2010-03-05 BBC
BBC News with David Austin.
Bomb attacks in Baghdad have killed at least 14 people as some early voting took place in Iraq's parliamentary elections. Suicide bombers killed seven soldiers at two polling stations while seven civilians died in an attack at another. More than half a million members of the Iraqi armed forces were voting early to free them for security duties on the main polling day on Sunday. Gabriel Gatehouse sent this report from a polling station in Baghdad.
The police and the military have thrown everything they got to try to stop attackers from disrupting the poll. All leaves have been canceled and there will be around 200,000 personnel on duty in Baghdad alone.
"We are ready for anything." this policemen told us, "If we don't risk our lives, how will we change the country." The Americans too, are hoping that these elections will bring about change. There are still around 100,000 US troops in Iraq. The Pentagon wants that number halved by the summer in preparation for a full military withdrawal by 2012.
The Nigerian Senates has begun an inquiry after graphic pictures appeared on the Internet showing bodies strewn across the road after an armed robbery on the Lagos to Beining in highway. There is no indication of when the robbery took place. Caroline Duffield reports from Lagos.
These pictures appeared to show the bodies of men and women twisted and crushed in the road in broad daylight. Bloggers and local journalists circulating them and describing an attack on a bus on the Lagos-Beining express way. There are claims that the passengers were made to lie down in the road and that the bus driver was forced to run them over and that is how the large number of death occurred. Senators have now set up a committee of inquiry to try to find out what happened.
The Congressional Committee in the United States has narrowly approved the resolution describing as genocide—— the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians at the hands of Turkish forces during the First World War. A house representative's foreign affair's committee endorsed the non-binding resolution. Earlier, the Secretary of State Hilary Clinton had urged Congress not to offend Turkey by approving it. But the Chairman of the Committee Howard Berman said Ankara had to come to terms with its history.
It is now time for Turkey to accept the reality of the Armenian genocide. This will most likely be a difficult and painful process for the Turkish people. But at the end of the day it will strengthen Turkish democracy and put the US-Turkey relationship on a better footing.
Within the passed few minutes, the Turkish Prime Minister condemned the resolution and said Turkey's lose recalling its ambassador to Washington for consultations.
Scientists say unprecedented amounts of the powerful greenhouse gas Methane are leaking into the atmosphere from under the frozen Siberian seabed off northeast Russia. The experts cautions that it's unclear whether the leakage is a result of current globle warming or some other factor.
This is the World News from the BBC.
A report by the Nepalese government says nearly half the country's children under five are suffering from malnutrition. The report says there has been study but slow progress in cutting poverty in the last decade, but more needs to be done to tackle poor nutrition. Health experts say extra attention should go to pregnant women and infants to stop children from suffering permanent intellectual damage.
Managers from the collapsed Russian oil firm Yukos have told the European Court of Human Rights, said the Kremlin government tried to destroy the company for political reasons. Yukos is seeking around 100 billion dollars in compensation. The Russian government says Yukos commited tax evasion on a massive scale.
Scientists say they can now definitively back, the long held theory that a huge asteroid striking the earth some 65 million years ago was responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs and more than half of all animal species on the planet. The scientists finally discounted an alternative theory that volcanic eruptions caused the dinosaur's demise. Our science correspondent Pallab Ghosh reports.
The popular conception is that dinosaur's reign supreme until they were suddenly eradicated from the face of the planet. The theory goes that a giant asteroid crashed into the earth, wiping out half of all life on earth. Some scientists though say that those evidences that dinosaur survived the asteroid impact and became extinct some 300,000 years later. But a new analysis of all the available research has backed the view that it was a giant asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Pallab Ghosh reporting.
The Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has said that he is ready to serve another term in office even though he will be almost 90 by the time the next election is due. Responding to a question at a news conference, Mr.Mugabe who is now 86 said if his party ZANU PF wanted him to serve another term, then he would stand.
And those are the latest stories from BBC News.