2010-04-22 BBC
BBC News with Michael Powles
Officials in charge of European airspace say air traffic across the continent should be back to almost 100% on Thursday. Airlines are continuing to restart services after almost a week of unprecedented paralysis caused by atmospheric ash from a volcanic eruption in Iceland. Dominic Hughes has more.
Restrictions on flying remain in place only the most northern parts of Europe. Finland in particular still seems to be affected by the cloud of volcanic ash, but further south planes have been flying again in and out of Europe's busiest airports, London's Heathrow, Paris's Charles de Gaulle and Frankfurt. Eurocontrol, the air traffic control agency based in Brussels, says of around 28,000 scheduled flights around 21,000 will go ahead, but such as the chaos caused by the long shutdown of European airspace that it will take weeks before services are running normally again.
The French government has announced plans to introduce a bill next month to ban the wearing of the full-face Islamic veil in public, a move expected to affect about 2,000 women. President Nicolas Sarkozy has said that such garments oppressed women and were not welcomed in France. The National Federation of Muslims of France said the planned legislation would transgress personal liberty. But a government's own legal adviser said the law could well be overturned in French or European courts.
The White House has welcomed an announcement from the American car company General Motors that it's repaid all of its government loans of 8.4 billion dollars as a bright spot on the road to economic recovery. GM collapsed a year ago, filed for bankruptcy and was kept afloat by the government. Russell Padmore reports.
The Chief Executive Ed Whitacre said repaying all the outstanding loans years ahead of schedule is a sign that the plan for building a new GM is working. He also claimed it’s a real possibility the company will sell shares on the market by the end of the year. That would mean the Canadian and US taxpayers getting a return on the 50 billion dollars spent bailing the firm out. The US government owns nearly 61% of GM while the Canadian government controls a stake of about 12%. Another big US carmaker Chrysler now run by Italy's Fiat Group said it will break even this year.
A team of German researchers says pledges made at the Copenhagen Climate Summit to contain greenhouse gas emissions are unlikely to help tackle the problem. The team concluded that many countries were pledging slower rates of carbon cuts than they had already been achieving. Our environment correspondent Richard Black has the details.
Analysts at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research have been through the various pledges made at the summit and conclude that they'll probably set the world on a cost to at least three Celsius of warming by the end of this century. That's likely to mean fall in crop yields virtually everywhere in the world, hundreds of millions more people struggling for access to water and serious damage to most coral reefs.
World News from the BBC
The Israeli military has deported a Palestinian man from the West Bank to Gaza, the first such case since it introduced controversial new system that critics say could see thousands expelled from the territory. The man was deported after being released from an Israeli jail. Rights groups say the new system gives the military the power to designate thousands of Palestinians as infiltrators.
The American space agency NASA has been showing the first spectacular images of the sun gathered by the new probe it launched in February. Officials in charge of the Solar Dynamics Observatory or SDO said the probe was sending back the most detailed images of the sun's surface ever seen. These included a video of a flare erupting on the sun's surface. One of the scientists involved Dean Pesnell said the observatory would increase knowledge about how the sun affects life on earth.
"SDO is the first mission in the Living with a Star Program. It's designed to study the sun and how the sun affects us here on the earth. Most of these effects come from the magnetic field of the sun and we are gonna see today that magnetic field is never the same twice. It's always changing."
Rescuers in the southern United States are searching for a dozen workers missing after an explosion and fire at an American offshore oil rig. The accident on a semi-submersible drilling platform, about 65 kilometres off the coast of Louisiana, also left at least seven people injured. An investigation is underway.
The President of the International Olympic Committee Jacques Rogge has led tributes to his predecessor Juan Antonio Samaranch who has died at the age of 89. Mr Rogge described him as the architect of a strong and unified Olympic Movement. Mr Samaranch transformed the Olympic Movement from the bankruptcy through lucrative sponsorship deals, reforms which some critics said ran counter to Olympic ideals.
And that's the BBC News.