BBC在线收听下载:美国制裁尼加拉瓜副总统

I'm Stuart Mackintosh with the BBC News, hello.

The Nicaraguan Vice President and First Lady Rosario Murillo has been targeted by new US financial sanctions. The US Treasury accuses her and a close advisor of corruption and serious human rights abuses. The Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Mrs. Murillo was trying to dismantle democratic institutions in order to consolidate power in Nicaragua. Candace Piette has more. Earlier this month, the White House National Security Advisor John Bolton said the US would sanction Nicaragua, lumping the country together with Cuba and Venezuela and what he called a "Troika of Tyranny". The sanctions reach deep into the Nicaraguan president's inner circle. Daniel Ortega's wife and co-ruler Rosario Murillo is accused of controlling the police and the youth wing of the governing Sandinista Liberation Front. The US Treasury said both organizations had engaged in extrajudicial killings, torture and kidnapping.

Voters in the US state of Mississippi are casting their ballots in a runoff for the last senate seat of the midterm elections. They're choosing between the incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, a White Republican and her black Democratic challenger Mike Espy. Ms. Hyde-Smith had been ahead until she was recorded making controversial comments about public executions. Chris Buckler reports. Cindy Hyde-Smith was recorded on camera telling people that if a supporter invited her to a public hanging, she would be in the front row. The Republican candidate has apologized and insisted her words were twisted. But in a state with a history of racially motivated lynchings, it has caused much outrage. It has also made this second round runoff election with her African American opponent Mike Espy a much tighter contest. It's reported that there were queues outside some polling stations in Mississippi when they opened this morning.

The government of Senegal says it wants African art that's currently in French museums to be returned. The aim is to house them in a new Museum of Black Civilizations that's about to open in the Senegalese capital Dakar following a twenty million-dollar investment by China. Hamady Bocoum is the museum's director. The aim of this museum is of course to showcase our history, but it's also for Africans to be able to project themselves. It is said and I personally hope it will be the case. I'm convinced it will be that this century will be Africa's century. But it won't be Africa's century if we don't take charge of our own mind map and we can only do that through our cultural production. Culture is an essential part of any emerging nation.

This is the world news coming to you from the BBC.