BBC在线收听下载:意大利前总理因逃税获刑

BBC news 2012-10-27

BBC News with Jerry Smit

An Italian court has convicted the former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of tax evasion and sentenced him to prison. The conviction centered on deals by Mr. Berlusconi’s media corporation to buy American TV shows through illegal slush funds. From Rome, Alan Johnston.

Mr Berlusconi said that he had again been hounded by political enemies in the judiciary. He will appeal and the case may well drag on so long that it will ran out of time and expire. But even by the standards of Mr. Berlusconi’s extraordinarily colorful story, the outcome of this case has been a striking development. This time last year he was running this country from the prime minister’s office. And now a judge has ruled that he should actually be behind bars.

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There have been multiple violations of a temporary ceasefire in Syria between the government and rebel groups. In Damascus, a car-bomb killed at least five people and wounded more than 30 others. Activists’ sources say more than 40 people have been killed. Both sides have blamed each other. But government forces appeared not to have carried out air attacks, which have been increasingly become a key tactic.

The American economy picked up in the third quarter of the year, the new data showing growth at an annual rate of 2% in the three months to September. The figure (is) slightly better than forecast. It’s the last to be released before the US presidential election where the economy is the key factor. Paul Adams reports from Washington.

On the face of it, the latest report represents a modest bit of good news for President Barack Obama. Coming on top of a recent drop in the unemployment rate, the figures for consumers spending and home-building are positive, but the report does nothing to alter a well-established impression over a painfully slow recovery. The two main presidential campaigns will do what they can with the numbers, but the figures are unlikely to shift public opinion one way or the other so close to election day. Most people have reached their own conclusions about the state of the economy based on personal experience. They don’t need the commerce department to tell them what to think.

Paul Adams.

World News from the BBC

The human rights group Amnesty International says more than 200 people have been illegally detained and tortured this year in Ivory Coast. Amnesty says its staff has spoken to dozens who say they have been subjected to electric shocks or sexual abuse after being seized by the security forces. It expressed concern that the detention amounted to reprisals for attacks played on supporters of the former President Laurent Gbagbo.

One of Cuba’s best-known dissident Eloy Gutierrez-Menoyo has died in Havana aged 77. He was an ally of Fidel Castro during the 1959 Cuban revolution, but later led a failed armed uprising against him. Will Grant reports.

Eloy Gutierrez-Menoyo was one of the few men who actively fought on both sides of the Cuban revolution. Born in Madrid, he was the son of a republican fighter against General Franco in the Spanish civil war. His family moved to Cuba in the 40s and he eventually took up arms with Fidel Castro. However, after the revolution took power and became openly Marxist, Leninist in character, Gutierrez-Menoyo began to lose faith with its leadership. He fled to Miami in 1961 and helped set up an arm unit called Alpha 66 intended to remove Castro from power. They returned to Cuba with that aim in 1964, but were caught within a month.

Hurricane Sandy has now known to have killed more than 30 people as it passed through the Caribbean before heading towards the United States. It caused widespread damage in the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica.

Cycling's world governing body, the UCI, has announced there will be no winner of the Tour de France for the seven years. The victory was awarded to the disgraced American cyclist Lance Armstrong. He was stripped of his victories after the US anti-doping agency produced a dossier accused him of extensive doping.

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