BBC在线收听下载:意大利触礁豪华邮轮被扶正

BBC news 2013-09-17

BBC News with Julie Candler

Thirteen people including a suspected gunman have been killed during a shooting rampage inside a US navy complex in central Washington. Police said the suspect was a 34-year-old Texan, and another gunman might still be at large. Staff who were arriving for work when the first shots were fired have described a chaotic scramble to flee the building. At a news conference within the past hour, Washington’s mayor, Vincent Gray, said the city had experienced nothing like it before.

“This is a horrific tragedy, certainly one of the worst in recent memory and certainly I don’t know we can ever remember anything quite like this here in the city. We know these kinds of things have happened in other places, in other cities in America, but nothing like this here in the District of Columbia.”

The police said there was no reason to believe it was a terrorist attack. From Washington, here’s Katy Watson.

In President Obama’s words, America is mourning yet another mass shooting. It started nine hours ago at the Washington Navy Yard—one of the country’s most important naval-command centres. According to the FBI, one gunman was killed. He’s been identified as 34-year-old Aaron Alexis. The shooting led to tightened security on Capitol Hill. The Senate was closed down while police continued the hunt. Officers say there’s no motive for the attacks, but questions have already been raised about how in a building with heavy security something like this could have happened.

United Nations inspectors have concluded that chemical weapons were used on a relatively large scale in an attack near the Syrian capital Damascus last month in the first official confirmation by independent experts of chemical weapons’ use in Syria. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said their report provided overwhelming evidence of a chemical attack. Here’s our diplomatic correspondent James Robbins.

The inspectors say in their report “the environmental chemical and medical samples we have collected provide clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent sarin were used on August 21st”. The conclusion of their report is that chemical weapons have been used in the on-going conflict on a relatively large scale. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the international community had a responsibility to hold the perpetrators accountable. When he went on to add that Syria had belatedly acknowledged it possessed chemical weapons, the UN secretary general seemed to point the finger of blame pretty clearly.

Turkey has shot down a Syrian military helicopter. The Turkish deputy prime minister said the helicopter had strayed two kilometres into Turkish airspace and was hit with a missile after repeated warnings. Syria said the helicopter had strayed only a short distance into Turkish airspace. A statement by Syria’s armed forces said Turkey’s hasty reaction showed its true intention was to escalate the situation on the border.

World News from the BBC

An attempt to raise the capsized cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, is continuing into the night in Italy. Engineers have succeeded in lifting the luxury liner off the rocks 20 months after it ran aground off the island of Giglio. But the BBC’s Alan Johnston who’s watching the salvage effort says the operation has taken longer than expected.

Late in the afternoon, a difficulty with a cable attached to the wreck led to more than an hour suspension of the entire operation and the programme is well behind schedule now. There is originally talk of having the ship up on her keel by sunset, but that target was badly missed. They are talking about working all through the night and that it’ll be dawn at the earliest before this thing ends.

The British government is to sell off part of the stake in one of the country’s leading banks that it required at the height of the financial crisis. It used tax payers’ money to rescue Lloyds bank in 2008 and now plans to sell 6% of its 39% shareholding. This is likely to raise more than $5bn, meaning the British government will get back more or less the price it paid for these shares.

A mudslide in Mexico’s eastern state of Veracruz has killed at least 12 people hours after Hurricane Ingrid made landfall on the country’s gulf coast. Another 22 people have died since Saturday on the western Pacific coast which had been battered by Tropical Storm Manuel. The area around the resort of Acapulco has been one of the most-affected.

The former Malaysian communist party leader Chin Peng has died in exile in Thailand. He was 88. For decades Chin Peng led a guerrilla campaign in the jungles of Malaysia. He fought the Japanese in the Second World War, then British colonial authorities and finally the Malaysian government after independence. The communist party signed a peace treaty in 1989, but Chin Peng was never allowed to return from exile.

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