BBC News with Neil Nunes. The White House says the Nigerian man accused of attempting to blow up an American airliner last month has given useful intelligence to investigators. A spokesman said FBI interrogators spent a number of hours with the man after he was removed from a plane at Detroit Airport on Christmas Day. The official was speaking as President Obama met advisors to discuss security failings that allowed the man to get onto the plane. Here is our correspondent Nick Childs. A Slovakian man who had been arrested after inadvertently bringing explosives through Dublin Airport has been released by Irish police. It's understood the explosives were planted in his luggage by Slovakian authorities testing security procedures at Bratislava Airport. Here is Mark Worthington. A leading credit rating agency has downgraded Iceland's long-term debt rating to junk status, after it decided to hold a referendum on repaying more than 5 billion dollars to Britain and the Netherlands. The referendum was triggered when more than a quarter of Iceland's people signed a petition objecting to the terms of the repayment. Andrew Walker reports. Iceland's government debt is junk according to the new assessment from Fitch Ratings, one of the world's three leading agencies. That term means the agency thinks there is increased risk of the Icelandic government failing to repay its debts. Fitch said the decision by the country's president not to sign a law on repaying Britain and the Netherlands has created a new wave of uncertainty and is a setback for efforts to restore normal financial relations with the rest of the world. Some 40,000 former officials from the communist-era in Poland have had their pensions halved. The measure was designed to counter popular anger at the size of the pensions given to people such as the former leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski. World News from the BBC. The Internet search company Google has unveiled its first mobile phone. It's called the Nexus One and / is intended to be a direct rival for Apple's iPhone. Mark Gregory reports. Colombia has extradited to the United States the leader of a pyramid scheme which defrauded at least 200,000 people out of nearly 2 billion dollars. David Murcia Guzman, who was sentenced in Colombia to 30 years in prison, will be tried in New York on money laundering and conspiracy charges. The collapse of the pyramid scheme in 2008 led to violent protest and rioting by thousands of angry investors who had been offered interest rates of over 100%. If convicted in the US, he faces a 20-year sentence. The former boss of Renault's Formula One racing team, Flavio Briatore, has had his lifetime ban from the sport overturned by a court in France. The court said Mr Briatore had not been given the opportunity to defend himself properly and ruled the ban illegal. The penalty was imposed by motor sports ruling body, the FIA, which decided that Briatore had ordered the Brazilian driver Nelson Piquet Jr to crash deliberately in the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix to help his fellow Renault driver Fernando Alonso win the race. Briatore denied being involved. BBC News. (责任编辑:voa365) |