BBC news 2011-10-06 加文本

BBC news 2011-10-06

[BBC] News with Marion Marshall

Bahrain's public prosecutor has ordered a retrial in a civilian court for 20 medical workers sentenced to up to 15 years in prison after helping anti-government protesters. Announcing the retrial, the public prosecutor said no doctors or medical staff should be punished for fulfilling their humanitarian duties. Caroline Hawley reports.

The sentencing of the medics prompted an international outcry. Many of the doctors and nurses say they were tortured into making confessions. Amnesty International said the charges were ludicrous. Now Bahrain has acted to try to contain the damage to its reputation. There's to be a retrial in a civilian court. The attorney general said it would allow the evidence to be re-evaluated, and he promised that the doctors and nurses would have the full opportunity to defend themselves.

The government in Afghanistan says it's foiled a plot to assassinate the president Hamid Karzai. It said the Afghan intelligence agency had arrested six people, including a member of staff at the presidential palace. Most of the others were said to be lecturers from Kabul University. Some of those detained are alleged to have links with the Haqqani militant network and al-Qaeda. In recent months, several allies of Mr Karzai have been killed, including his chief peace negotiator with the Taliban, Burhanuddin Rabbani.

An opinion survey among combat veterans in the United States suggests that a third of them believe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been worth fighting. The poll, by the Pew Research Center in Washington, found that a majority of American war veterans thought the West should focus more on domestic issues than foreign affairs.

The British Prime Minister David Cameron has warned that the world economy could be pushed to the brink by the eurozone's debt crisis. Speaking at the annual conference of his governing Conservative Party, Mr Cameron compared the current economic situation to the banking crisis of 2008. Britain, he said, would not help fund endless bailouts of its weaker European neighbours. He said governments had to cut their spending.

"The only way out of a debt crisis is to deal with your debts. That's why households are paying down their credit card and store card bills. It means banks getting their books in order, and it means governments - governments all over the world - cutting spending and living within their means."

Soldiers in Mexico have arrested a man they say is a key figure in the country's most powerful drug gang, Noel Salgueiro Nevarez. Vanessa Buschschluter reports.

Security officials say Noel Salgueiro Nevarez is behind much of the extreme violence which has plagued Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's murder capital, where more than 3,000 people were killed in drug-related violence last year. He's thought to have started his criminal career 15 years ago, producing marijuana for the powerful Sinaloa cartel. Prosecutors say his gang has been exporting up to 15 tonnes of marijuana and two tonnes of cocaine per month to the United States.

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Prosecutors have been outlining their case against two Pakistani cricketers at the start of their trial in London for involvement in a betting scam. The former Pakistani captain Salman Butt and the fast bowler Mohammad Asif both deny the charges. Gordon Farquhar reports.

Opening the case for the prosecution, Aftab Jafferjee said the jury would hear a depressing story of "rampant corruption" at the heart of international cricket. He said that in respect to the Lord's Test against England in 2010, the fixes took the form of deliberate no-balls delivered at pre-arranged times. He praised the efforts of the News of the World newspaper in exposing the alleged conspiracy, saying that without the paper's undercover methods, the activity of fixing would almost certainly have continued unabated and beyond the reach of law.

The mother of a young Syrian woman, Zainab al-Hosni, who was reportedly beheaded, has confirmed that her daughter has appeared in a television interview. The story of Ms al-Hosni's apparent murder during the anti-government uprising was condemned by human rights groups. But in the interview, Ms al-Hosni said she ran away from home to escape beatings by her brother.

Scientists in the United States say they've trained monkeys to control a virtual arm using only their brain waves. Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers say their experiment involved implanting hair-like filaments into the brain of monkeys. They say their work could one day be used to increase autonomy in quadriplegic patients. Here's our science reporter Matt McGrath.

In these experiments, two monkeys were trained to control a virtual arm on a screen solely by the electrical activity generated in their brains. As well as moving the arm, the monkeys were able to feel differences in the textures of virtual objects. The researchers involved say that just like a normal functioning limb, they were able to do both actions at the same time, sending out signals to control the arm while simultaneously getting electrical feedback to understand the texture of the objects that were touched.

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