BBC在线收听下载:海啸中被冲走渔船现身加拿大

BBC news 2012-03-25

BBC News with David Austin

Several liberal and secular parties in Egypt have pulled out of a process to elect a panel to draft a new constitution. One of the key issues to be addressed is how much the constitution should be guided by Islamic law. Jon Leyne reports from Cairo.

Parliament is dominated by Islamist parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood. The liberal and secular parties are concerned that the Islamists are using this to dominate the constitutional assembly as well. So now around 50 members of the more secular and liberal parties have pulled out of the process to select the members of the constitutional assembly. It is a key issue for Egypt's future. The constitution is likely to set the course for the country for what could be decades to come.

Clashes resumed in the Egyptian city of Port Said after the funeral of a teenager who died in football-related violence. The first trouble began on Friday after the Port Said football club al-Masry was suspended for two years over a post-match riot last month in which more than 70 people were killed.

The leader of the military coup in Mali has told the BBC he's in complete control of the country. Captain Amadou Sanogo said he had no fear of a counter coup. But a BBC correspondent in the region says it's not clear how much support the captain has among high-ranking commanders. Tuareg rebels have taken advantage of the uncertainty to seize positions in the north. Captain Sanogo said he wanted peace talks with them.

"The Tuareg people in the north, Arab people are our brothers. I want all of them to come to the same table. My door is open. We can talk about and work out through the peace process."

The Malian capital Bamako was reported to be quieter on Saturday after earlier looting.

Thousands of extra police are on the streets of the Nigerian capital Abuja, where members of the governing party are meeting to choose a new executive. Roads leading to the conference venue have been blocked. Security has been tightened following a series of deadly attacks by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram.

The Turkish government says 15 Kurdish militants, all of them women, have been killed in fighting with the security forces. The clashes took place in the southeastern province of Bitlis, which is a centre of the banned PKK militants. Jonathan Head is in Istanbul.

As many as one third of the PKK's fighting force are women - a legacy of the group's one-time Marxist ideology, which prioritised the raising of women's status in Kurdish society. So women casualties are not unusual, but for 15 women to be killed in a single clash certainly is. The Turkish interior ministry is giving few details of the incident. It occurred in Bitlis, a province known for strong PKK support, during a large-scale military operation against the organisation in the mountains bordering Iraq.

Jonathan Head reporting

World News from the BBC

French police say the older brother of the Islamist gunman Mohammed Merah - who killed Jewish children, a rabbi and soldiers in separate attacks in southwestern France - has expressed pride at his actions. Abdelkader Merah is being questioned by anti-terrorist police in Paris, but they say he's claimed not to have known in advance that Mohammed Merah would carry out the killings. The man's mother was also questioned by police and released without charge. Her lawyer Jean-Yves Gougnaud said she was devastated by what happened.

"Her world has tumbled down. Everything has crashed. Like I said, at no point did she think that her son was the killer. She wanted to talk to her neighbours, to tell them to protect their children, to be careful, to take care of them."

The authorities in Beijing say it'll be at least two decades before they get the Chinese capital's air pollution under control. Beijing came close to the bottom of a recent list of the world's most polluted cities. Charles Scanlon reports.

The city authorities in Beijing have been stunned by a wave of criticism of the accuracy of their pollution figures. They are now trying to convince the sceptical public that they have a credible plan to tackle the problem. The vice-mayor Hong Feng said the best the city could hope for was to have air pollution under control within the next 20 years. He said that would include one of the biggest threats to health - the tiny particles in the air that until a recent controversy were not even measured by the Beijing authorities.

Charles Scanlon reporting

A Japanese fishing boat swept away by last year's earthquake and tsunami has been spotted adrift off the west coast of Canada. No one is believed to be on board the ship, which is still intact but badly rusted. However, the Canadian transport ministry is monitoring it for pollution. The vessel was registered in Hokkaido in Japan.

Those are the latest stories from BBC News.