BBC news 2009-12-09 加文本

BBC 2009-12-09

BBC News with David Austin.

President Barack Obama has announced plans to boost job creation in the United States. Speaking in Washington, he said he wanted to use surplus money left over from bailing out the banking system. Our economics correspondent Andrew Walker has more.

The US treasury has revised its estimate of the ultimate likely cost of the banking rescues because the further financial disasters they feared might happen have not. The reduction is 200 billion dollars and several large banks have repaid the investments made by the government. President Obama wants to use some of the surplus funds to reduce the amount his government has to borrow, but he also wants to boost job creation with help for homeowners with the cost of energy efficiency improvements, new tax breaks for small businesses and with more spending on infrastructure, such as roads and railways.

The top American commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal has told Congress that President Obama’s decision to deploy 30,000 more troops will help reverse the current momentum enjoyed by the Taliban. Our defense and security correspondent Nick Childs says the extra number of troops is pretty much what the general had been pushing for.

The extra forces he called for were always what he said were needed to try to regain the initiative from the insurgency. He says he believes he can do that in the next year to 18 months, indeed that that period is critical. In that sense, this timeline has both a military as well as a political rationale, albeit that everyone is insisting it’s not a deadline. This is a surge to try to break the back of the insurgency. The extra forces will give General McChrystal and his commanders extra flexibility to take and hold territory particularly around key population centers in the most dangerous south and east of the country.

At least 127 people are now known to who have been killed in car bombings across the Iraqi capital Baghdad. All appeared to target government buildings or universities. The bombings came just a day after the Iraqi parliament finally approved a new electoral law. The election has now been set for early March next year.

Environmental campaigners have reacted angrily to a leaked Danish text of the Climate Summit in Copenhagen saying that it’s too lenient on rich countries. The campaign group, Friends of the Earth, says proposals to pay poor countries to cut emissions on not what’s needed and that rich counties must make significant cuts in their own emissions. Andy Atkins is the group’s executive director.

“There is a high amount of offsetting that they are proposing, in other words, rich countries paying poor countries to cut their emissions rather than doing it themselves at home and science suggests we’ve got to do it at home. Rich countries have got to cut domestically by at least 40%. Secondly, they haven’t actually put in there the kinds of targets that I’ve just been mentioning. They say they want to keep temperature below 2 degrees C. But actually they haven’t said what rich countries need to do achieve that. Again that's highly dangerous.”  Andy Atkins from Friends of the Earth. 

World News from the BBC.

Gunmen in Honduras have shot and killed the head of the country’s anti-drug trafficking operations. Police say that General Julian Aristides Gonzalez was travelling in a car in the capital Tegucigalpa when attackers on motorcycles opened fire. Honduras has long been a major hub for drug smugglers and has one of highest murder rates in Latin America. It was recently plunged into a political crisis when President Manual Zelaya was ousted.

The Obama administration says it plans to pay more than 3 billion dollars to settle a long running legal dispute with Native Americans over land. President Obama described the settlement as a step towards reconciliation with the grieved Indian tribes. The lawsuit alleged that the government mismanaged Indian land that was divided up into small parcels in the 19 century to encourage assimilation. 

The head of Egypt’s Antiquities Department has said he’ll drop his demand to Britain for the permanent return of the Rosette stone if the British museum agrees to lend it temporarily. Sebastian Usher reports.

The Rosette stone is one of the most famous exhibits in the British museum where it’s been kept since 1802. It’s a black slab of stone that’s more than 2,000 years old. On it are inscriptions in ancient Greek and Egyptian. They provided the key to finally unlocking the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Egypt has long demanded its permanent return. But in what seems a significant concession, Zahi Hawass, the head of Egyptian Antiquities has now said he’d accept a temporary loan for the opening of the major new museum in Giza. The British museum says it’s considering the request.

Egypt is stepping up efforts to clear part of its north coast of millions of landmines left over from the Second World War. The 17 million munitions represented about 20% of war remaining landmines around the world. They were left by both British and German armies around the site of Al-Alamein, one of the decisive battles of the Second World War. 

And that’s the latest BBC News.