BBC news 2010-09-05 加文本

2010-09-05 BBC

BBC News with Jonathan Wheatley

The Afghan President Hamid Karzai says he's formed a national peace council to pursue negotiations with the Taliban. Mr Karzai's office described it as a significant step towards peace talks. His chief of staff, Mohammad Omar Daudzai, told the BBC that significant elements of the Taliban had indicated their willingness to negotiate.

"Soon after the peace jirga, we have noticed some momentum within a certain degree of leadership of their position and also within the foot soldiers. Significant level of leadership has been indicating their willingness to talk. Of course they have their conditions for talking for peace, but their willingness to talk is there."

An American air attack has killed at least seven people in Pakistan's northwest tribal region near the Afghan border. Missiles targeted suspected militants in a house and a vehicle in a village in North Waziristan. Government officials said three foreign fighters were among the dead.

Demonstrators have taken to the streets in more than 130 cities and towns in France to protest against the government's policy of expelling Roma people. A French medical aid group said the authorities had declared a veritable war on the Roma. Christian Fraser reports from Paris.

Perhaps 30,000 people gathered in the capital, all sorts of groups, the unions, anarchists, students, African migrants and of course, the Roma - now the target. Just short of 1,000 travellers had been expelled from France in the month of August, but 11,000 were expelled last year. This is not a new policy, but a debate on the Roma is building and increasingly divisive. Today's demonstrations show there are people in France hugely concerned of what is being done in their name.

A British newspaper says it's making fresh disclosures about an alleged betting scam involving the Pakistani cricket team. The News of the World is publishing 18 pages of evidence, detailing allegations of cheating by some members of the team. Three Pakistani bowlers were suspended after the paper first published its allegations a week ago. The BBC understands that a fourth player has been contacted by the ICC, but it's not in connection with the last Test. Here is our sports editor David Bond.

Exactly one week after the News of the World's revelations led to new questions over the integrity of cricket, the newspaper tonight published new claims, promising to reveal every detail of their nine-month investigation into cricket corruption. The most significant new allegation appeared to concern a fourth Pakistan player who was under investigation by the International Cricket Council. The News of the World refused to name him for legal reasons, but it is known the ICC had already written to Kamran Akmal in August for information relating to possible events over the last 12 months. An ICC spokesman said they did not comment on ongoing investigations.

World News from the BBC

A prominent journalist in Belarus has been found hanged at his weekend home outside the city of Minsk. The body of Oleg Bebenin was discovered on Friday, and local investigators say it appears he took his own life. Mr Bebenin was the founder of an opposition website critical of President Lukashenko's government. An opposition figure questioned whether his death was suicide.

The miners who have been trapped underground in Chile for a month are being contacted by four Uruguayan survivors of a plane crash in the Andes who endured extreme conditions for 72 days before being rescued. Gideon Long now reports.

The four men came to the mine as a gesture of solidarity with the miners. They were rescued here in Chile after surviving an almost unimaginable ordeal. They were lost in the snow, at an altitude of over 3,000 metres and were forced to eat the flesh of their fellow passengers who had been killed in the crash. Their ordeal was turned into the 1993 Hollywood film Alive. While the Uruguayans talked to the miners' families, engineers continued to burrow into the mountain side to try to reach the trapped men. They have now drilled through 42 metres of rock but have 660 to go.

Armed robbers in Barbados have set fire to a clothing shop in the capital Bridgetown, killing six people who were inside. Police said two men with machetes burst into the shop and demanded money before starting a blaze. Three staff and three customers were trapped inside the burning building after apparently fleeing to the back of the shop to escape the flames. A police spokesman described the incident as a national tragedy. Violent crime is relatively rare in Barbados.

An Islamic scholar from Nigeria (who) has been released without charge in Saudi Arabia seven months after being detained there. The Saudi authorities took Sheikh Ahmad Gumi into custody in February after finding he had the telephone number of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up an American airline over the US city of Detroit last year.

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