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BBC news 2012-02-16

BBC News with Sue Montgomery

President Porfirio Lobo of Honduras has suspended the officials in charge of the national prison system after a fire at a jail killed more than 300 inmates. Mr Lobo said he was determined to ensure a full investigation into the cause of the disaster and find out who was responsible. He expressed his sympathy for the families of those who'd died.

"We deeply regret what has happened, and I would like to express my solidarity with the families of our compatriots who lost their lives in the Comayagua prison."

Firefighters said many prisoners were burned alive or asphyxiated in their cells because the keys could not be found.

The French President Nicolas Sarkozy has confirmed that he'll run for a second five-year term in elections in April. He was speaking on national television. Mr Sarkozy is currently well behind his main rival, the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, in the opinion polls. Hugh Schofield reports.

President Sarkozy told television viewers that he saw it as his duty to run for a second term. The captain of a ship did not desert the helm in troubled waters. He said that in the last five years many reforms had been carried through, but there was still much work to do. "I have plenty of ideas, plenty of things to say to the French," he said. Nicolas Sarkozy lags far behind the Socialist Francois Hollande in the polls, but he's a pugnacious campaigner and appears to believe he's got a decent chance of winning.

The United States has downplayed the significance of what Iran called two major advances in its controversial nuclear programme. Tehran said it had loaded Iranian-made nuclear fuel rods into a research reactor in north Tehran. It also said that a new generation of centrifuges had been put into operation at the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz. At a briefing in Washington, the US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the announcements didn't amount too much.

"We frankly don't see a lot new here. This is not big news. In fact, it seems to have been hyped. The Iranians have for many months been putting out calendars of accomplishments, and based on their own calendars, they are many, many months behind. This strikes us as calibrated mostly for a domestic audience."

The head of the Eurogroup, Jean-Claude Juncker, has said he's confident that a decision on a second Greek bailout will be taken on Monday. He was speaking after eurozone finance ministers held a conference call to discuss what more Greece had to do to secure a bailout worth 130bn. Mr Juncker said the Greek government had found a way to cut 325m more from its budget. He also said that the finance ministers wanted mechanisms to monitor the Greek economy.

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The Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping has told US business leaders the time is right for a new starting point in relations between the two countries. Speaking in Washington, Mr Xi said China welcomed a constructive US role in promoting peace in the Asia-Pacific region, but he said Washington had to respect China's interests and concerns in the area. Correspondents say this is Beijing's response to America's new policy of strengthening its military and political presence in Asia.

The president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, has announced that he will step down at the end of his five-year term in June. It opens the possibility that for the first time a non-American could be chosen to head the bank. Last year, new guidelines were adopted calling for an open merit-based selection process.

The Sri Lankan army has agreed to investigate allegations aired on British television that government forces committed war crimes in the final stage of the conflict against the Tamil Tigers in 2009. It's something the army has always denied. Charles Haviland is in Colombo.

This is a big change. The army has come out with a statement saying it is looking into the allegations contained there, as it says, irrespective of the authenticity or otherwise of the video footage. So they are leaving open the notion that that footage might actually be authentic. The army has made clear that this is very much an internal army commission. They say it's a commission of inquiry at the moment and that if there is prima facie evidence against anyone, that might lead to prosecutions in a court-martial, which could potentially incur penalties including the death penalty.

Scientists in Switzerland have announced plans to launch a special satellite designed to clean up space. They say the prototype will scoop up debris orbiting Earth and take it back into the atmosphere where it'll burn on re-entry. More than half a million pieces of debris from rockets and satellites are orbiting Earth at a very high speed.

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