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BBC news 2012-02-24

BBC News with Fiona MacDonald

The British Prime Minister David Cameron has hailed the London one-day international conference on Somalia as a "turning point" towards greater stability and prosperity. He said agreements had been reached on major issues, such as security, piracy, humanitarian assistance and Somalia's political process. Somalia's Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali said he'd like to see air strikes against the Islamist militant group al-Shabab, which recently joined forces with al-Qaeda.

"We welcome the targeted air strikes against al-Qaeda in Somalia, and reason being al-Qaeda in Somalia is not a Somali problem; it is a global problem, and it has to be addressed globally. So, therefore, we have to have a common strategy against this common enemy."

Al-Shabab condemned the meeting.

Dozens of Syrians are reported to have been killed in new attacks against opposition strongholds across the country by the security forces. Activists say that 13 members of one family have been killed in the village of Kfartoun near Hama. Homs, Deraa and Deir al-Zour have also come under attack.

A French journalist wounded in the Syrian city of Homs on Wednesday has made a video appeal asking to be evacuated to Lebanon. Edith Bouvier, a freelance journalist working for Le Figaro newspaper, says her femur is broken. Doctors looking after her said she had life-threatening injuries. The paper's foreign editor Philippe Gelie told the BBC she needed proper medical attention.

"She's conscious. She looks ok, but also she's quite aware of her situation. She needs a, you know, surgical operation, you know, in a proper environment. So we have to take her out of Homs quite quickly, and that's the most difficult part of course."

The court-martial has opened near Washington of the American soldier Bradley Manning, who's accused of passing hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the Wikileaks website. Paul Adams reports from Washington.

This is the start of what could be a protracted process. Bradley Manning has now been formally charged with 22 separate offences, including aiding America's enemies. But after hearing the charges, the 24-year-old soldier exercised his right - not to enter a plea or to choose whether to be tried by a military jury or judge alone. If found guilty, he could face a maximum sentence of life in prison. The prosecution will say that he leaked more than 700,000 documents to Wikileaks. His defence will counter that he was a troubled soldier who should never have had access to such a large quantity of classified material.

Doubts have been raised about an experiment which stunned the scientific world last year when it appeared to show subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light. Researchers at the Cern laboratory near Geneva now say they've found flaws in the way that sophisticated clocks were set up to measure the speed of neutrinos.

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A report by the human rights organisation Amnesty International says about 400 Afghans a day are fleeing their homes because of the armed conflict in the country. It says about half a million Afghans are now displaced. It also accuses Afghan officials of failing to let international aid agencies help the displaced. A senior Afghan official told the BBC that such allegations were baseless.

American officials have had their first direct talks with North Korea since Kim Jong-un took power after his father's death. The US envoy Glyn Davies described the talk as "serious and substantive". The United States is offering food aid in exchange for North Korea abandoning its nuclear arms programmes. Michael Bristow reports from Beijing.

The US envoy to these talks, Glyn Davies, said little following two meetings with North Korean officials in Beijing. He said the talks had covered a number of issues but didn't want to go into details. That discussions were "serious and substantive" was all he would say. The two sides are due to meet again on Friday.

The Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is to travel to Cuba on Friday for a new cancer operation. It's in the same area where he had a cancerous tumour removed last year. Mr Chavez has said the lesion is probably malignant and warned that he'll have to reduce his workload ahead of presidential elections in October. The Venezuelan leader had previously declared himself cancer-free.

New research suggests it may have been only relatively mild drought conditions that led to the demise of the highly developed Mayan civilisation, which flourished until about 1,100 years ago in parts of what's now Mexico and Guatemala. Scientists have long thought that repeated severe drought produced the decline. But Mexican and British researchers now think that a sustained drop in rainfall of no more than 40% was enough to ensure that evaporation of water from the reservoirs outstripped replenishment.

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