BBC在线收听下载:马来西亚当局扩大搜索失联飞机范围

BBC news 2014-03-11

BBC News with Marion Marshall.

Pro-Russia forces are continuing to consolidate their hold on Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula, meeting very little resistance. Up to 30 men in military uniform have taken over a military hospital in the administrative capital Simferopol. Our correspondent John Simpson was there.

Around midday, a group of Russian soldiers wearing military camouflage without any badges of rank or unit arrived at the military hospital. They allowed 300 seriously ill patients to stay, but sent the outpatients home. While I was waiting outside in the street, the hospital director came out, still wearing his Ukrainian army uniform and looking very stressed and anxious. He said he had been asked at gunpoint to surrender, and when he had refused, he had been taken to a vehicle and held prisoner in it.

The Malaysian authorities have decided to search over a much wider area to try to locate an airliner that disappeared less than an hour into its flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Three days after the aircraft went missing, an international effort involving ships and planes hasn't found any wreckage, causing growing frustration for the families of the 239 people on board, most of them came from China. John Sudworth reports from Beijing.

The search area has been widened, and now includes the waters on both sides of the Malaysian Peninsula. It's a huge expansive sea and it shows that the authorities still have no idea of what's happened to the missing plane. They've released some very limited information about the two men who boarded the flight using stolen passports. They are not of Asian appearance. The travel agent who booked their tickets to Amsterdam via Beijing says they didn't specifically request flight MH370, but took it because it's the cheapest route to Europe.

Libyan officials say they have seized a North Korean flagged tanker carrying an illegal shipment of oil loaded at a port occupied by rebel forces. A spokesman for the state-owned national oil corporation said the ship was stopped as it tried to leave. Rana Jawad reports from Tripoli.

The military and the Libyan congress are claiming they have intercepted the oil tanker carrying an illegal shipment of crude oil from Libya. They say they are escorting it to a state controlled port. Meanwhile, the eastern oil port blockaded since July by former rebels described the latest claims to the BBC as government's lies. They say the ship is still docked in As-Sidra in the east of the country. Neither of the 2 claims could be independently verified.

Jordan has called for an investigation after Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian Jordanian judge at the King Hussein Border crossing which is also known as the Allenby Bridge. The Israeli ambassador to Amman was summoned to the foreign ministry over the killing of 30-year-old Raed Zeiter who was crossing from Jordan into the West Bank when an altercation took place.

World News from the BBC.

Spain's Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz has acknowledged that police should not have fired rubber bullets to try to deter migrants attempting to enter Spain's north African enclave of Ceuta in February, when at least 15 people drowned. The migrants were trying to enter the enclave by swimming around a pier from neighboring Morocco.

Iran has made a formal protest to Austria about a meeting its Tehran embassy hosted between the European Union's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and a group of human rights activists. Baroness Ashton met the rights activists on Saturday during her first visit to the country. An Iranian foreign ministry spokeswoman said such meetings would only deepen Iran's mistrust of the West.

A new study has found that wild elephants can distinguish between different human languages. Scientists from the University of Sussex in England played recordings of human speech to elephants in Amboseli national park in Kenya where hundreds of wild elephants live among humans. Richard Hamilton has more.

In Amboseli National Park, men and elephants sometimes come into conflict over scarce water resources. The result is that the animals have learnt to distinguish the voices and languages of those they consider a threat. In their experiment, the scientists played recordings of Maasai men, who have been known to kill the creatures and Kamba men who are less of threats. When they heard the Maasai voices, the elephants retreated and regrouped, but stayed their ground when they heard Kamba. These remarkable findings suggest that the elephants have built up a memory capacity to make quite subtle distinctions between human voices.

The President of Bayern Munich football club Uli Hoenss has admitted in court that he evaded paying 18 million euros in tax, a figure far higher than the prosecution had initially alleged. He said he had kept the money in a secret Swiss bank account during a period of obsessive gambling on stocks.