BBC news 2010-01-30 加文本

2010-01-30 BBC

BBC News with David Legge.

The former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he does not regret helping the United States to remove the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Mr Blair was giving evidence at an official inquiry into the war. Madeleine Morris reports.

It's been a long day for Britain's former prime minister. But despite the dogged questioning from the inquiry's five panel members, he rarely seemed flustered. Even when confronted with the failures of the post-war planning for Iraq, Tony Blair was adamant his government had done all it could to plan for the eventualities.

"Given the analysis of what they might be and we, we worked them out. The trouble was we didn't plan for two things - One was, as I say, the absence of this properly functioning civil service infrastructure; and of course the second thing which is the single most important element of this whole business of what happened afterwards. People did not think that al-Qaeda and Iran would play the role that they did."

Earlier, he had been at pains to say how much the events of 9/11 changed his view of Iraq. "We could not afford to allow rogue states to develop weapons of mass destruction and possibly join forces with al-Qaeda," he argued. What's more, at the time of going to war, he reiterated he truly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He denied, however, that he committed to toppling Iraq's leader at a meeting at George Bush's Texas ranch in 2002. All he promised at that time, he said, was to deal with Iraq. Despite that, Mr Blair maintained that the invasion was legal and that Iraq and the world were better off without Saddam.

The White House is rethinking plans to trial the men accused of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 here in a part of New York where the World Trade Center once stood. An official said President Obama was considering alternative sites because of the expected huge cost of holding the trial in Lower Manhattan. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators are to be tried in a civilian rather than a military court.

A man, who killed an abortion doctor in the United States, is facing life imprison after being found guilty of first-degree murder. The man Scott Roeder said he’d wanted to protect unborn children. Adam Brooks reports.

Last May, Scott Roeder, a 51-year-old anti-abortion activist, walked into a church in Wichita, Kansas, and shot one of the worshippers George Tiller. Doctor Tiller performed abortions; in particular he offered late-term abortions, which had made him the target of anti-abortion activists for many years. At his trial, Scott Roeder admitted killing Doctor Tiller, but he argued in his defence that he'd acted in order to save the lives of unborn children. His lawyer has tried to persuade the judge that Roeder should face a lesser charge than first-degree murder because killing an abortion provider could be justified. The judge refused to allow it.

World News from the BBC

New figures from the United States show the American economy grew faster than expected in the last three months of last year, an annual rate of 5.7%. It's the second consecutive quarter of growth after America's severe recession. President Obama's senior economic adviser Lawrence Summers welcomed the news but said it was too soon to celebrate.

Police in Dubai say they have identified several European passport holders as suspects in the killing last week of a senior figure in the Palestinian Hamas movement. They said their investigations indicated that members of the criminal gang had followed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh to Dubai, murdered him there and fled abroad. Hamas said he was assassinated by Israeli agents. Mahmoud al-Mabhouh's funeral was held in the Syrian capital Damascus on Friday.

Further talks have been taking place between the two main parties in Northern Ireland aimed at preventing the possible collapse of the power-sharing government there. The parties, Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists, have been deadlocked over policing and justice powers.

A court in Britain has lifted a reporting ban on the private life of the England and Chelsea football captain John Terry. His lawyers got an injunction last week on privacy grounds when they learned that a British newspaper planned to write a story about an alleged extramarital affair. Torin Douglas reports.

John Terry's identity was reviewed after Mr Justice Tugendhat lifted the injunction. It had prevented the media on privacy grounds from reporting allegations that he had a relationship with an unnamed woman or even that the injunction had been granted. The judge said the order was no longer necessary or proportionate because the information had become widely available to so many people. He said he thought the applicant Mr Terry's real concern was the effect on his sponsorship contracts, in which case payment of damages would be an adequate remedy if he succeeded at trial.

BBC News