BBC在线收听下载:美国掐断对巴勒斯坦难民援助资金

Hello, I'm Eileen Mchugh with the BBC news.

It's been criticism of the decision by the United States to withdraw all funding from the UN agency that provides assistance to Palestinian refugees amid fears it could further destabilize the region, a spokesman for President Mahmoud Abbas described the move as an assault on the Palestinian people. Israel, however, has welcomed the US decision. Yolande Knell has more. The position of Israel and of Washington has been that UNRWA is perpetuating the Israel-Palestinian conflict, because it keeps alive Palestinian hopes of the right of return to land that is now in Israel, ancestral land for the Palestinians. Israel has long said that UNRWA should be phased out, that perhaps support for UNRWA should be shifted instead to other agencies that could support the Palestinians, because there is also an awareness the getting rid of UNRWA, scrapping it overnight would end up with really a lot of political instability.

The opposition Workers' Party in Brazil says the former president Lula da Silva will remain its candidate for next month's election despite a court ruling that he is ineligible to stand. The party said it would appeal. The party's president is Gleisi Hoffman. We won't abandon Lula. We will present all appeals possible to ensure his candidacy. As long as we can still appeal, Lula should be the candidate. Today's decision belittles Brazil internationally and prevents the people from voting freely. The electoral court ruled that Lula could not be a candidate because of his conviction for money laundering and corruption.

Officials in Indian administered Kashmir say militants have released eleven relatives of police who had been abducted earlier in the week. They were set free after the police released relatives of detained rebel leaders. Anbarasan Ethirajan reportes. Political leaders in Indian Kashmir had expressed alarm over the abductions as it was the first time in the 30-year-old insurgency in the region that family members had been targeted. It started with police detaining family members of a militant leader following a rebel attack in which four police officers were killed. Then the rebels obducted the relatives of policemen, unlike the army and paramilitary forces, most police officers are from the region, and local leaders have warned that the violence could become more brutal if family members are targeted in the ongoing conflict by both sides.

World News from the BBC.