BBC news 2010-01-06 加文本

2010-01-06 BBC

BBC News with Neil Nunes.

The White House says the Nigerian man accused of attempting to blow up an American airliner last month has given useful intelligence to investigators. A spokesman said FBI interrogators spent a number of hours with the man after he was removed from a plane at Detroit Airport on Christmas Day. The official was speaking as President Obama met advisors to discuss security failings that allowed the man to get onto the plane. Here is our correspondent Nick Childs.

US security officials have insisted that some of the supposed intelligence on the latest bombing suspect was far from clear-cut. But the failed attack has prompted new shockwaves of concern in the United States and beyond. President Obama quickly demanded a series of urgent security reviews. He will be hearing now from his officials the results so far on those. The US authorities have already instituted new airport security procedures. There are also issues of intelligence - how can the various watch list and suspect list be made more effective.

A Slovakian man who had been arrested after inadvertently bringing explosives through Dublin Airport has been released by Irish police. It's understood the explosives were planted in his luggage by Slovakian authorities testing security procedures at Bratislava Airport. Here is Mark Worthington.

The 49-year-old Slovakian electrician knew nothing about the explosives in his luggage until the Irish police sealed off his Dublin flat this morning. They found almost 100 grams of the explosive RDX planted in his bag at the weekend, during a test of security procedures at Bratislava Airport. Staff there were supposed to detect it, but they failed. And the man unwittingly transported the explosive to his home in Ireland. The Irish government says it's concerned that it took three days for the police in Bratislava to tell them what had happened.

A leading credit rating agency has downgraded Iceland's long-term debt rating to junk status, after it decided to hold a referendum on repaying more than 5 billion dollars to Britain and the Netherlands. The referendum was triggered when more than a quarter of Iceland's people signed a petition objecting to the terms of the repayment. Andrew Walker reports.

Iceland's government debt is junk according to the new assessment from Fitch Ratings, one of the world's three leading agencies. That term means the agency thinks there is increased risk of the Icelandic government failing to repay its debts. Fitch said the decision by the country's president not to sign a law on repaying Britain and the Netherlands has created a new wave of uncertainty and is a setback for efforts to restore normal financial relations with the rest of the world.

Some 40,000 former officials from the communist-era in Poland have had their pensions halved. The measure was designed to counter popular anger at the size of the pensions given to people such as the former leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski.

World News from the BBC.

The Internet search company Google has unveiled its first mobile phone. It's called the Nexus One and is intended to be a direct rival for Apple's iPhone. Mark Gregory reports.

Increasingly, consumers access the Internet via their mobile phones. Google, the king of web search, wants a slice of this lucrative market. Partly, so it can influence how the technology develops. And it is betting its brand is strong enough to take on the might of the Apple iPhone, which currently dominates sales. But critics claim there is little really new about Google’s product. It has pretty much the same functions as rivals' smart phones. And in any case, they say, Google’s mobile phone operating software Android is already available on several other phones.

Colombia has extradited to the United States the leader of a pyramid scheme which defrauded at least 200,000 people out of nearly 2 billion dollars. David Murcia Guzman, who was sentenced in Colombia to 30 years in prison, will be tried in New York on money laundering and conspiracy charges. The collapse of the pyramid scheme in 2008 led to violent protest and rioting by thousands of angry investors who had been offered interest rates of over 100%. If convicted in the US, he faces a 20-year sentence.

The former boss of Renault's Formula One racing team, Flavio Briatore, has had his lifetime ban from the sport overturned by a court in France. The court said Mr Briatore had not been given the opportunity to defend himself properly and ruled the ban illegal. The penalty was imposed by motor sports ruling body, the FIA, which decided that Briatore had ordered the Brazilian driver Nelson Piquet Jr to crash deliberately in the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix to help his fellow Renault driver Fernando Alonso win the race. Briatore denied being involved.

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