BBC news 2011-06-10 加文本

BBC news 2011-06-10

BBC News with Mike Cooper

The United Nations human rights commissioner Navi Pillay has accused Syria of waging war on its own people. In a statement from Geneva, Ms Pillay said Syria was ruthlessly crushing civilian protest, using cruel and vicious violence.

"I have been watching the whole region and seen incidents of excessive violence. And what we're seeing now in Syria is so atrocious, I felt that I had to strongly condemn the excesses that are being taken there in terms of the regime's oppression of ordinary aspirations of their own people. And for a government to act so violently against their own people is something that is totally unacceptable."

The United Nations nuclear watchdog has decided to refer Syria to the Security Council over its alleged covert nuclear programme. The International Atomic Energy Agency voted to rebuke Syria on claims of an undeclared nuclear reactor in the country's remote northeast. Bethany Bell reports.

Diplomatic pressure on Syria is mounting. The IAEA's board of governors has reported Damascus to the Security Council. The vote came after the agency's latest report, which said that a Syrian site which was bombed by the Israelis in 2007 was very likely a secret nuclear reactor. That's a charge Syria denies.

Pakistan's prime minister has ordered an inquiry into the death of a young man, Sarfaraz Shah, at the hands of paramilitary forces in Karachi on Wednesday. Video footage of the incident was broadcast on Pakistani television. Here's Jill McGivering.

The video is disturbing. It shows a young man in a black T-shirt being dragged by his hair in a public park. He is unarmed and pleads for his life as he's surrounded by a group of paramilitaries, who are armed and in uniform. One of them shoots him in the thigh at point-blank range. The young man is then shown writhing on the ground, bleeding heavily and begging for help. The paramilitaries stand next to him and watch but do nothing to help. He subsequently died. The paramilitaries have since said that the young man had been caught trying to rob someone. His family denies this.

China has rejected accusations from the United Nations that it has arranged the forced disappearance of 300 Tibetan monks. Reporting from Beijing, here's Michael Bristow.

This issue centres on the fate of 300 Tibetan monks based at a monastery in Sichuan province. The UN says there are reports they've been taken away in 10 military trucks to unknown destinations. It wants to know where they are and calls on China to end the practice of making people disappear. China says there's no question of forced disappearances, but a foreign ministry spokesman admitted that something has happened to the monks. He said the authorities are giving them what he called (a) "legal education".

World News from the BBC

Top aides of a contender for the Republican Party's presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich, are reported to have resigned en masse in a dispute over campaign tactics. In what American media were describing as a major blow to Mr Gingrich's hopes, his campaign manager and press spokesman are among those said to have left his team. Mr Gingrich, who's a former speaker of the House of Representatives, is believed to be determined to stay in the race.

The government of Malawi has stopped paying a special allowance to civil servants with HIV because it says they are spending the money on beer and prostitutes. An official accused them of further spreading the disease. The 40,000 government employees will, instead, be given a monthly supply of nutritional food.

International flights to and from Argentina and Uruguay have been disrupted again by a huge ash cloud caused by an ongoing volcanic eruption in southern Chile. Danny Aeberhard has more details.

Argentina's capital Buenos Aires, named after its fair breezes, is hoping the winds change. The vast cloud of fine grey ash from Chile's Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano continues to cause havoc there. The city's main international and domestic airports, the biggest airport in the country, have been forced to close. Both had already seen flight cancellations earlier this week. Several other smaller Argentine airports, mainly in Patagonia, remain closed too. And many flights in and out of the Uruguayan capital Montevideo have also been cancelled, affecting thousands more travellers.

The price of crude oil has risen strongly for a second day after the exporters' group Opec didn't reach an agreement to increase production. Brent crude oil, one of the main benchmarks, climbed by more than $3 a barrel from its price before the Opec decision to more than $119. The biggest Opec producer Saudi Arabia tried to convince the group to increase production, but when it failed to do so, prices started to rise.

BBC News