BBC news 2011-04-15 加文本

BBC news 2011-04-15

BBC News with Jim Lee

The Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said more members of the alliance need to contribute attack aircraft to the military operation in Libya. At a meeting of Nato foreign ministers in Berlin, Mr Rasmussen said very sophisticated equipment was needed to carry out attacks in heavily populated areas. From Berlin, James Robbins.

For days, France and Britain have been complaining that too few member countries were willing to provide ground-attack aircraft for strikes against Colonel Gaddafi's forces. Opposition rebel leaders in Libya have been pleading for more strikes to prevent the killing of civilians. And today the American admiral, who is Nato supreme commander, told Nato governments in joint session he did need more precision ground-attack aircraft. Afterwards, the Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told a news conference the alliance was united. But this meeting has so far left unanswered the question which other countries are willing to join the active combat role in Libya.

The man in charge of air traffic control in the United States, Hank Krakowski, has resigned over revelations that flight controllers have been sleeping on the job. The Federal Aviation Administration said people had rightly questioned its ability to ensure safety. Andrew North reports from Washington.

Six times so far this year, air traffic controllers at US airports have fallen asleep on the job. The most recent was just last week when a medical flight carrying a sick patient had to land on its own in Nevada when the pilot couldn't get through to a snoozing controller on night duty. Two aircraft had to land unaided last month here in Washington after the controller there nodded off. The same person at Seattle airport is reported to have fallen asleep three times on the job before being suspended.

Syrian state television says President Bashar al-Assad has ordered the release of hundreds of people detained during the recent anti-government protests. Reports said only those involved in what were described as criminal acts would remain in detention. Andrew Bolton reports.

Anti-government protests broke out a month ago. The government has reacted with some force. Syria's main pro-democracy group says more than 200 people have been killed. The government's decision to set free many of those arrested recently is certainly a concession of some kind, but whether it will be enough to calm the mood is open to question. President Assad sacked his cabinet two weeks ago, but that failed to stop the protests. He's just announced the formation of a new government in the hope that that might help to do the trick.

An Italian man has been kidnapped by Islamist militants in Gaza. Vittorio Arrigoni is an activist who's been campaigning against the Israeli blockade of Gaza. He was abducted on Thursday morning, and a video has since been posted on an Islamist website showing him blindfolded, having apparently been beaten. In the footage, the kidnappers demand the release of prisoners from the Salafist movement, who are being held by the Hamas authorities in Gaza.

World News from the BBC

Protests have interrupted the annual general meeting in London of the oil giant BP, the first since last year's oil rig blast and huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Several protesters were ejected, and fishermen from the US Gulf Coast were refused entry to the meeting, where they'd planned to complain about the continued effects of the pollution. Inside, a campaigner read out a statement by the father of one of the 11 men who died in the blast, in which he accused BP of prioritising profits over safety.

The British and Danish governments have both attempted to prevent drugs made in their countries being used for executions in the United States. The British Business Secretary Vince Cable said he was blocking the export to the US of three drugs used to administer lethal injections. He said Britain was opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances. The Danish government says it will ask US states that carry out lethal injections to stop using a drug produced in the US by a Danish company.

Researchers in Australia have discovered that some tunes sung by mating humpback whales become popular across the ocean and are copied by other whales thousands of kilometres away. Victoria Gill has been listening.

It's one of the most haunting and complex sounds in the animal kingdom. Male humpback whales combine groans, cries and shrieks into repeated patterns to make up their signature song. All the males in one population sing the same song, but occasionally they invent an entirely new one. The scientists studied hundreds of hours' worth of whale song recordings gathered over a decade of research. They found that when the whales off the coast of eastern Australia started a new song pattern, this version gradually spread from population to population. After two years, humpback whales 6,000km away in French Polynesia were singing exactly the same song.

Victoria Gill

BBC News