BBC news 2010-09-01 加文本

BBC news 2010-09-01

BBC News with Gaenor Howells.

President Obama has marked the formal end of American combat missions in Iraq by visiting a military base in Texas to pay tribute to US troops. Mr Obama is due to make a televised address to the American people in a few hours, and he told the troops what they could expect to hear.

"It's not gonna be a victory lap, it's not gonna be self-congratulatory. There’s still a lot of work that we’ve got to do to make sure that Iraq is an effective partner with us. But the fact of the matter is that because of the extraordinary service that all of you have done, Iraq has an opportunity to create a better future for itself, and America is more secure."

Just under 50,000 American troops will remain in Iraq in what's been called an “advisory and assistance” role until the end of next year.

The Israeli security forces say four Israelis have been killed in a gun attack in the West Bank. The Israeli Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, said the shooting was a deliberate attempt to sabotage the relaunch of Middle East peace talks in Washington on Thursday. From Jerusalem, here is William Davis.

According to Israeli police, the car was travelling near to the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba in the occupied West Bank when it came under fire from an unidentified gunman. Ambulance workers said that all four people in the car, two men and two women, were killed. Other reports said one of the women had been pregnant. A statement from the armed wing of the Islamist group Hamas later claimed responsibility for the shooting. A Hamas spokesman from Gaza said it was an inevitable consequence of the Israeli occupation, and called on the group supporters to celebrate in the streets. 

Officials in the United States say they do not now believe that two Yemeni men arrested at a Dutch airport on suspicion of terrorism were planning an attack. They say investigators don't think the men even knew each other. Here is our security correspondent Gordon Corera.

The two men were arrested when they arrived at Schiphol Airport from Chicago after Dutch authorities received information from their US counterparts. Both men were heading to Yemen, although they do not appear to have been travelling together. One of the men had missed an earlier connecting flight to Washington D.C.. When his luggage had been searched in the US, it was found to contain mobile phones taped together, as well as watches taped together and also a knife, items which were considered suspicious. Security at Schiphol has been tightened after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate a bomb which he received in Yemen on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit last Christmas Day.

The owners of the Chilean mine which collapsed almost a month ago, trapping 33 workers, have apologised for the accident. Speaking before a Chilean congressional committee, one of the owners said they were asking for forgiveness for the pain caused.

You are listening to the World News from the BBC.

Rwanda says it's preparing to pull out its peacekeeping troops from Sudan if the United Nations publishes a report accusing Rwandan forces of involvement in genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A version of the UN report leaked last week alleges that Rwandan Tutsi troops and their allies killed tens of thousands of Hutus in the DRC. Rwanda’s foreign minister, Louise Mushikiwabo, said Rwanda would retaliate if the UN published the report.

"This is not a decision we've taken without reflection, we've thought about this very carefully. We don't take it lightly as some people have said that we are trying to blackmail the United Nations, and we don't. We are considering pulling our troops out of peacekeeping operations starting with Darfur, and we have instructed our force commander to start making contingency plans."

The former Cuban President Fidel Castro has said that he was ultimately responsible for the persecution of homosexuals in the years following the revolution of 1959. In a lengthy interview published in a Mexican newspaper, Mr Castro said the persecution had been a great injustice. But he said that in the early years of the revolution, he had too many other problems to deal with, like surviving plots against his life. Cuban homosexuals were sometimes sent to so-called “re-education camps” in the 1960s. Homosexuality was decriminalised in Cuba in 1979.

France has described as “unacceptable” what it says are insults in the Iranian media aimed at the French first lady, Carla Bruni Sarkozy. One newspaper had denounced her as “prostitute” after she’d publicly criticised Iran for threatening to stone a woman to death. Earlier, the Iranian foreign ministry urged the country's media not to insult foreign dignitaries, but the hard-line Iranian newspaper, Kayhan, which carried the original comments has stepped up its attack against Ms Bruni.

BBC News.