BBC在线收听下载:美国财政部制裁俄罗斯7名相关人员

BBC news 2014-04-12

BBC News with Kathy Clugston.

The White House has said the United States will not issue a visa to the man nominated by Iran to be its next ambassador to the United Nations which has its headquarters in New York. Hamid Aboutalebi has been linked to the group which stormed the US embassy in Tehran in 1979. From Washington, Rajini Vaidyanathan.

It's unusual for a government to intervene in a country's choice for UN ambassador. But deep misgivings about Hamid Aboutalebi are why the White House says it won't issue him a visa to take up the post in New York. A veteran diplomat who served in many countries, it is his connections to the Iran hostage crisis which have raised huge concerns. Mr. Aboutalebi was a member of the Muslim student group which held 52 Americans hostage in 1979. He maintains he's only a translator and negotiator.

The United States Treasury is imposing sanctions on 7 more people in connection with Russia's annexation of Crimea. From Washington, Beth Mcleod reports.

This is the third round of sanctions linked to the Ukraine crisis imposed by the US Treasury. The earlier wave mostly targeted Russian officials and business people. This time the Treasury has frozen the US based assets of one former Ukrainian official and 6 Crimean leaders including the chairman of the Crimean electoral commission and the mayor of Sevastopol. The new sanctions also target a subsidiary of a Ukrainian state gas company whose assets have been seized by the Crimean authorities.

The senior Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat says the Palestinian authority's decision to sign up to the Geneva Conventions doesn't mean the territory is breaking off the current round of peace talks. Israel had vehemently opposed the move now approved by Switzerland and it's applied new economic sanctions. Here's our diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus.

They argue that this throws the whole effort to negotiate with the Palestinians into dispute because they say this  was one of the conditions that they sat down the Palestinians would not pursue membership of this type of international organization whilst those talks were underway. The talks of course are due to end on April 29th. They are in a sort of limbo at the moment. But the Palestinians for their parts say that it was the Israelis who broke the conditions, that it had been laid down by not going through with the fourth release of Palestinian prisoners.

Pope Francis has said he takes personal responsibility for the evil of priests who sexually abuse children. During the meeting with representatives of children's organizations, the pope asked victims to forgive him and said those responsible must face sanctions. He said the church needed to be even stronger in dealing with such scandals in the future. Pope Francis has been criticized for not making the issue a priority. And the BBC correspondent in Rome says these remarks were his strongest yet.

World News from the BBC.

Police in Brazil say they've detained 6 people as part of a wider investigation into money laundering that includes the former director of the country's oil giant Petrobras. They said they had also obtained documents from the Brazilian state run company and that it was cooperating with the authorities.

The group of twenty leading nations has agreed to give the United States until the end of the year to ratify reforms to the International Monetary Fund. The reforms which give emerging economies a bigger role in the fund have been held up by political rivalries in the United States congress. If Washington fails to approve the plans agreed back in 2010, the G20 said it would then ask the IMF to study alternative options.

Serbian archaeologists have used heavy machinery to move the skeleton of a prehistoric mammoth from a coal mine. The female skeleton nicknamed Vika was unearthed in the east of the country 5 years ago. Here is our Belgrade correspondent Guy De Launey.

Moving a prehistoric pachyderm is naturally a mammoth task, especially when like Vika, she's reckoned to be about a million years old. The preparations took months. First, the archaeologists had to encase the mammoth in 60 tons worth of sand and rubber to stop the bones shifting about. Then, cranes and bulldozers moved in to transfer the remains to a permanent resting place. Vika will go on show in an exhibition center a few kilometers from the opencast mine where she was found.

Guy De Launey.

The ashes of a French resistance veteran have been buried near the mass grave of comrades who perished at a concentration camp in Germany during the World War II. Louis Bertrand, who survived several months at the Langenstein-Zwieberge camp had expressed a wish to be given a final resting place alongside more than 4,000 colleagues who lost their lives there. Mr. Bertrand himself died last June at the age of 90.

BBC News.