BBC news 2010-12-12 加文本

BBC news 2010-12-12

BBC News with Kathy Clugston

President Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, is critically ill in Washington. Mr Holbrooke, who's 69, underwent heart surgery on Saturday after falling ill while at work in the State Department. His family is at his bedside. Here's Peter Cardwell.

In a career alternating between finance and diplomacy, Richard Holbrooke is perhaps best-known as the architect of the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended three years of war in Bosnia. Tapped as a replacement for Warren Christopher as US secretary of state in 1997, Holbrooke lost out to Madeleine Albright and later served as US ambassador to the United Nations. He took up his current post last year.

One of the sons of the disgraced New York financier Bernard Madoff has been found dead on the second anniversary of his father's arrest. Police say Mark Madoff was found hanged at his home in New York in an apparent suicide. Mark Madoff and his brother Andrew had been investigated in relation to his father's huge fraud, but no charges were brought against them.

Two of the three main candidates in the disputed presidential election in Haiti have rejected a proposed recount of votes from the first round a fortnight ago. The recount was proposed following protests by opposition supporters. Here's Vanessa Buschschluter.

The Haitian electoral council had hoped that its offer of holding a recount would bring calm to the streets of Haiti. But both the front-runner Mirlande Manigat and Michel Martelly, who came third, have dismissed the plan. They have been joined in their rejection of the move by six election monitoring groups, who say a recount would not be enough to end days of street protests by opposition supporters. That leaves the governing party candidate, Jude Celestin, as the only top candidate to support the recount.

There have been two explosions in the Swedish capital Stockholm. Police said a car exploded, injuring two people. A few minutes later, another explosion nearby killed a man. Local media have speculated that it could have been a suicide bomber. But a police spokesman, Ulf Johansson, said they hadn't linked the blasts to terrorists. Damien McGuinness in Riga has more.

Security police in Sweden received an email about 10 minutes before the first explosion in Stockholm on Saturday afternoon. The mail contained a sound file in both Swedish and Arabic, in which a voice condemns Sweden's presence in Afghanistan; Sweden is also criticised for supporting the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who in 2007 drew a controversial cartoon of Mohammad.

Protests have taken place in major cities in Spain against the detention in Britain of the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange. Hundreds of people gathered outside the British embassy in Madrid, calling for him to be freed. Mr Assange is facing extradition to Sweden for alleged sexual offences. His detention is seen by his supporters as an orchestrated attack on Wikileaks.

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The leader who's been recognised internationally as the winner of the disputed presidential election in Ivory Coast has said the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo must concede power before talks can begin between the two sides. A spokesman for Alassane Ouattara said he was not against dialogue, but until he's recognised as president by everyone, no negotiations could take place. The African Union has suspended Ivory Coast while Mr Gbagbo continues to hold on to power.

The governing party in southern Sudan, the SPLM, has for the first time publicly backed independence for the South ahead of next month's referendum. This is at odds with the terms of a 2005 peace deal that ended a long civil war with northern Sudan. Here's Simon Ponsford.

When they signed their peace deal, the leaders of both North and South Sudan also made a commitment - they would campaign to make unity attractive to southerners. But it's been an open secret that what the South really wants is independence, and that's what a senior SPLM member, Anne Itto, has now made perfectly clear. She accused the governing party in the North, the NCP, of making unity a very, very, very unattractive prospect.

Tens of thousands of people have attended a rally in Rome against the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The protest was organised by the opposition Democratic Party. Mr Berlusconi faces a motion of no confidence in parliament next week. In a message to supporters, he insisted he'd win Tuesday's vote.

The authorities in Germany say two bank robbers shot dead on Friday may have been the same married couple who staged a string of hold-ups over a 15-year period. The pair were carrying out a heist when they were interrupted by police and a gunfight broke out. German media said the female robber took her own life when she saw her husband killed. A police officer was also badly injured. The couple were widely known as the "gentleman robbers" because they were extremely polite to their victims.

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