Hello, I'm Fiona MacDonald with the BBC News.
Eurozone treasury officials have begun assessing the latest Greek proposals for a way out of the debt crisis. The package that Athens submitted on Thursday to its international creditors includes the kind of austerity measures that Greek voters rejected in a referendum last Sunday. Chris Morris reports from Brussels.
“The proposals include tax rises, pension reforms, spending cuts and promises of privatisation. Measures rejected in last Sunday's referendum will now be conceded. But this is no capitulation by the Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras. In return, he is asking for far more than was offered last month. Greece wants a new three-year bailout from the Eurozone. It wants more support to promote economic growth, and it wants its huge debt burden to be restructured. In that, it now has support from the IMF, the U.S. Treasury and the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk.”
International negotiators striving for a deal on Iran's nuclear programme have missed another deadline, but they say they are committed to working on. Lyse Doucet is in Vienna, where the talks are being held.
“Western diplomats made it clear the onus is on Iran to make some tough political decisions. But a senior Iranian official complained that other countries were changing their positions at this late stage, and that each of them had different red lines. The six world powers in this process are known to be divided on some key issues, but that's not the only hurdle. It's clear more time is needed to resolve some significant differences, relating to restrictions on Iran's nuclear programme and the lifting of sanctions.”
The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, John Boehner, has called for the sacking of top officials of the Office of Personnel Management, following new revelations about a massive breach of its computer systems. It's now emerged that hackers stole information of more than twenty million people. Here's Tom Batement.
“It's now thought the cyber attack began as early as last May with hackers accessing the U.S. government's Human Resources Service and stealing, what the Director of the FBI has called, a treasure trove of security vetting information. The breach targeted anyone who'd applied for a job at a federal agency in the last fifteen years, taking social security numbers, financial histories, even, in some cases, people's finger prints. China has denied involvement in the breach, but that is likely to do little to comfort Homeland Security officials deeply suspicious of the country's activities in cyber space.”
Indonesia's closed five airports, including the one at Bali, due to the eruption of Mount Raung, a volcano in East Java. The Transport Ministry says the move is for safety reasons, and it's not yet known when the airports will reopen. A number of flights between Australia and Bali have been canceled in recent days because of the danger from volcanic ash.
World news from the BBC.
One of the leaders of the failed coup in May against the Burundian President, Pierre Nkurunziza, has told the BBC that his rebel group is recruiting police and soldiers for a fresh attempt to oust him. Speaking in exile, General Leonard Ngendakumana, denied that any other country was helping them. He accused President Nkurunziza of stoking ethnic tensions between the majority Hutus and the minority Tutsis.
Pope Francis has apologised for the actions of the Catholic Church against indigenous peoples during the conquest and colonisation of the Americas. In the speech in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz, Francis said he humbly begged for forgiveness for the crimes that were committed.
The Governor of South Carolina signed into law the bill to remove the Confederate Flag from the State Capitol grounds. The Flag, used by the slave-owning states during the Civil War, had always been controversial. Nick Bryant reports from Columbia, South Carolina's capital.
“The Governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, added her signature to the bill, bringing down the Confederate Flag, using nine pens, one for each of the victims of the Charleston shootings. It's their deaths allegedly at the hands of a self-confessed white supremacies, Dylann Roof, who was pictured brandishing the colours. This completely transformed this long-running debate. The Flag will come down in, what the Governor said will be, a dignified ceremony, and then be taken to a museum housing Confederate relics.”
A French pilot will attend to make aviation history today by crossing the English Channel in an electric aircraft. The plane, developed by the Air Bus Group, uses engines paired by lithium Batteries, which allow it to stay airborne for up to fifty minutes. Its pilot and designer, Didier Esteyne, hopes to make the crossing from England to France in around forty minutes. Mr. Esteyne says he wants to honour the legacy of Louis Bleriot, who made the first cross-channel flight in 1909.