2010-05-07 BBC
BBC News with Julie Candler.
Voting has just finished in the British general election and an exit poll released in the last few moments indicates that the Conservatives will win but will not have an overall majority in parliament. Reporting live from Westminster is our political correspondent Rob Watson.
The exit polls suggest the Conservatives will be the largest party in the new parliament, but they will fall short of an overall majority by about 19 seats. The polls suggest heavy losses for the governing Labor Party, but perhaps only modest gains for the Liberal Democrats despite the excitement surrounding their campaign. Of course all polls have a small margin of error, which could be significant in a tight election like this. There could also be different voting patterns around the country, so the actual results will need to be watched carefully. Certainly the voting comes after one of the most unpredictable and close-fought campaigns in many years, which has seen a genuine three-horse race between the three main parties after 13 years of Labor government.
There's no indication yet of turnout but there are reports of long queues at polling stations in some areas. Voters in the constituency of the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg waited for as long as three hours to vote. In another constituency in the north of England, voters were still queuing half an hour before the polling station was due to close.
The Greek parliament has voted decisively in favor of drastic spending cuts in exchange for international financial rescue package. The vote came a day after violent protests against the austerity measures. From Athens, Duncan Kennedy reports.
In the parliamentary debate before the vote, the Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou said that if the measures were not passed, Greece could go bankrupt. He said the cuts to pensions, increased taxes, and pay freezes were necessary to secure a massive bailout from the IMF and European governments. But the reforms have proved deeply unpopular with Greeks, and were behind the riots in Athens yesterday which left three people dead. Unions have promised more demonstrations to try to block the measures. The events in Greece have been closely followed around Europe and in international currency markets.
Stocks in New York have suffered their worst losses in a single day since April of last year because of investor concerns over the debt crisis in Greece. At one point during the day, the Dow Jones Index lost close to 9% of its value. Caroline Hepker reports from New York.
The Dow Jones index of stocks, which tracks America's top 30 companies, plunged almost a thousand points on Thursday afternoon before recovering some of the losses just minutes later. Investors sold off shares in huge volumes, suddenly gripped by fears about the Greek economic crisis. The worry is that austerity measures there will hold back the Eurozone economy recovery and therefore hurt the US.
World News from the BBC.
The funeral has been held in Nigeria of the late president Umaru Yar'Adua, who died on Wednesday after a long illness. Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony in the northern city of Katsina, the capital of Mr. Yar'Adua’s home state.
An Argentine pilot has arrived in Buenos Aires following his extradition from Spain to face charges on alleged human rights abuses under military rule between 1976 and 1983. Julio Alberto Poch, who holds dual Argentine and Dutch nationality, is accused of having flown planes that were used to dump opponents of the military government into the sea. Mr Poch denies having participated in the so-called death flights.
The United States Coast Guards working to contain a massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico say oil sheen has started washing ashore on an island off the coast of Louisiana. The oil company BP has begun placing a giant funnel on the leaking sunken oil well to harvest the spill as Rajesh Mirchandani reports.
Even though the giant funnel is now at the site of leaking oil well, some 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, it could be Monday at least before it's operational. The technology, though used before, has never been tried at such depth, 5000 feet down. Oil has been spilling unstopped into the Gulf of Mexico for 17 days. The slick covers thousands of square miles and is edging towards the land. Already scientists say oil is in the food chain here. Local tour operators are reporting cancellations and fishing fleets are unable to work in affected waters.
A new study has found that all non-African people are part Neanderthal. Scientists have compared the genetic makeup of modern humans with that of our closest ancient relatives. They found evidence that, contrary to popular belief, the earliest humans mated with the Neanderthals they encountered as they emerged from Africa. The research was published in the journal Science.
BBC News.