2010-04-21 BBC
BBC News with Sue Montgomery
Britain is reopening all its airports with immediate effect following six days in which flights were largely grounded by the plume of volcanic dust that has blown across much of Europe from Iceland. A spokeswoman for the British aviation regulator Dame Deirdre Hutton also announced new standards governing flying in hazardous conditions. She said the rules had been drawn up in consultation with the aircraft manufacturers and took account of the results of recent test flights.
"The new guidance allows a phased reintroduction of much of the airspace which is currently closed due to the volcanic ash plume over the UK. There will continue to be some no-fly zones where concentration of ash levels are at unsafe levels for flights to take place. But that will be very much smaller than the present restrictions."
Throughout the day, some flights resumed at the main international airports in Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt. But flight bans remained in place over large swathes of the continent. Some news just in, the first flight has landed at Heathrow Airport in London after the lifting of the flight ban. Britain announced it was again opening its airspace to flights late on Tuesday.
The International Monetary Fund is calling for new taxes to be imposed on financial institutions to pay for any bailouts that might be needed in the future. The proposals are contained in a paper prepared for finance ministers from the group of 20 countries and obtained by the BBC. Our economics correspondent Andrew Walker reports.
The IMF is proposing a levy, what it calls a financial stability contribution to cover the cost to taxpayers of any future government support for the sector. It will apply to all financial institutions. Over time, the IMF suggests it could be refined to reflect the riskiness of each firm's activities. And if \ governments want to raise more money, the IMF suggests they put in an additional tax on profits and then employees' pay. The report also says that there should be a legal framework for sorting out troubled firms. Otherwise, there would be an incentive for them to take risks in the expectation that they would not be allowed to fail.
The Iraqi military says it's killed another leading member of al-Qaeda. It comes a day after the government said its troops had killed the two most wanted al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq. Here is Jim Muir.
According to Iraqi military officials, Ahmed al-Obeidi was killed in an early morning attack by US and Iraqi forces somewhere near Mosul in the north of the country. They said he was in charge of al-Qaeda's operations there, and also in Kirkuk and Salahuddin provinces. One report said that the intelligence for the attack came from the same captured al-Qaeda official as the information that led to the raid which killed the two top al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq early on Sunday morning. Iraqi government leaders are convinced that they now have the al-Qaeda leadership on the run.
BBC News
Fresh allegations have surfaced of rigging in Sudan's elections last week. A group of local observers released a video which reportedly shows men dressed in the orange uniform of election officials stuffing voting slips into a ballot box. However, a Sudanese elections commission official denied there'd been any ballot stuffing or other rigging.
The Supreme Court in the United States has ruled that a law that makes it a crime to sell videos of animals being tortured or killed violates the right to free speech. The Supreme Court judges who supported the ruling said the law was too vague and therefore infringed the guarantee of free speech in the US constitution. Mark Mardell is in Washington.
The Supreme Court ruled that the law \ banning animal cruelty videos was over broad and invalid under the first amendment. A man, who had been sentenced to three years in prison producing videos of pit bulls fighting and attacking pigs and other animals, appealed against his sentence. And the court found that although dog fighting is outlawed in every American state, the depiction of cruelty shouldn't itself be illegal. The law had originally been introduced to deal with what are known as "crush videos", fetishistic films of women in high-heels slowly crushing small animals to death.
Some 3,000 workers in southern Egypt are refusing to leave their factory until management agrees to better pay and working conditions. The workers at an aluminium factory are also demanding the sacking of the official trade union representative whom they accuse of working for management.
A court in Britain has heard that a dead body lay undiscovered for nearly ten years in a tower block flat in the western city of Bristol despite neighbors repeatedly complaining about the terrible stench. The court heard that the man had been staying with a friend when he suddenly died. Council workers had visited the flat put the smell down to an overflowing drain. Bristol City Council has apologized for failing to act earlier.