BBC在线收听下载:“卡特里娜”飓风10周年 奥巴马访问新奥尔良

BBC news 2015-08-31

Hello, I’m IanPurdon with the BBC News.

Rescue operations are underway of the coast of Libya after two boats carrying about 500 migrants capsize near the port of Zuwara. One unconfirmed report says there are at least 100 bodies at a hospital in Zuwara including nationals from Syria, Bangladesh and several sub-Sahara African countries. Our Libya correspondent Rana Jawad is in Tunis. “We haven’t been able to establish how many people were on each boat, but from the people we’ve been speaking to we are told that there were at least 400 up to 500 are on both of them. Our rescue operation is still underway for one of those boats that capsized later in the day. And we understand that at least twenty all together have been rescued, but hundreds are basically feared dead at the stage.”

Austrian police say they’ve known until Friday the exact number of dead migrants found in an abandoned lorry near the Hungarian border. The initial estimates vary from twenty to fifty. The lorry had been left on the side of a road on Wednesday.

President Obama has marked the 10th anniversary of hurricane Katrina by praising the response of the people of New Orleans to the devastation their city suffered. In a commemorative speech then Mr. Obama said what had started as a natural disaster became a manmade disaster. “New Orleans, like so many cities and communities across the country, had for too long been plagued by structural inequality that left too many people, especially poor people, especially people of color, without good jobs or affordable health care, or decent housing, too many kids grow up surrounded by violent crime cycling through substandard schools where few had a shade to break out of poverty. And so, like a body weakened, when the storm hit, there’s no resources to fall back on.”

There has been a surge in the number of death since Saudi Arabia from what is known as Mers, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. Authorities say 17 people have dead over the past seven days. Allan Johnston reports. “MERS infections have been recorded in countries across the Middle East, Europe and Asia, but Saudi has been hit hardest. And now the kingdom is coping with a surge in the number of fatalities. Four more deaths were reported on Thursday. And health officials admit that they are worried by the timing of this. Next month more than two million Muslins from all around the world will gather in Saudi for the annual hajj pilgrimage.”

An Egyptian court has sentenced twelve members of the Islamic State Group to death. They were convicted of joining IS and have planning attacks against police and soldiers. An official says six of these on trial were still at large. World news from the BBC.

The father of the US reporter killed on Wednesday has said President Obama must use the opportunity to push through tougher gun control. Andy Parker acknowledged that would be an uphill battle. “I would appeal to the president right now, this is your perfect opportunity, work with the press, they are on your side. They just lost one of their own.”

The Columbia President Juan Manuel Santos has recalled his country’s ambassador to Venezuela for consultations as the border between the two countries remains closed. The Venezuelan President Nicols Maduro announced the border closure a week ago after three Venezuelan soldiers were wounded in a shoot-out with smuggling gangs.

French police have arrested two writers suspected of trying to blackmail the Moroccan authorities. Eric Laurent and Catherine Graciet are alleged to have asked for more than three million dollars not to publish a book said to contain compromising information reportedly about the king.

President Obama and King Salman al Saud of Saudi Arabia will meet in Washington next Friday. Discussions will focus on Syria, Yemen and what the White House said were Iran’s destabilizing activities in the Middle East. Relations between the two countries have cooled during recent nuclear negotiations between the US and Iran.

And finally British scientists have found a man with an immune system disorder has been unwittingly spreading polio for nearly 30 years despite having been vaccinated against the disease. Roger Walker reports. “The man’s immune disorder meant that the vacant polio virus used to vaccinate in childhood had not been killed in his gut. It had subsequently mutated into strains of live virus capable of causing paralysis as researchers discovered from samples taken from the man over a ten-year period. The case is thought unlikely to be unique, and doctors fear other people with the same disorder could trigger new outbreaks of polio among individuals who have not been vaccinated.” That is the BBC News.