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BBC news 2012-01-16

BBC News with Iain Purdon

Divers searching a submerged cruise ship in Italy say they will work through the night to try to find more survivors. Fifteen people are still unaccounted for while five are known to have died. Earlier, two more bodies were found. Filippo Marini is a spokesman for the Italian coast guard.

"The bodies of two elderly people have been found. They'll be identified as soon as possible. The correct procedures will be observed, and then we will proceed with identification. It's a sad piece of news to give. Our divers have found themselves with this very sad situation. The bodies are being brought onto the mainland. They're two elderly people found on the third floor in a meeting area section of the ship."

The vessel, the Costa Concordia, smashed into rocks off the Italian coast on Friday. The ship's captain has been questioned. He argues that nautical charts failed to show any spike of rock, but the authorities say he brought the ship too close to the island of Giglio, where it ran aground.

The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has harshly criticised President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and the way he's handled the anti-government protests in the country. Speaking in Lebanon, Mr Ban said the Arab revolution showed that people no longer accepted tyrannies.

"Today, I say again to President Assad of Syria: Stop killing your own people. The path of repression is a dead end. The lessons of the past year are eloquent and clear. The winds of change will not cease to blow. The flame ignited in Tunisia will not be dimmed."

However, the French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe has attacked what he called the silence of the UN Security Council over Syria.

The head of UN humanitarian operations in Somalia, Mark Bowden, has told the BBC many more people will die of hunger before the famine there is brought under control. He said the situation was improving, but the crisis would continue till July or August.

"The number of people facing strict famine conditions has been reduced from 750,000 to about 250,000, but that doesn't mean that there's not a major crisis in Somalia."

Mr Bowden said that the famine had killed tens of thousands of people since it was declared six months ago and some of the world's highest child malnutrition rates had been recorded in Somalia with half of all children being malnourished.

Two planes have attacked the Somali city of Jilib in the south of the country, an area controlled by Islamists of al-Shabab. Elders in the city have told the BBC that six children were killed in the bombing which was apparently carried out by Kenyan military jets. There are reports that al-Shabab fighters were among the casualties. The Kenyan military spokesman told the BBC that he was checking whether Kenyan aircraft were involved in the raid.

World News from the BBC

There's been a third day of fighting between rival Libyan militia groups despite efforts of the interim government to broker a ceasefire. At least three people have been killed and more than 40 wounded since Friday in clashes near the town of Gharyan, south of the capital Tripoli. The interim government has been struggling to control armed groups.

Voting has ended in parliamentary elections in Kazakhstan, which the party of President Nursultan Nazarbayev is expected to win. International observers have never deemed any election in Kazakhstan as free or fair. Rayhan Demytrie reports.

In Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city, the turnout was low. But nationwide by 6pm local time, nearly 70% of voters had cast their ballots. The presidential party Nur Otan is expected to win by a landslide. So far it has been the only party represented in parliament. But a new election law guarantees the party with the second highest number of votes some seats. The six other political parties that are standing do not pose a serious challenge to Nur Otan.

A Swiss-German consortium has announced a $2bn project to develop solar technology in Oman. The investors plan to build 400 megawatts of solar generating capacity, and factories to make solar panels for Oman and for export. Despite plentiful sunshine, the Middle East region's solar power production is negligible, compared with that of Europe, China or the United States.

Russia says it believes debris from a spacecraft that failed in its mission to Mars has crashed into the Pacific Ocean. The probe, Phobos-Grunt, is one of the heaviest and most toxic ever to fall back down to earth although the Russian space agency says most of it will have burnt up on re-entry. The spacecraft was launched last November in an ambitious bid to scoop up rocky fragments from a Martian moon and bring them back for study. But it became stranded in Earth's orbit after the launch went wrong.

BBC News