BBC news 2009-12-18 加文本

2009-12-18 BBC

BBC News with Michael Poles.

With the deadline for agreement of the climate summit in Copenhagen approaching, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has warned the failure will be a catastrophe for everyone involved. Documents leaked to BBC News show the UN calculates that unless countries pledge deep emissions cuts, the global temperature rise is likely to average three degrees Celsius, a level that’s estimated to bring dangerous changes on earth. Roger Harrabin reports.
The stated aim of the big countries here is to stabilize emissions at a level associated with a temperature rise of two degrees. That’s too reckless for developing countries’ wishes, but the big polluters say it’s the best they can do. But the document prepared for the UN late on Tuesday night shows that the big polluters are missing their own agreed two-degree target by between about two and four billion tons of CO2. The documents suggest that unless that changes, we’ll be likely to face a three-degree rise. Greenpeace said it showed world leaders were focused on getting any deal in Copenhagen, even if it’s a weak deal.

Naval vessels from Lebanon of United Nations peacekeeping force in the country are carrying out a major search operation after a cargo ship with 80 people on board sank in heavy seas off the Lebanese coast. Natalia Antelava in Beirut has more.
The United Nations told the BBC that so far, together with the Lebanese army they’ve managed to save 19 sailors, but with more than 15 men still missing. Their joint rescue operation is carrying on into the night. The UN, which has a peacekeeping operation in Lebanon, dispatched three ships, and the Lebanese army also has several rescue boats at the sea. The overturned ship sailed under the Panamanian flag, but many of the crew members are believed to be from Pakistan and from the Philippines.

The Pentagon has admitted that insurgents in Iraq have managed to hack into live video feeds from unmanned American drones. Adam Brooks reports.
Unmanned drones now fly almost incessantly above Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan. Piloted remotely, they hunt and target insurgents and are an important part of the US military effort. It’s now emerged that insurgents in Iraq managed to intercept signals from the drones and even downloaded video footage filmed by the drones’ cameras, using commercially available software. Defense officials in Washington say at no stage did insurgents manage to take control of the drone, that Pentagon said it’s working to improve the security of its surveillance systems.

Officials in Yemen say security forces backed by the air force have killed at least 34 al-Qaeda militants and arrested 17 in raids on training bases in hideouts in the north and south of the country. They said militants were planning suicide attacks against foreign and local targets, including schools. Eyewitnesses said civilians were killed and wounded in the air strikes.

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A report into the killing of more than 150 protesters by the security forces in Guinea in September says it was a pre-meditated massacre designed to silence opposition. The report by Human Rights Watch says Guinea’s presidential guard fired into the crowd until they ran out of bullets then continued to kill with bayonets. Mark Doyle reports.
Today’s report says the scale of the killings and the apparent lack of any provocation on the part of the demonstrators suggests that these crimes were pre-meditated and organized. The report gave details of how the military tried to cover up the killings by removing bodies from hospitals for secret mass burials. The report names several military officers, including the current head of state Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, who it says should be investigated further and face full and fair trials.

British Airways has won a court in junction to prevent cabin crews from staging a 12-day-strike over Christmas. The High Court judge accepted the company’s argument that there were irregularities in the strike ballot. The cabin crew’s trade union called the ruling a disgraced democracy and said it would appeal. The stoppage would have affected up to a million passengers.

A man who’s spent the last 35 years in jail has become the longest serving prisoner in the United States to be exonerated using DNA evidence. James Bain was 19 when he was convicted of kidnapping and raping a 9-year-old boy. On his release from prison in Florida, he said he wasn’t angry and hoped to go back to school.

Archeologists working in Mozambique have found evidence that humans may have been eating porridge and making bread as early as 100,000 years ago. Stone-grinding tools and traces of sorghum starch are found in a deep limestone cave, suggesting prehistoric humans were processing wild cereal grains at the start of the last Ice Age. The findings, by a team of Calgary University in Canada, were published in the journal Science.

And that’s the latest BBC News.