BBC在线收听下载:法航人员前往阿尔及利亚坠客机坠机点调查

BBC news 2014-07-26

BBC News with Sue Montgomery.

Israeli government says it has unanimously rejected a proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza, put forward by the US Secretary of State John Kerry. Mr. Kerry said he had been working with the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon towards achieving a 7-day ceasefire and remained confident such an agreement could be reached. From Jerusalem, Bethany Bell.

Mr. Kerry said serious progress had been made towards a temporary truce, but there was more work to be done. On the table is a proposed 7-day ceasefire which would go into effect next week at the start of the Muslim festival of Eid. The temporary truce is intended to pave the way for further talks on a more permanent ceasefire. But it seems Israel has rejected the plan in its current form. However, an Israeli official told the BBC that a 12-hour humanitarian ceasefire is being considered.

The leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah has made a rare public appearance in which he expressed support for Hamas, despite their rift over the war in Syria. Speaking to thousands of supporters in southern Beirut, Mr. Nasrallah called for differences between the 2 groups to be put aside, because the situation in Gaza was above all other considerations.

Russia has accused the United States of conducting an international smear campaign against it, claiming it's trying to influence international opinion through falsehoods and anti-Russian propaganda. A foreign ministry spokesman in Moscow rejected US accusations that Russia had armed the rebels in eastern Ukraine or that the Russian military had fired artillery into Ukraine. From Washington, Aleem Maqbool. 

The Pentagon says it's got evidence that over recent days, Russia has been shelling Ukrainian military positions from Russian soil, amassed up to 12,000 troops at the border and is ready to deliver more powerful rocket launchers to rebels in eastern Ukraine, something that could happen even today, it says. It's reinforcing briefings given by the US statement department of late along similar lines. But once again American officials declined to elaborate on the intelligence that gathered.

Wikipedia has imposed a ban on page edits from computers at the US House of Representatives after anonymous changes were made to entries about politicians, businesses and historical events. Here is Rajini Vaidyanathan.

Wikipedia has blocked users from the US Capitol from making changes to address what it describes as persistent disruptive editing. One entry referred to former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld as an alien lizard who eats Mexican babies, another said President Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted on behalf of Fidel Castro. The Wikipedia site allows users to contribute to and update pages, but also monitors content which is false or unverified.

BBC News.

The authorities in Sierra Leone are appealing for public help in tracking down an Ebola patient who's been forcibly taken by a family from a hospital in the capital Freetown. It's the first case of the deadly disease in the densely populated city. And radio messages have been broadcast, warning all residents of the risks posed by contact with her. The are fears that Ebola could also spread to west Africa's most populous country Nigeria.

French air accident investigators are traveling to the site in northern Mali where an Air Algerie plane crashed on Thursday, killing all 116 people onboard. French troops have secured the wreckage which is packed in a relatively small area. France has now said 54 of the passengers held French or dual nationality.

The United Nations Population Fund says it's unable to verify claims that Islamist militants in northern Iraq have ordered women and girls to undergo female genital mutilation. Imogen Foulkes reports from Geneva.

The UN's announcement that a militant Islamist group in Iraq had ordered women to undergo FGM made headlines around the world, but it also raised doubts with some claiming the UN's information was based on an old and forged document circulating on social media. For almost 24 hours, the UN said nothing, but now a spokesman for the UN Population Fund has confirmed that the agency can not verify the claim and does not know where the information came from.

A Russian experiment to study the sex lives of Geckoes in space has run into trouble after the satellite carrying the creatures suffered a malfunction. The rocket carrying the Russian satellite lifted off from Kazakhstan a week ago but has now stopped responding to commands.  The experiment into the effect of weightlessness on reptile sexual reproduction is still continuing.

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