BBC在线收听下载:波兰拟购美“爱国者”导弹

BBC news 2015-04-22

BBC News with Jerry Smit.

Saudi Arabia says it has ended its bombing campaign against Houthis rebels in Yemen. The Saudi Defence Ministry said the focus would now shift towards finding a political solution and preventing the movement of the Houthis fighters. But it said military force would still be used when needed. Our Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, is in the Saudi city of Jeddah.“A military spokesman in Riyadh said that the new operation, renewal of hope, would concentrate on preventing the movement of the Houthis militias, on providing aid and on a political solution in Yemen. Military force would still be used when needed. The Saudis have claimed victory in the first stage of their campaign. But the Yemeni government has not been restored, and the Houthis militia is still fighting supporters of the ousted government and still controls the capital of Yemen.”

The Army in South Africa has begun deploying in areas hit by waves of violence against immigrants from elsewhere in Africa. Soldiers are patrolling parts of the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, including the volatile township in Johannesburg where a Mozambican man was killed and a couple from Zimbabwe survived a knife attack. Karen Allen has more.“The deployment of the soldiers to troubled spots was a strategy adopted in 2008, when scores of migrants were killed and thousands took to the borders in a wave of targeted attacks. Although the South African government's been quick to deploy the police and now the military, critics say it's failed to learn the economic lessons of the past. And poor leadership and persisted unemployment are fanning the flames of anti-foreigner sentiment.”

Amid continued tensions with Russia over Ukraine, Poland has announced a major deal to buy Patriot surface-to-air missiles from the United States. President Bronislaw Komorowski said Poland would enter negotiations with U.S. government to finalize the multi-billion-dollar contract. Poland has accelerated a massive military modernisation programme, because of Russia's annexation of Crimea and its subsequent support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The British authorities have arrested a financial trader Navinder Singh Sarao on 4 charges at the request of the United States. The U.S. Justice Department wants him extradited of allegations he manipulated the U.S. stock markets in May, 2010, causing an event known as the flash crash. Here's our economics correspondent, Andrew Walker.“The U.S. Department of Justice accuses Mr. Sarao of manipulation by placing large orders to sell financial futures related to the U.S. stock market. Although the orders would generally not be carried out, they did still affect market prices, the Department argues, and they contributed to the flash crash of May, 2010, when the Dow Jones Index fell by 600 points within 5 minutes. Another U.S. agency, a financial regulator, says that Mr. Sarao and his company made profits of forty million dollars over a period of 5 years by using this strategy.”World news from the BBC.

Amnesty International has condemned the 20-year prison sentence given to the former Egyptian President, Mohammed Morsi. The human rights group said the verdict shuddered any illusion that Egypt's criminal justice system retained independence and impartiality. This was the first verdict in a series of cases which have been brought against Mr. Morsi, since the military deposed him in 2013. Mr. Morsi was one of more than a dozen people sentenced for the detention and torture of protesters.

Italian investigators have questioned the captain of a ship that capsized in the Mediterranean on Sunday, causing the deaths of about eight hundred migrants. The captain would appear in court in Sicily on Friday charged with mass homicide. Prosecutors believe he was responsible for a collision with a Portuguese merchant ship that had come to the rescue of his overcrowded boat. Laurent Laurens Jolles speaks for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Italy.“We are talking about a boat that had several layers, in which people were sort of packed as sardines, really. And when the boat capsized, it just immediately went down and so the persons who were on top managed to, probably, get out and jumped into the sea. And, well, some of them died, but others were the ones that are the survivors.”

The United States Military says it has no reason to believe reports that the leader of the Islamic State militant group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was seriously wounded by an airstrike in Iraq last month. The Pentagon said that self-portrayed caliph was not one of the U.S.-led coalition's targets on the day he said to have been hurt. But one Iraqi government spokesman told the BBC the reports were accurate.

A frustrated computer user in the U.S. state of Colorado has been charged by police after he took his uncooperative machine into an alley and shot it with a handgun 8 times. The man, Lucas Hinch, said he'd been struggling to use the computer for several months. BBC News.