2010-01-27 BBC
BBC News with Jonathan Izard.
The two senior lawyers working for the British Foreign Office in the run-up to the Iraq war have told an official inquiry that they advised the government on a number of occasions that the invasion was illegal. The legal advisers, Sir Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst, were speaking at an official inquiry into the conflict chaired by Sir John Chilcot. Peter Hunt reports.
These were two senior Foreign Office lawyers whose advice was clear, consistent and ultimately ignored. Sir Michael Wood, the Foreign Office's most senior legal adviser at the time, summed up his position in a statement submitted to the inquiry. It read "I considered the use of force against Iraq in March 2003 was contrary to international law". "The process followed in this case was lamentable," Elizabeth Wilmshurst told the inquiry. She said Iraqi experts within the Foreign Office had warned that to go to war without a second UN resolution would be the nightmare scenario.
The American car manufacturer, General Motors, has confirmed that it's reached agreement to sell the Swedish firm, Saab. The new owner is Spyker Cars, a small Dutch manufacturer of luxury sports cars. GM put Saab on the market more than a year ago, but negotiations on earlier deals had fallen through. Nigel Cassidy reports.
The car industry has a long history of unlikely rescue bids, many of them ultimately unsuccessful. But this one must be the more for audacity. A tiny loss-making Dutch company that sold just 23 cars in the first six months of last year is to take on a carmaker that made and sold 90,000 cars in 2008. It's also succeeded doing a deal in the nick of time. Saab is in the process of being officially wound down, although the 3,500 workers in Sweden have yet to be laid off.
Military commanders in Honduras have been cleared of abusing their power by expelling the then President Manuel Zelaya from the country last year. The Supreme Court dismissed the charges brought by state prosecutors against the six commanders. Charles Scanlon reports.
Manuel Zelaya was ordered from his bed by armed soldiers last June and put on a plane to Costa Rica while still in his pajamas. The attorney general brought charges against the military commanders earlier this month not for staging a coup, which the current government says was legal, but for expelling the head of state rather than putting him on trial. The Supreme Court has now cleared them of any criminal responsibility. The decision comes just a day before a conservative businessman, Porfirio Lobo, is due to be sworn in as the new president following elections in November. He says he'll support the Supreme Court's decision.
The authorities in Guatemala have captured a former president who's wanted in Guatemala and the United States on money laundering charges. US prosecutors accused Alfonso Portillo of using state funds as a personal cash machine and laundering money taken from a charity that supplies school books. Mr. Portillo's lawyer said earlier that he would not surrender because the charges against him were political.
World News from the BBC.
The parliamentary commission in France has called for a ban on the wearing of face-covering veils by Muslim women using public hospitals, schools, government offices and public transport. It described the full veil as an unacceptable challenge to French principles of secularism and equality. But the opposition Socialists have rejected a legal ban, warning that it risked stigmatizing the Muslim community.
Talks are continuing in Northern Ireland, trying to resolve a political crisis that threatens the power-sharing assembly there. The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been meeting all the political parties in the province as he and his Irish counterpart, Brian Cowen, try to broker a deal between the main parties, Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists.
The new interim prime minister of the West African country of Guinea has been sworn in, marking another step towards civilian rule. Jean-Marie Dore was appointed by the general currently in charge of Guinea after the military government agreed to step down. Our West Africa correspondent Caspar Leighton reports.
Jean-Marie Dore made a brief speech in which he set out some big objectives. Reforming Guinea's armed forces was top of the list, most small order in a country that has in effect been controlled by the military for decades. The current government took power in December 2008 after the death of Lansana Conte, himself an army man who staged a coup 24 years earlier. Mr. Dore said he would organize elections and prioritize the economic revival of Guinea, which is the world's largest exporter of bauxite and is rich in other minerals.
The American space agency NASA says it's given up trying to free its Spirit Rover which has been stuck in soft ground on Mars since May last year. NASA says all efforts to free the robot vehicle have failed and it will now live out its days as a static science station. The rover, which landed on Mars six years ago, has taken thousands of images of the planet's surface. A NASA spokesman said, “Spirit is not dead. It has just entered another phase of its long life.”
BBC News.