they could see, and hurled hand grenades into the crowd. The army says all four attackers are dead, with this attack the militants have shown once again that they can still penetrate supposedly secure areas and they brought the fight back to the army's own doorstep. The Pakistani Taliban say they carried out the strike.

The American National Security Advisor General James Jones has said that President Obama's plans to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan by July 2011 should not be interpreted as a full withdrawal. In a BBC interview, General Jones said until then sending another 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan would make many changes possible.

With a relentless application of this new force in 2011, we will be successful in reaching our goals which will not only deal with the tribal regions and the border regions but also better buildup of the Afghanistan national security force, more focus on government's better economic revitalization and Afganization program, that will in fact allow us to start pulling some of our forces out, because we will clearly be able to turn some of the responsibilities over to the Afghans.

Dozens of people are now reported missing after two passenger ferries collided on the Nile in northern Egypt. Rescuers are still searching for survivors of the accident near the city of Rachid. The state governor Ahmed Zaki Abdeen said six people had been injured, 13 others escaped unharmed, and he thought around twenty were still missing. It's not clear what caused the accident.

World News from the BBC;

The president of Burkina Faso says he has been told by the doctor of Guinea's military leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara that the captain is in what he described as a difficult but not desperate situation after being shot by one of his aides on Thursday. This would appear to contradict earlier reports that Moussa Dadis Camara was not seriously injured in the attack. Caspar Leighton reports.

Initial reports from Guinea's military government suggested he had only been lightly wounded in Thursday's attack. But when it was announced that the Guinean leader was being flown to Morocco for medical treatment, it became clear that his injuries were more serious. The man alleged to have shot the Guinean leader, Lieutenant Aboubacar Sidiki Diakite, is apparently still at large. So far, Guinea's military government is standing firm in the absence of its head, but this is by far its most serious test.

A retired Guatemalan colonel has been sentenced to 53 years in prison for his role in the disappearance of eight farmers during the country's decades-long civil war. It's the first conviction by Guatemalan court of a former military officer in connection with human rights abuses in the civil war during which more than 200,000 people died. Colonel Marco Antonio Sanchez who is 72, was accused of having ordered the detention, torture and murder of the farmers in the 1981 for the alleged ties with left-wing guerillas.

Reports from Indonesia said at least 20 people have died in a fire in the city of Medan in northern Sumatra. The blaze is believed to have started in a Karaoke club on the third floor of a commercial building. Police say the number of dead could rise.

In Britain, the Ministry of Defense has closed down the unit that investigated reports of unidentified flying objects (or UFOs). It had been operating for more than 50 years and had been shut to save money. Over that time it had looked into thousands of reports about UFOs, but it never found any evidence of a potential threat to Britain.

And that's the latest BBC News.