BBC在线收听下载:美宣布废除49名委官员与家人签证

Hello, I'm Nick Kelly with the BBC News.

A Judge in Brazil has agreed to release from prison the former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to attend the funeral of his seven-year-old grandson. The boy died of meningitis and will be buried on Saturday. Leonardo Rocha reports. Lula will fly from the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba in a jet that belongs to the local government. He will be leaving the federal police compound where he's serving his sentence for the first time since he was imprisoned in April. Lula rejects the corruption allegations and says he was imprisoned by his political opponents to prevent him from running for office again last year. For many, he led the most corrupt government in Brazilian history, but the country is split politically and thousands are expected to turn up at the cemetery to show the support for the former president.

The United States has cancelled the visas of forty-nine Venezuelan officials who helped close the country's borders last Saturday to block the delivery of foreign aid. The US State Department said the officials were responsible for undermining Venezuela's democracy. The sanctions were also applied to their family members. President Nicolas Maduro rejected the offer of humanitarian aid donated mainly by the US, saying it was a pretext for a ground invasion.

The American space agency NASA and California SpaceX company preparing to launch astronaut capsule from US soil for the first time in eight years. The Dragon capsule will blast off on board a Falcon 9 rocket and will carry a dummy fitted with sensors to the International Space Station. NASA's Bill Gerstenmaier says using a private company won't compromise on standards. We're doing things that are really risky and the designs and the complexity of what we have to do. We're strapping human beings on top of rockets with millions of pounds of thrust, hurling them into orbit to go attached to a space station to do world-cutting research. That isn't trivial.

The US ambassador to London has described the European Union as a museum of agriculture with a traditionalist and unsustainable approach to farming. In an article for a British newspaper, Woody Johnson writes that criticism in Britain of American farming is part of a smear campaign by those who want to prevent a trade deal between the US and the UK after Britain leaves the EU. Earlier this week, the US set out its objectives for such a trade deal, which would force the UK to abandon European food standards.

The court of appeal in Quebec has upheld a ruling in a lawsuit ordering three big tobacco companies to pay more than eleven billion dollars in damages to smokers and ex-smokers in the Canadian province. The plaintiffs alleged that the companies had known since the 1950s the tobacco cause cancer and had failed to warn consumers.