BBC news 2010-04-15 加文本

2010-04-15 BBC

BBC News with David Legge.

An earthquake that struck the remote Chinese province of Qinghai is now known to have killed almost 600 people and injured thousands. The tremor wrecked the town of Jiegu. The BBC correspondent in the province says cold and rain are hampering relief operations. A local teacher told the BBC's Chinese service that almost all residential housing in Jiegu had collapsed, and so had its school.

The extents of the destruction of houses is very bad. More than 80% of the residential houses built with mud and brick have collapsed. And many people have been buried or trapped underneath. We are now helping people to carry out rescues on their own, but we lack heavy lifting equipment.

President Obama has urged top Republican and Democrat leaders to speed up majority regulatory reforms, major regulatory reforms of the US financial system, widely seen as his next big political challenge at home. In face to face talks with senior politicians, Mr Obama urged them to approve the reform bill, saying the United States could not afford another financial meltdown. At a news conference in Washington, the US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner explained why he thought the bill was important.

I think it's a critical moment for reform, a promising moment. A lot of hard work, a lot of progress. It's been two and a half years since this crisis started, more than a year since we first laid out a comprehensive set of reforms and I think we know what we need to know about the choices we face. It's just time to decide and time to move.

Republican figures said that in its present form, the legislation would only institutionalize the bailing out of failed banks.

The head of the US Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke has said that addressing the record federal budget deficit should be a top priority for the American government as postponing it could jeopardize a full economic recovery. Mr Bernanke said he was also worried about the impact high unemployment rates could have on the recovery.

The Americans say they are increasingly concerned about reports that Syria may be providing Hezbollah in Lebanon with Scud ballistic missiles. Israel has accused Syria of supplying Scuds to Hezbollah, but it's not clear whether any have actually been handed over. Here is our state department correspondent Kim Ghattas.

The White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs said the US had expressed its concerns to the governments involved. That would be Syria and Lebanon. He talked about sophisticated weaponry that is allegedly being transferred into Lebanon. Hezbollah is backed by Iran. If it obtains medium-range missiles, this could alter the military balance in the region. Mr Gibbs was responding to questions about the accusation made by the Israeli president, but he did not confirm that the transfer had taken place.

This is the latest World News from the BBC.

Scientists in Britain have successfully created human embryos containing DNA from a man and two women. The technique could be used within three years to prevent mothers with genetic disorders from passing them to their unborn children. Women with damaged mitochondria, manute structures that power human cells, are more likely to produce disabled children than their healthy counterparts. Researchers from Newcastle University managed to bypass the problem by implanting genes from the fertilized egg of one woman into a healthy donor egg from another woman.

A Dutch nurse who was jailed for life for murder she did not commit has been exonerated and given a public apology. Lucia de Berk was convicted in 2001 of killing seven people in her care and served six years in prison. The attorney general in the Netherlands said experts had mistakenly testified that she'd killed patients who'd probably died of natural causes.

The party of the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has invited opposition groups to join the government if it wins Sudan's first multi-party elections in almost a quarter of a century. The voting ends on Thursday that many parties opted to boycott. From Sudan, James Copnall reports.

The presidential adviser Ghazi Salahuddin said opposition parties would be offered roles in the government to be formed after the elections. Officials from President Omar al-Bashir's National Congress Party were saying similar things in separate interviews. The exact proposal is not yet clear, and so there was no firm response from the various opposition groups, some of which boycotted the elections. But Dr Salahuddin said the offer would apply even to those who didn't participate. It can even apply to rebel groups in Darfur if they sign peace deals.

The head of the World Bank Robert Zoellick says it's  time to stop using the term Third World to refer to developing countries. Mr Zoellick said the global economic crisis had shown that such categorizations were no longer relevant.

BBC News.