BBC news 2011-12-23 加文本

BBC news 2011-12-23

BBC News with Iain Purdon

The Iraqi Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi has accused the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of causing a national crisis by issuing an arrest warrant against him. Mr al-Hashimi, who is a Sunni, told the BBC that what Mr Maliki, a Shia, had begun was not easy to control.

"It is a big deficiency. This deficiency is in the security services and in the leaders of the armed forces because instead of chasing the murderers and the terrorists, they are chasing the patriotic politicians. It is evidence for the lack of control over the security brief."

Mr al-Hashimi was speaking after Iraq suffered its worst wave of attacks since August, four days after the last American combat troops left the country. About 70 people were killed. The White House said attempts to derail Iraq's progress would fail. From Washington, Jonny Dymond.

Just a few days ago, President Obama was saluting troops as they arrived home from what he called a "sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq". On Thursday, with Baghdad still counting its dead, the White House was back in more familiar territory. A statement strongly condemned what the White House called "terrorist attacks against innocent Iraqis". It urged Iraq's leaders to come together to face common challenges.

The militant Palestinian faction Hamas, which governs Gaza, is to join the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Hamas has reached agreement on PLO membership with its rival Fatah, which is in power in the West Bank. Here's Yolande Knell.

Historically, Hamas has stayed outside the PLO and has opposed its peace talks with Israel. Its submission now will undoubtedly complicate the peace process which stalled over a year ago. Yet this deal does mean an advance towards Palestinian reconciliation. The long-standing rivalry between Hamas and the Fatah faction headed by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is seen as having damaged the Palestinian national cause.

The Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has delivered an uNPRecedented attack on the country's powerful military. In a speech in Islamabad, he said the armed forces had to be accountable to parliament and could not act like a state within a state. He said the Pakistani people would have to decide between an elected government and a dictatorship. Mr Gilani alleged that there was a conspiracy to bring down his government.

The United States has expressed deep regret and condolences for a Nato air strike in November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers after admitting a number of mistakes. Following an investigation, the US military said its forces acted in self-defence and with appropriate force when they came under attack on the Afghan border, but they admitted there had been a lack of proper coordination with the Pakistan military. Pakistan reacted furiously to the attack, closing its border to Nato supply trucks.

World News from the BBC

Turkey has reacted furiously after the lower house of the French parliament approved a bill that makes it a criminal offence to deny that Ottoman Turks committed genocide against Armenians during the First World War. The Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the move would open grave and irreparable wounds in relations with France, and recalled Turkey's ambassador from Paris. Turkey denies that the mass killing of Armenians was genocide.

There have been reports of several bomb blasts and gunfire in two cities in northeast Nigeria. The first explosions were heard in Damaturu. They were followed a few hours later by more blasts in Maiduguri. There have been no reports of casualties. Both cities have previously been hit by violence blamed on the Islamist group Boko Haram.

The pre-trial hearing of Bradley Manning, the US soldier alleged to have passed on thousands of classified American documents to Wikileaks, has ended with concluding statements from both prosecution and defence. A decision on whether he'll face a court-martial is due in January. If tried and found guilty, he faces life in prison.

For the first time since the Large Hadron Collider opened two years ago, scientists at the Cern laboratory in Geneva believe that they have detected a new subatomic particle. The existence of the Chi-b(3P) particle was first predicted 25 years ago. Details from Pallab Ghosh.

The Chi-b(3P) is one of the simplest particles in nature, made up of just two smaller particles called the "beauty quark" and the "beauty anti-quark". Now that it's been found, they can study the Chi-b(3P) to discover how one of the fundamental forces of nature works. The so-called nuclear strong force holds the insides of atoms together. According to current theory, they are glued together by the exchange of particles called, appropriately enough, gluons. study of the new particle should help physicists discover how this process works.

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