BBC在线收听下载:玻利维亚将国有化西班牙输电公司

BBC news 2012-05-02

BBC News with Neil Nunes

President Obama is making a surprise visit to Afghanistan on the first anniversary of the death of the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. He has signed a 10-year strategic partnership agreement with the Afghan leader Hamid Karzai, setting out military and civil relations between their two countries after the conclusion of Nato's mission in Afghanistan in 2014. From Washington, Paul Adams.

Air Force One, the jumbo jet carrying President Obama, landed at the Bagram airbase north of Kabul. The president then flew onto the Afghan capital by helicopter. He'll only be on the ground for a few hours, but the strategic partnership he and President Karzai have just signed is the product of months of difficult negotiations. Only when differences over night raids by special forces and the handling of prisoners were ironed out did the agreement finally fall into place. It's a first symbolic step towards setting out a long-term relationship designed to reassure the people of Afghanistan that they are not about to be abandoned when Nato ends its operations there in 18 months' time.

The Libyan government has officially challenged the right of the International Criminal Court to try Colonel Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam for war crimes. From the Libyan capital Tripoli, Rana Jawad has more details.

A fresh bid from Libya to judges in The Hague, it's unclear when a decision will be made on this latest appeal by Libyan lawyers, but it's believed it could take months. A spokesman from Libya's justice ministry, Nuri al-Bharathi, told the BBC that it's important for Saif al-Islam to be tried on home soil to revive faith in the Libyan judiciary. He said it's crucial that the Libyan state shows that the new Libya will guarantee international standards in prosecuting alleged criminals.

The Bolivian President Evo Morales has nationalised a Spanish-owned electric power company. Mr Morales ordered the military to take over the subsidiary of the Spanish power company REE, which owns and runs around three quarters of Bolivia's power grid. He said he was expropriating the company because it had failed to invest sufficiently in Bolivia.

A court in New York has found a Bosnian-born American citizen guilty of plotting to bomb the city's subway network in 2009. The court heard that Adis Medunjanin was persuaded to carry out a suicide attack after receiving training with al-Qaeda in Pakistan. He was convicted in part on the basis of evidence given by two co-conspirators who pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.

The former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has had his application for diplomatic immunity thrown out by a judge in New York. Mr Strauss-Kahn will now face a civil trial in a case filed by a hotel maid who alleges he sexually assaulted her. Criminal charges were dropped when doubts emerged about the consistency of the evidence.

World News from the BBC

There's been a second day of shooting in the Malian capital Bamako between rival groups of soldiers. The leaders of a coup which overthrew President Amadou Toumani Toure in March say they have fought off an attempted takeover. They say the main barracks of the presidential guard has been overrun and the troops there have fled.

A British parliamentary committee has issued a scathing verdict on the role of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch in a phone-hacking scandal at one of his biggest newspapers. It found that News Corporation had shown "wilful blindness" over the extent of phone hacking by journalists. But the committee's strongest criticism that Rupert Murdoch was unfit to run an international company split (it) along political party lines. Ben Geoghegan reports.

The conclusion about Rupert Murdoch's fitness to run a major company is damning. Four Conservative MPs were against including it in a final report. However, there was unanimous agreement on the issue at the heart of their nine-month inquiry - whether they were misled about the extent of phone hacking at the News of the World. News Corp has rejected the committee's conclusions about Rupert Murdoch, saying they were unjustified and highly partisan.

The United Nations says that it expects to deploy the full contingent of 300 unarmed ceasefire monitors to Syria by the end of this month. The head of UN peacekeeping, Herve Ladsous, told journalists that member states had so far promised only half this number of monitors, but he was confident the force would reach full strength.

Colombia's largest rebel group, the Farc, says it is holding a French journalist who had been missing since a deadly guerrilla ambush on Saturday. In a telephone call to journalists, a woman claiming to be a Farc member said the rebels were holding Romeo Langlois as a prisoner of war.

That's the latest from BBC World News.