BBC news 2010-10-30 加文本

BBC news 2010-10-30

BBC News with John Jason

President Obama said the suspicious packages that triggered security alerts in the United States, Britain and Dubai did apparently contain explosive material. The president told a news conference the packages came from Yemen on freight planes bound for the US and were addressed to Jewish places of worship in Chicago. The US counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan said they'd now been made inert and were no longer dangerous. President Obama said the US would work closely with Yemen to disrupt extremist activities.

"We will continue to strengthen our cooperation with the Yemeni government to disrupt plotting by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and to destroy this al-Qaeda affiliate. We will also continue our efforts to strengthen a more stable, secure and prosperous Yemen so that terrorist groups do not have the time and space they need to plan attacks from within its borders."

Delegates from nearly 200 countries have adopted a plan aimed at protecting threatened species of plants and animals around the world. The deal was reached at the end of a United Nations conference on biodiversity in the Japanese city of Nagoya. The 10-year plan includes a promise of billions of dollars to aid conservation in poorer regions. The targets are weaker than many scientists wanted, but the European Union's chief negotiator at the conference, Karl Falkenberg, told the BBC it was a significant agreement.

"It was a roller coaster. But it's that much more satisfactory to have achieved this, and it is a big result. It really is big for environment, big for the UN, big for Japan, big for Europe. Great night."

French trade unions say workers at all 12 oil refineries have now voted to end their strike against raising the state retirement age. The strike, which began more than two weeks ago, was part of a wider campaign of industrial action against the government's pension reforms. From Paris, our correspondent Christian Fraser reports.

For 33 days, the hard-line unions of Marseille had choked supplies to France's biggest oil terminals. But since the bill on pension reform was approved this week, there were signs that public support was turning against them. Through the course of the last month, their local protest at the Fos-Lavera plant spread to all 12 of the country's refineries. There was never an oil shortage - the government and the oil companies have over three months of reserves. But together with blockades at oil depots and the dockers' strike at Marseille and Le Havre, France was facing the prospect of a crippling winter fuel crisis.

The parents of Linda Norgrove, the kidnapped British aid worker killed three weeks ago in Afghanistan, have said they don't blame anyone for the failed rescue attempt in which she died. In their first interview since then, John and Lorna Norgrove said it was a credit to the Americans who led the attempt that they admitted a mistake by one of their soldiers might have killed her. Initially, it was thought the aid worker had been murdered by her captors.

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The United Nations says more than 7,000 Somali refugees are trapped just inside the Kenyan border, dangerously close to the violence that they recently fled. The UN refugee agency said their security and health conditions were deteriorating by the hour. The distribution of aid was briefly suspended after a truck delivering supplies to the refugees was shot at.

A suicide bomber has killed at least 25 people in an attack in central Iraq. Seventy more were wounded. The attacker detonated an explosive vest after going into a popular coffee house in the mainly Shia town of Balad Ruz, about 70km northeast of the capital Baghdad. Jim Muir reports from Baghdad.

Police said the bomber wearing an explosive vest walked into the coffee shop at around nine in the evening local time and blew himself up. The cafe would have been busy at that hour with people relaxing on the day of rest. The district of Balad Ruz where the bomb went off is largely inhabited by Shia Kurds, and the town as a whole is largely Shia. In May 2008, a double suicide bombing killed at least 35 people in the town, and four months later, more than 20 others died in another suicide attack carried out by a woman. These bombings were widely believed to have been the work of Sunni extremists trying to kill and provoke Shias.

An Italian surgeon has been jailed for more than 15 years for conducting unnecessary surgical procedures for financial gain. Operations included removing the breast of a woman with a minor ailment and taking part of a lung from a patient with pneumonia.

An appeal court in the United States has upheld two convictions for fraud and obstruction of justice against the former newspaper magnate, Conrad Black. Two other fraud convictions were overturned. The ruling means that Lord Black, who was released from prison on bail in July pending the appeal, will be re-sentenced on the two convictions upheld and may be returned to jail. He's already served more than two years of a six-and-a-half-year jail term.

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