BBC news 2010-08-16 加文本

BBC news 2010-08-16

(BBC News with David Austin.)

(The UN Secretary General) Ban Ki-moon has urged the world to step up its support for flood-ravaged Pakistan. Mr Ban said he would never forget the suffering and destruction he’d seen and announced the UN would give an extra $10 million from its emergency fund. He was speaking after seeing for himself some of the worst-hit areas. Our correspondent Lyse Doucet traveled with Mr Ban and the Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

Ban Ki-moon and President Zardari flew by helicopter over four districts of Punjab, the province known as this country’s bread basket. Now from the air it looks like a land of sprawling lakes. Valuable crops like sugar cane and wheat are under water. Mud houses are submerged, millions have fled. The UN says not even half the survivors are now being reached with aid. Ban Ki-moon called on the world’s donors to do much more. UNPRecedented floods, he said, demand uNPRecedented assistance.

The new commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, has said he reserves the right to advise against President Obama’s commitment to start withdrawing troops next year. Speaking on the American NBC programme “Meet the Press”, General Petraeus said progress had only begun a few months ago and only in “small pockets”. He said he would make recommendations to the president based on the security needs at the time.

“The president has been very clear, Vice President Biden has been very clear as well more recently that this is a date when a process begins that is conditions based. And as the conditions permit, we transition tasks to our Afghan counterparts and to security forces, and in various governmental institutions, and that enables a quote ‘responsible drawdown’.”

Israeli troops have begun demolishing a high concrete wall that was erected eight years ago to protect a Jewish settlement on the outskirts of East Jerusalem at Gilo. An Israeli military spokesman said the two-metre-high wall was no longer needed. Warren Bull reports.

After the second Palestinian uprising started in 2000, the Jewish neighbourhood at Gilo came under fire from Palestinians in the nearby village of Beit Jala. The attacks prompted the Israeli authorities to build a concrete barrier along several streets of Gilo. The settlement had been annexed by Israel in the 1967 War, and Israel regards it as a neighbourhood of Jerusalem. The wall itself can’t be seen as a precursor to the much larger security barrier that Israel has been building in the West Bank to stop suicide attacks. Now Israel’s military says the wall at Gilo can be dismantled, because it says the security situation has improved there.

The Roman Catholic shrine of Lourdes in southern France has reopened after a temporary evacuation following a hoax bomb alert. French police said they'd received a call warning that four bombs would go off at the shrine, but a search of the site did not reveal any devices.

This is the World News from the BBC.

The authorities in Bahrain say they’ve arrested three more Shiite activists on security related charges following the earlier detention of a leader of the mainly Shiite Haq Movement for Civil Liberties and Democracy, Abdul Jalil al-Singace. He was arrested on his return from London where he’d been giving a lecture on human rights in Bahrain.

The charity Save the Children says severe flooding is causing further devastation in Niger, where nearly 300,000 children are at risk from a massive food crisis. The country is struggling to cope with the worst flooding of the River Niger in 80 years. Richard Hamilton reports.

It’s thought the food crisis in Niger caused by last season’s drought was already the worst in the world this century in terms of the number of people affected. And now the country’s been devastated by flooding. Half the population is reliant on food aids. Zinder in the south is one of the regions suffering most from the current food crisis. Around 28,000 people have been affected by the floods, and more than 37,000 animals have drowned.

The Anglo-Dutch oil multinational Shell has said acts of sabotage are increasing in Nigeria. In a statement, the company said it had suffered at least three separate incidents of sabotage on its pipelines in the Niger Delta this month. Shell added that it had placed containment booms into the surrounding waterways to stop the flow of oil. Thieves known as bunkerers often try to cut into the pipes to extract oil and sell it on. Militants in the Delta have also carried out repeated attacks against oil installations.

Two South African political parties have agreed to merge to challenge President Jacob Zuma’s African National Congress. The leader of the official opposition, Helen Zille, welcomed the leader of the Independent Democrats, Patricia de Lille, into her party, the Democratic Alliance. All members of the Independent Democrats have been asked to join the Democratic Alliance over the next four years.

That’s the latest BBC News.