BBC news 2011-06-21 加文本

BBC news 2011-06-21

BBC News with Marion Marshall

Syrian activists say their anti-government protests will continue, dismissing a renewed pledge by President Bashar al-Assad to set up a national dialogue. Just minutes after the speech, fresh demonstrations were reported in several cities. A spokesman for the activists said they were no longer just demanding reform but a change of government. Jim Muir reports from Beirut.

Within minutes of Mr Assad finishing his speech, protesters were out in the streets of Homs, the country's third biggest city. "This is the response to your speech," they chanted. "You and those around you are in the rubbish bin of history." As far as the protest movement is concerned, the speech contained nothing new, just a repeat of what they call the "empty promises" of reform and change that he's laid out before.

A court in Tunisia has sentenced the former Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his wife Leila Trabelsi to 35 years in prison. They were accused of corruption and drug trafficking and sentenced in absentia. In a BBC interview, Mr Ben Ali's lawyer Akram Azouri dismissed the verdict as politically motivated.

"This is a joke. This is a continuation of the political judgment that has already been issued and executed. And I'm very happy now I think that no court of justice can recognise this judgment."

The Libyan authorities say an attack on a compound owned by one of Colonel Gaddafi's closest advisers has killed 15 people, three of them children. They accuse Nato of using eight rockets to carry out the attack, which pulverised a country estate west of the capital Tripoli. Nato said its warplanes carried out a precision air strike against a key command-and-control site of the Libyan government.

The families of a group of doctors on trial in Bahrain for taking part in anti-government protests say they've been tortured into making false confessions. Prosecutors say the doctors took over Bahrain's biggest hospital as a base for anti-government protests in March. Human rights groups say the authorities are making an example of them by trying them in a military court. Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Bahrain has been talking to the relatives.

The first government witness today accused them of a strange list of crimes, including stealing blood from the blood bank and transporting guns in ambulances. But interviews with families of several of the doctors reveal compelling evidence that they have been tortured. The wife of one of them told me why her husband had signed a confession.

"They didn't allow him to sit for three weeks. They will release his handcuff only when he want[s] to eat. There was no sleep because he was standing, standing and standing."

Representatives of north and south Sudan have signed an agreement to withdraw their troops from the disputed Abyei region and allow Ethiopian peacekeepers to move in. The move to demilitarise the area comes just three weeks before the south is due to secede from the north.

World News from the BBC

In the largest sex discrimination case ever brought before a court, the United States Supreme Court has ruled in favour of the retailing giant Wal-Mart. One and a half million women employees had brought a class action suit in which they accused Wal-Mart of paying women less and giving them fewer promotions. Here's Paul Adams.

The court's ruling was all about what constitutes a class action suit, and here all nine justices agreed that this was a flawed case. The court concluded that it was simply not possible to lump together up to 1.5 million employees at 3,400 stores. Evidence of a general policy of discrimination was, in the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, "entirely absent". But that doesn't mean the court found no evidence of discrimination. The four most liberal justices, three of them women, wrote that Wal-Mart's predominantly male managers were steeped in a corporate culture that perpetuates gender stereotypes.

The vice president of football's world governing body Fifa has resigned. Jack Warner was suspended last month over allegations of bribery, but Fifa said those had now been dropped. Mr Warner was being investigated over a cash-for-votes scandal. Another Fifa executive committee member, Mohamed Bin Hammam, was also implicated. Fifa said Mr Warner had left of his own volition.

A new report on the state of the world's oceans warns marine life is likely to go extinct at a rate uNPRecedented in human history. The study by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean concludes that the world's waters are in a poorer shape than had been imagined. Coral reef specialist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg was one of the experts involved in the report.

"The rate of change is vastly exceeding what we were expecting even a couple of years ago. So if you look at almost everything, whether it's fisheries in temperate zones or coral reefs or Arctic sea ice, all of this is undergoing changes, but at a much faster rate than we had thought."

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