BBC在线收听下载:马来西亚92岁前总理重返政坛

Hello, I'm Jerry Smit with the BBC news.

The newly elected Prime Minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad has said that the King is willing to grant a full pardon for his political ally Anwar Ibrahim. The opposition leader, a former deputy prime minister, has been in prison since February 2015. Jonathan Head reports from Kuala Lumper. Twenty years ago Mahathir Mohamad sacked Anwar Ibrahim as deputy prime minister and had him imprisoned on dubious sodomy charges. Today, he's calling for his release from a second jail term imposed three years ago. Such is the remarkable turnaround in Malaysian politics, which has seen the 92-year-old former prime minister return to office, this time as leader of the opposition, inflicting the first ever defeat on the ruling party he once led. Getting on why Ibrahim pardoned was one of the conditions for Dr. Mahathir to be accepted by an opposition movement he once tried to crush.

The Philippines top judge Maria Sereno has been removed from office by her fellow judges. It follows a series of clashes with the President Rodrigo Duterte. Howard Johnson reports from Manila. It is the first time in the Philippines that a chief justice has been removed from office in this way. Mrs. Sereno has also been facing separate impeachment proceedings for 27 allegations of wrongdoing, including corruption and betrayal of the public trust. Speaking to BBC news, she described the allegations as hogwash and said that the actions against her were unconstitutional and political. Mrs. Sereno has been a fierce critic of President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs, a campaign which has seen thousands of drug users and dealers killed during police operations.

The Chief Justice of Pakistan Saqib Nisar has described the attacks on the minority Hazara community as ethnic cleansing. The attacks are blamed on Sunni extremists. Here is Abrason Antiragon. These were strong comments from Pakistan's top judge, referring to the violence against the Hazaras were Shia muslims. The court took up the case on its own following a spate of attacks on the community in the city of Quetta. More than six hundred thousand Hazaras live in Sunni majority Pakistan. Police say at least nine members of the community have been killed in targeted attacks in the past four months while hundreds of Hazaras have died over the past few years.

World news from the BBC.