BBC news 2012-06-30 加文本

BBC news 2012-06-30

BBC News with Fiona MacDonald

Egypt's president-elect Mohamed Morsi from the Muslim Brotherhood has taken an informal oath of office before tens of thousands of supporters in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Mr Morsi declared that there was no power above people power, telling the crowd that they were now the source of sovereignty and authority in Egypt. All Egyptians, he said, would be treated equally.

"All those who voted for me and all those who didn't, I am for you. No one's legal rights will be transgressed. This is democracy."

Mr Morsi, who's Egypt's first civilian president, has his official inauguration on Saturday.

In a further boost to overcome the eurozone debt crisis, the lower house of the German parliament has decisively approved two of Chancellor Angela Merkel's key policies. They voted in favour of a permanent eurozone rescue fund as well as the fiscal pact which aims to prevent countries from running up excessive debts. But the pact still faces political obstacles, as Steve Evans reports from Berlin.

The so-called fiscal pact is the measure by which Chancellor Merkel set such great store as the means to put economies in the eurozone back on their feet. But there are still problems in Germany. In that the country's president has indicated he won't sign it into law until a legal position is clarified. It all illustrates just how hard it is for Chancellor Merkel to get measures she thinks are essential through the German democratic procedure.

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says he believes there's a good chance of finding common ground on Syria at talks in Geneva on Saturday, but he warned against trying to impose any outcome in advance. Mr Lavrov was speaking after meeting the American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in St Petersburg. Here's Steve Rosenberg.

Russia's role is vital because it has influence in Damascus which the other players don't. It supplies Syria with weapons and political support. While Russia's veto at the UN Security Council has already been used as a counter-weight to Western pressure, recent rhetoric between Russia and America suggests that East and West still don't agree on the key question - the fate of President Assad.

Gunmen in Kenya have kidnapped four international aid workers at the Dadaab refugee camp in the north of the country. The aid workers were seized when an aid agency convoy was ambushed as it drove through the sprawling camp. A Kenyan driver for the agency, the Norwegian Refugee Council, was killed. The Somali Islamist group al-Shabab is often blamed for kidnappings in the area.

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Paraguay has been suspended from the South American trading bloc Mercosur a week after the impeachment of President Fernando Lugo described by regional leaders as a parliamentary coup. The presidents of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay said Paraguay will remain outside the bloc until the next presidential election in April, but they decided not to impose sanctions. They also announced that Venezuela would now become a full member of Mercosur.

The brother of the American fraudster Bernard Madoff has pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and falsifying records and has agreed to serve 10 years in prison. But Peter Madoff said he'd not known his brother's decades-long securities business was a sham until his brother told him it had collapsed in 2008. From New York, here's the BBC's Nada Tawfik.

Bernie Madoff maintained no one else knew of his elaborate Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors of $20bn, but prosecutors were never convinced. Peter Madoff helped to run his brother's Wall Street firm, but in a New York court he told the judge he was in total shock when Bernie Madoff revealed he had defrauded investors of billions of dollars, and that he was deeply ashamed and terribly sorry. But the FBI says Peter Madoff was one of the chief architects of the scheme, signing his name to documents that certified the firm's investment balances.

The Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has made clear through his spokeswoman that he will continue to seek political asylum in Ecuador. He's wanted in Sweden for alleged sexual offences. Today British police requested that he report to a London police station, but his spokeswoman told the media that Mr Assange feared this would eventually lead to his extradition to the United States on espionage charges.

The film star Tom Cruise and his wife actress Katie Holmes are getting divorced after five years of marriage. They have a six-year-old daughter. Cruise has been married twice before to Nicole Kidman and Mimi Rogers.

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