BBC在线收听下载:美国共和党初选投票开始

BBC news 2012-02-29

BBC News with Mike Cooper

Syrian activists have helped to smuggle out of Syria a British photographer, Paul Conroy, who had been trapped in Homs since being wounded there last week. Several activists are reported to have been killed in the operation to get him out of the besieged district of Baba Amr. Jim Muir reports from Beirut.

Paul Conroy left Baba Amr during the day yesterday. He was smuggled across the border into Lebanon in the middle of the night and taken to Beirut, where he's resting after his ordeal. He was wounded in shelling last Wednesday that killed his colleague Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times and a French photo journalist, Remi Ochlik. But his wounds are relatively light. An activist who helped smuggle him across the border said he was able to walk, was in good health and good spirits. There are conflicting reports about what's happened to the other wounded journalist Edith Bouvier. She's more seriously hurt and needs to be carried on a stretcher. Reports that she too has crossed the border into Lebanon have not been fully confirmed.

Polls have opened in the latest Republican Party primaries in the United States. Voters in Michigan and Arizona are choosing who they want to challenge President Obama in November's election. In Arizona, Mitt Romney is expected to win comfortably, but Rick Santorum has mounted a strong challenge to him in Michigan. Paul Adams reports from Washington.

Of the two contests today, all eyes are on Michigan. A few weeks ago, this would have been unthinkable: Mitt Romney grew up there, and his father was the governor. But Rick Santorum's victories in three states earlier this month energised his campaign and shattered the notion that Mitt Romney might wrap up the nomination quickly. If the more socially conservative Mr Santorum wins in Michigan and even if it's close, then it'll be clear that this contest is far from over.

A study has found that incinerated remains from victims of the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001 ended up in landfill waste disposal sites. The partial remains were from people killed in the attack on the Pentagon and the hijacked airliner which crashed in Pennsylvania that day. The remains could not be identified.

The French President Nicolas Sarkozy has ordered his government to draft a new bill making it illegal to deny that genocide was pursued against Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915. Mr Sarkozy issued the statement after France's constitutional court had struck down an earlier law on genocide denial, saying it infringed freedom of expression. Here's Christian Fraser.

The decision of the constitutional court will be welcomed by the Turkish government, who warned the bill would risk a serious crisis in relations between the two countries. But Mr Sarkozy said it was a great disappointment to those who had supported the bill. Genocide denial, said his statement, is intolerable and so must be punished. The vote in parliament spurred angry protests by Turks both in Paris and in Ankara. The Turkish government suspended political and military cooperation with France after the Senate approved the bill. The Turkish foreign minister said it was still too early to decide whether to restart full diplomatic relations.

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The Venezuelan government says President Hugo Chavez has had a successful operation in Cuba to remove a potentially cancerous lesion from his pelvic area. Hugo Chavez had two operations and chemotherapy for cancer in the same area last year. His renewed illness has cast doubt on his ability to campaign for re-election in October. But the Vice-President Elias Jaua said Mr Chavez was in good shape after the operation.

"The tumour on the pelvis has been completely removed, including the surrounding tissue. There were no complications with other organs. He's in a stable condition with no complications and is making good progress."

Health regulators in the United States say that widely used drugs for lowering cholesterol may raise blood sugar levels and could cause memory loss. The Food and Drug Administration says it's placing warning labels on the drugs known as statins, which are considered to reduce the risk of heart attacks and heart disease. A spokesman for the FDA said the risks associated with taking statins remained extremely low.

Two museums in Poland and the United States are wrangling over the fate of a barracks building from the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. A spokesman for the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in Poland has said the loan of the barracks to the Washington-based Holocaust Memorial Museum has expired, but the Holocaust Memorial Museum says it could be damaged if disassembled and transported back to Poland. Here's Danny Aeberhard.

The relic at the heart of this dispute is highly symbolic: half of one of the wooden barracks used to cram in thousands of prisoners at the Birkenau section of the wide Auschwitz complex before they were taken to the gas chambers. The Holocaust Memorial Museum is keen to hold on to a prized exhibit. It says the loan it originally signed over 20 years ago was renewable. The director of the Auschwitz museum has hit back, telling a Polish newspaper, Rzeczpospolita, that any self-respecting museum returned loaned objects.

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