BBC在线收听下载:世界银行行长宣布20亿美元援缅计划

BBC news 2014-01-27

BBC News with Sue Montgomery

After second day of peace talks in Geneva, the Syrian government delegation has agreed that women and children may leave the besieged centre of the city of Homs, but said that a list of names would be needed of men who want to leave. Syrian deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad also said the government would let an aid convoy into the city. The United Nations mediator on the Syrian conflict Lakhdar Brahimi welcomed the moves as the first tangible outcome of the talks. Here's Bridget Kendall in Geneva. “This is a significant if limited development from the peace talks in Geneva. Permission from the Syrian government to lift the siege on parts of the old city of Homs, which for months had left hundreds of people trapped including the very ill and very vulnerable. But though Damascus said women and children could leave immediately, it seems there is a caveat that other civilians, in other words men could leave only if the Syrian government had a list of their names first, it's a condition that the opposition points out could be ominous as information contained in lists could be used to detain or even torture people later.”

A brain-dead woman kept alive in a hospital in the southern United States because she was pregnant has now been removed from life support. Beth McLeod has more from Washington. “Marlise Munoz was 14 weeks pregnant when she collapsed in November from a suspected blood clot. She was considered brain-dead but was kept alive by doctors in a hospital in Fort Worth. Hospital officials argued that state law prohibited them from withdrawing treatment from a pregnant patient. But a state district judge said on Friday that this law was being misapplied and ordered that all life sustaining treatments be removed. The hospital has now followed the court order. The families of Marlise Munoz had argued that she won't want to be on life support and the medical record showed the fetus was severely damaged from oxygen deprivation.”

Protesters against the Ukrainian government have continued to spread across the country with administrative headquarters besieged in more than a half of the country's regions. In Kiev here's David Stern. “The demonstrations are spreading these days demonstrations where protesters are besieging and in some cases taking over government buildings. So it's not exactly that the entire city is protesting, but there are significant demonstrations and the fact that they are taking place in what is President Viktor Yanukovych's base of popularity show a sign that something is happening in the east and that the protesters are taking on a new character.”

The President of the World Bank has announced a $2bn development program for Myanmar, the country also known as Burma. Speaking at the start of the first visit to the country by a World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said half the money would be used to extend the electricity supply while $200m would be made available to improve health services.

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The Tunisian Prime Minister-designate says he's formed a new government. The cabinet consists mainly of independents and technocrats and it's suspected to run the country until new elections. Mehdi Joma was appointed as Prime Minister in December.

The former intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden has said that the United States' National Security Agency was engaged in industrial espionage as well as spying on people to prevent terrorism. Stephen Evans reports from Berlin. “Edward Snowden has given an interview to Germany's public broadcaster ARD. In it, he says that the National Security Agency wasn't just engaged in spying to prevent violent attacks on the Untied States, but also engaged in what he called economics spying. Referring to the German engineering company Siemens, Mr. Snowden said if there is information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests,not the national security of the United States, they will go after that information.”

***省略一段***

New research suggests the Grand Canyon in the western United States may be much younger than previously thought. Scientists said earlier estimated it to be 70 million years old. Here's our science correspondent Jonathan Amos. “Running for almost 450km and to a depth of 1,800m, it's almost too vast to take in. Now a new study in the Nature Geoscience journal finds the Grand Canyon has some very old segments, but the full system was only cut into the form we know today by the

Colorado River just over five million years ago.”

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