BBC在线收听下载:欧盟主席称脱欧协议没有商讨余地

Hello, this is Charles Carroll with the BBC News.

The President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker has said there's no room whatsoever to renegotiate the Brexit deal that the British Prime Minister Theresa May is trying to salvage. Mrs. May is on a tour of Europe to ask Mr. Juncker and her Dutch and German counterparts for assurances to try to convince sceptical British MPs to back the agreement. Earlier today, Mr. Juncker addressed the European Parliament. There is room if used intelligently, there is room enough to give further clarifications and further interpretations without opening the Withdrawal Agreement. This will not happen: everyone has to note that the Withdrawal Agreement will not be reopened. Many British MPs fear the country could become permanently stuck in a legally binding backstop plan to avoid re-establishing a hard border in Ireland. Mrs. May canceled a parliamentary vote on her deal due to have taken place today and acknowledged that she would have been defeated.

The United Nations has launched a plan to support more than five and a half million refugees from Syria who are being hosted in neighboring countries. The organization is appealing for 5.5 billion dollars to help provide education and other services. Imogen Foulkes reports from Geneva. Since the Syrian conflict began, a million Syrian babies have been born in exile. A trickle of refugees around thirty seven thousand have returned home this year, and that could increase to a quarter of a million next year. But it's just a fraction of the estimated 5.6 million Syrian refugees in neighboring countries. Return is risky. Sporadic fighting continues.

At least ten people have been killed in an overnight attack by a rebel group in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Local officials say suspected members of the Allied Democratic Forces attacked the town of Oicha in the Beni region where they looted property and animals. The ADF which began as a Ugandan rebel group in the 1990s, has been blamed for hundreds of killings since 2014.

A Franco-German meeting is underway in Paris to counter the smuggling of illegal firearms from the western Balkans. The French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said that Europol estimated that up to six million firearms were in circulation in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Forty-four thousand illegal firearms had been destroyed there over the past year, he said, but that was not enough. He stressed the need for tighter checks on the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

World news from the BBC.