BBC news 2010-07-18 加文本

2010-07-18 BBC

BBC News with Marian Marshall.

The oil company BP says it'll continue to monitor the cap it's put on the stricken oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. Earlier, BP's senior vice president Kent Wells gave a cautiously optimistic assessment of the operation to cap the ruptured well. Laura Trevelyan reports from Louisiana.

BP says it's encouraged by the pressure tests on the well, and crucially there is no sign of new leaks. The pressure inside the gigantic cap on top of a leaking well is rising, but it's not as high as BP engineers had initially hoped it might be. This may be due to the oil reservoir running dry. BP is drilling a relief well which should intercept the leaking one at the end of July, enabling it to be sealed by mid-August.

The leader of the main opposition conservative party in Australia, Tony Abbott, has criticized the country's new Labor Party Prime Minister Julia Gillard after she called an early general election. Mr Abbott said voters wouldn't be conned by a leader who, he said, was running to the polls before establishing her credentials. Julia Gillard became Australian prime minister last month after ousting her Labor Party predecessor Kevin Rudd.

The authorities in central Nigeria say about eight people, including the family of a priest have been killed in fresh clashes. Residents said men with machetes were involved in the attack on a Christian village near Jos. Richard Hamilton reports.

Eyewitnesses said the attackers set fire to more than half a dozen houses as well as a church in the early hours of Saturday morning. The army says it's deployed troops to the area and brought the situation under control. They have not, however, reintroduced a curfew which was imposed when simmering sectarian tensions exploded in March, leaving several hundred dead. Jos lies on a fault line between the mainly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south. At the heart of the clashes lie deep-rooted resentments between indigenous groups and settlers over land and possessions of power.

Afghan and international troops have destroyed almost two tons of processed heroin in Helmand province. The heroin was found with quantities of raw opium and ammonium nitrate which officials say could have also been used to make roadside bombs.

Police in Bangladesh have arrested an army major accused of transporting hundreds of bottles of illegal cough syrup. It has opium-based codeine in it and is widely abused. Anbarasan Ethirajan reports from Dhaka.

Since drinking liquor is not permitted for Muslims in Bangladesh, the syrup is used as an alternative to alcohol and heroin and cocaine. Researchers say the abuse of the drug seriously affects the liver and central nervous system, and in the long run kills the user. The problem of Phensedyl was so widespread that government banned the use of the syrup way back in 1982. But thousands of bottles of the syrup are still being smuggled into Bangladesh mostly from neighbouring India.

World News from the BBC.

Germany's Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner has warned the social networking site Facebook that it could be breaking data protection laws. Ms Aigner has told a German magazine she is concerned that Facebook users can upload contacts from their mobile phones, including the private phone numbers of people who have never agreed to join the networking site. She said the company shouldn't store this data which could be marketed for commercial gain.

The French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux has told residents of the city of Grenoble that police have restored order after rioting there. Youths went on the rampage after a memorial service for a robbery suspect killed in a shoot-out with police.

Thousands of people have taken part in a European-wide gay rights parade in the Polish capital Warsaw. It's the first time the annual EuroPride march has been held in Central or Eastern Europe. There were several small counter-demonstrations.

Divers have recovered what's believed to be the world's oldest drinkable champagne. About 30 bottles were found in a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea. Our reporter Danny Aeberhard has the details.

Diving instructor Christian Ekstrom must be feeling bubbly. Down in the cold, murky depths of the Baltic of the Aland Islands between Finland and Sweden, he and fellow divers stumbled across what could be a consignment of champagne sent by King Louis XVI of France to the Russian empress, Catherine the Great, in about 1780. Celebrations are on ice until the results of definitive tests come back. But if authenticated and still properly sealed, experts believe each bottle could be worth over 60,000 dollars. One wine buff said it tasted exquisite.

Customs officers in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur have foiled an attempt to smuggle more than 370 critically-endangered tortoises from Madagascar. They have arrested two Malagasy women who'd filled two bags with tortoises. They also contained frogs and chameleons in their bags.

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