BBC在线收听下载:韩国客轮沉没 近300人下落不明

BBC news 2014-04-17

BBC news with Sue Montgomery.

Divers have spent the night searching the corridors of the passenger ferry that sank off the coast of South Korea, almost 300 people are still missing. The country's Prime Minister Chung Hong-won has warned there is not a second to lose, and urged those involved to do their utmost to save more lives. Our correspondent Lucy Williamson is in the coastal town of Jindo.

Outside Jindo's gymnasium tonight, a list of names. The survivors from this disaster posted up on boards. Hundreds of names are missing, parents searching for their children, often come away in distress. Rescuers struggled to cope with the speed of events out of the sea, an hour after they arrived, the ship sank. Just a tip of it visible above the water.

Masked gunmen have taken over the Mayor's building in the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. It comes as pro-Russian groups consolidated their control of government buildings in a number of towns and cities in eastern Ukraine. Our correspondent David Stern saw what happened.

I went there and I saw that there were indeed, men in ski masks, well-armed, who were kicking over the city's administration building. They said they will remain there until the government accepts their demand that there will be a referendum for a political status, whether or not to grant more autonomy or perhaps even independence to the eastern region. And of course, no one really quite knows what will be the government's decision tomorrow, but more importantly, nobody really knows what will be the reaction in the rest of Ukraine as well.

The Pakistani Taliban or TTP have refused to extend a ceasefire they declared last month to facilitate peace talks with the Pakistani government. It comes three days after Pakistan's interior minister said the process was about to enter what he called a comprehensive phase. From Islamabad, Haroon Rashid reports.

The Pakistani Taliban had announced a ceasefire on the first of March this year, which came as a big relief for
ordinary Pakistanis. Negotiations between the gunmen and the Taliban continued for some time, but lately reports of a deadlock had emerged. The Taliban said its Central Council took a unanimous decision not to extend the ceasefire, but still wants to continue with the talks. It complained that the government was completely silent on its initial demands.

The UN Security Council has heralded a proposal to create a special medal for bravery in UN Peacekeeping. It was inspired by a BBC documentary about a UN soldier, Senegalese captain Mbaye Diagne, who served in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. The documentary A Good Man in Rwanda, centered on how Captain Diagne, who was himself killed two months into the manslaughter, personally saved hundreds of lives.

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The governor of Borno state in northeast Nigeria has offered a $300,000 reward for information that will help find the teenage girls abducted on Tuesday. A hundred girls were taken from their school by a gunman suspected to be from the militant Islamist group Boko Haram.

A US Federal Judge has overturned a controversial law in the state of North Dakota that bans abortions as soon as a
fetal heartbeat is detected - sometimes as early as six weeks into pregnancy. The judge ruled the law was invalid and unconstitutional. The law was challenged by the state's only abortion clinic.

Scientists at the US Space Agency, NASA believed the planet of Saturn may be about to produce its 63rd moon. New findings show a noticeable bump in the outermost of Saturn's distinctive rings. The latest moon is expected to a half of a diameter of less than 1km. More details from David Shukman.

The bump is the result of the particles that make up the ring becoming distorted by the presence of something large. So the evidence is circumstantial but potentially very revealing, because the latest theory is that Saturn's moon was first formed in its rings. So, this object, nicknamed Peggy may have been pictured at very act of birth. What happens to it now isn't clear. If Peggy continues to orbit inside the rings, it may be destroyed by collisions with smaller lumps of ice, and if it escapes, its small size may make it impossible to see again. So the scientists believe they witnessed a hugely significant moment, but one is likely to prove fleeting.

Dramatic online images of a public execution halted at the last minute have provoked a widespread debate in Iran. The pictures showed the condemned man standing beside the noose blindfolded and screaming. The mother of the man he killed in a fight when they were both 17, slaps him on the cheek, but then pardons him, sparing his life.

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