BBC news 2010-11-19 加文本

BBC news 2010-11-19

BBC News with David Legge

One of the giants of American industry, General Motors, has resumed trading its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, 18 months after being rescued from bankruptcy by the US and Canadian governments. The two countries pumped $50bn into the firm, and the initial share offering is expected to reduce the US government's stake in the company by half. Neville Isdell is one of GM's board members.

"This is huge. This is the whole new General Motors. This is a 102-year-old company that sadly went through a bankruptcy process that is being reborn and reborn based on what is important and that is the designing, the building and the selling of the world's best cars."

Greece has unveiled deep new spending cuts aimed at reducing its budget deficit by almost $7bn to comply with the terms of a European Union and IMF bailout. Forty per cent of the projected savings will come from the national health service. The Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou insisted the latest cuts were vital for long-term growth.

"We all understand that the battle has not been won yet, but we are at a better stage to focus our attention on the bigger problems because obviously the problem is not low-income pensions; the problem is the wasteful state, the public corporations, how to fight tax evasion and how all these are at the base of creating viable growth in the country."

Prosecutors from the International Criminal Court have begun preliminary investigations in Nigeria and Honduras to establish whether there are cases there involving war crimes or crimes against humanity. The court's chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said the ICC had started inquiries into last year's coup in Honduras after receiving reports of possible human rights abuses. He declined to give details about the investigations in Nigeria.

Astronomers say they detected the first planet from outside our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Max Planck Institute in Germany said the Jupiter-size planet and its star were from a dwarf galaxy which was absorbed into the Milky Way billions of years ago. Dr Robert Massey is with Britain's Royal Astronomical Society.

"The nice thing about this discovery is that it's the first hard evidence of a planet around a star which was actually once not in our galaxy. Now there's every reason to believe that planets are really quite widespread throughout the Universe, not just in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, but also in all the thousands of millions of others there are. But this is the first time we've got hard evidence of that."

A report says a dual epidemic of tuberculosis and HIV infection in Swaziland is threatening to wipe out entire generations. The medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres found that life expectancy in Swaziland had halved over the past 20 years, from 60 to just 31. Swaziland already has the highest HIV/Aids prevalence in the world and one of the highest rates of tuberculosis.

World News from the BBC

President Obama has described the ratification of a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia as a "national security imperative". He called on the US Senate to vote on the Start II treaty before Congress breaks up for the year. His Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had said the US couldn't afford to postpone the issue.

***一段省略***

The Italian government has announced that it's captured all but two of the 30 most wanted mafia criminals. It follows the arrest on Wednesday of the man said to be the financial brains behind the Neapolitan Casalesi clan, Antonio Iovine. The Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said he was confident the remaining fugitives would soon be caught.

"The number of mafia members arrested is 6,754, 28 of whom are on the list of the most dangerous criminals. We're only missing two from that list, Matteo Messina Denaro and Michele Zagaria, and the net is tightening around them as it did for Antonio Iovine."

Protests linked to the outbreak of cholera in Haiti have spread to parts of the capital Port-au-Prince. Haitian police fired tear gas at demonstrators who set up barricades and threw rocks at UN vehicles. Some Haitians have blamed peacekeepers from Nepal for bringing the disease into the country, an accusation denied by the UN.

An American teenager suspected of being the "Barefoot Bandit" has pleaded not guilty in a Seattle court to stealing several aircraft and flying them without a pilot's licence. Nineteen-year-old Colton Harris-Moore is accused of flying all the way from Indiana to the Bahamas. The nickname arose from reports he did not wear shoes.

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