BBC news 2010-04-01 加文本

2010-04-01 BBC

BBC News with Marian Marshall

The International Criminal Court has authorized its prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to investigate the violence that followed Kenya's last general election. Mr Moreno-Ocampo said the decision meant there would be no impunity for the perpetrators. Kenya's Justice Minister Mutula Kilonzo welcomed the move.

"They certainly very very warmly welcomed this decision partly because it also impacts on the suspects themselves. A lot of them are been having nightmare. Some of them are getting thinner and those are not sleeping. And then there are the victims. They are thrilling ICC comes and they are demanding justice."

The ethnic and tribal clashes which were allegedly inflamed by politicians left about 1,300 people dead.

The main opposition candidate in Sudan's first multi-party presidential election for nearly 25 years, Yassir Arman, says he is withdrawing. Mr Arman was standing for the SPLM, the southern former rebels. President Omar al-Bashir says he will cancel a promised referendum on independence for southern Sudan if the SPLM boycotts the poll. From Khartoum, James Copnall reports.

The Sudan People's Liberation Movement has withdrawn its candidate Yassir Arman from the presidential election, saying it would not be free and fair. Mr Arman made the announcement himself. He also said the party would not contest polls in Darfur.

However, the SPLM will contest the general election in other regions of the country and also the elections in the semi-autonomous south. The northern opposition parties would decide on Thursday if they too will boycott some or all of the polls. Both they and the SPLM believe the electoral process has been rigged in favor of President Omar al-Bashir's National Congress Party.

President Obama has announced plans to open large areas of the America's offshore waters to oil and gas extraction. He's ending a long-standing ban on drilling along the Atlantic coast in parts of the Gulf of Mexico and off northern Alaska. From Washington, here is Paul Adams.

The president said this is not a free for all but part of a broader strategy with energy security at its core. To underline the point, he made his announcement in front of a fighter jet that flies on a mixture of biofuels. Anticipating criticism from environmental campaigners, he said he wanted to move the American economy away from fossil fuels and foreign oil towards home-grown fuels and clean energy. He noted that certain areas notably Alaska's Bristol Bay would still be protected.

The United States and the European Union have pledged 2.7 billion dollars in an aid for Haiti at a donor's conference for reconstruction after the earthquake in January. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told a meeting at the UN headquarters in New York that the aim was a sweeping exercise in nation-building. The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that if Haiti failed to recover from the earthquake, its social and security problems could spread over its borders. The UN is seeking nearly four billion dollars for Haiti.

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A man arrested over a fatal attack on American consular staff in Mexico earlier this month has said drug traffickers were targeting a Texas jail guard. The guard was the husband of an official from the US consulate in the border city of Ciudad Juarez. He was killed along with a member of the consular staff and her husband who were traveling in another car. Mexican officials said the suspect had confessed to being a lookout for the gang.

A rebel Chechen leader says his group was responsible for the suicide bombings on the Moscow metro on Monday which killed almost 40 people. The claim from Doku Umarov came on an Islamist website but there's been no other confirmation. The statement said there'd be more attacks on Russian cities. In a new attack, two suicide bombers in the North Caucasus region of Dagestan have killed at least 12 people including several police.

British and Canadian scientists say they have identified a potential treatment for sleeping sickness which kills about 50,000 people a year in Africa. The scientists at the University of Dundee in Scotland were funded to research diseases neglected by major pharmaceutical companies One of them, Professor Mike Ferguson told the BBC the drug works by disabling a human enzyme essential to the parasite which causes sleeping sickness.

"What this discovery means is that we have identified a way of killing the parasite very very specifically. We developed, if you like, a magic bullet that goes right to one of the main organs of the parasite and kills it very very effectively. The prototype drug that we have at the moment appears to be extremely safe."

The lawyer for a Lebanese man sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia for witchcraft has appealed for international help to save him. Ali Hussein Sabat hosts a satellite television show in which he predicts the future and gives advice to the audience. He was arrested on a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia in 2008. His lawyer says she has been told Mr Sabat is due to be executed this week.

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