BBC news 2011-05-01 加文本

BBC news 2011-05-01

BBC News with Stewart Macintosh

Residents of the Syrian city of Deraa say the army has seized control of a mosque associated with anti-government protesters. Witnesses said troops backed by tanks stormed the Omari mosque. As Western journalists have been denied permission to enter Syria, Owen Bennett-Jones reports from neighbouring Lebanon.

Residents of Deraa say the assault on the mosque involved sustained heavy gunfire, after which the army placed gunmen on the mosque's roof. Deraa has been under a virtual siege since Monday. With no one allowed to hold funerals, bodies are being stored in makeshift morgues. But as the residents try to cope with their worsening conditions, the new Syrian Prime Minister Adel Safar has been talking about political reforms. He said new important legislation would soon be approved concerning the law of the parties and the media. Syria is currently a one-party state with a tightly controlled media.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt says it'll contest half of all the seats in the first parliamentary elections of the post-Mubarak era, which are due in September. But the movement, which was banned in 1954, says its new Freedom and Justice Party won't compete in the presidential election later in the year. From Cairo, Jonathan Head reports.

The Muslim Brotherhood's future role worries secular and non-Muslim Egyptians because of its Islamist roots and the organisational advantages it enjoys thanks to its 80-year history. Recent comments by some Brotherhood members calling for a strict implementation of Sharia law have only heightened those concerns. However, the movement has tried to reassure sceptics by describing the new party as a civil not a theocratic one. The new president and his deputy are known moderates, who've stated their commitment to equality for all faiths.

Prosecutors in Germany say three al-Qaeda suspects arrested on Friday were planning an attack in a crowded area using a shrapnel bomb. Two are originally from Morocco and the other from an Iranian family. They were arrested in Duesseldorf and nearby Bochum.

The French sports minister has suspended the technical director of the national football federation over allegations that officials secretly planned to introduce racial quotas in national training programmes. Here's Hugh Schofield in Paris.

The investigative news site Mediapart has published minutes of a meeting in which senior football figures clearly discussed the issue of ethnic quotas. At one point, the technical director Francois Blaquart says there should be an unofficial policy of keeping down the number of dual nationality, i.e. mainly black and North African, youngsters in French training centres. But defenders of French football's managing body say that the issue under discussion was the high number of players going through the excellent French national training system who defect to other national teams, many in Africa, at senior level.

World News from the BBC

Nato-led forces in Afghanistan say they're preparing for a spate of attacks by the Taliban in the coming days. The Taliban earlier issued a statement saying that its spring offensive, an annual surge in fighting, will start on Sunday. A spokesman for the Nato-led force, Brigadier General Josef Blotz, said the Taliban were trying to reverse Nato gains.

"We have brought in huge reinforcements in 2010, and we're able to change the strategic environment. We have taken away huge areas, for example in Kandahar, which is the homeland of the Taliban. And of course they will try to get that back, but they will fail."

Tens of thousands of pilgrims have joined a vigil in central Rome on the eve of a ceremony to mark the beatification of the late Pope John Paul II. Among those addressing the gathering at the Circus Maximus park is a French nun, whose apparently miraculous recovery from Parkinson's Disease is part of the official reason for taking the penultimate step towards declaring the late Pope a saint. The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, said the move towards sainthood had been rapid.

"It is very unusual, but I think it's popular demand frankly, and it isn't the quickest process. There have been saints in the past who have been virtually declared saints by popular acclaim, and we saw even on the day of his funeral people saying this man was a saint, make him a saint now. Now that's not happened."

One of the world's wealthiest men, the American investment guru Warren Buffett, has faced questions from shareholders in his company Berkshire Hathaway about the surprise resignation of one of its most senior executives. Mr Buffett admitted to thousands of shareholders gathered in Omaha for the company's annual meeting that he'd made a big mistake. He said he should have questioned earlier the executive purchase of shares in an oil company.

That's the BBC News.