BBC news 2011-07-07
BBC News with Iain Purdon
The owner of the media giant News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, has said he's ordered full cooperation with all investigations into allegations of phone hacking against one of his British newspapers, allegations he called "deplorable and unacceptable". The paper, the News of the World, is accused of hacking into the phone messages of murder victims or their relatives. The British Prime Minister David Cameron told parliament that he backed calls for a public inquiry into the allegations, which he described as "disgusting". Here's Rob Watson.
David Cameron announced he would support two separate inquiries: one into media ethics, and the second into the failings of an earlier police investigation into hacking by the News of the World. In exchanges in the House of Commons, Mr Cameron was attacked by Labour for what was described as a "catastrophic error of judgment" in having once employed the former deputy editor of the News of the World.
The new head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, has promised to make the organisation more open to developing countries. On the current crisis surrounding the Greek economy, she said any solution should be comprehensive and include all those concerned. Here's our economics correspondent Andrew Walker.
Christine Lagarde was until a few days ago the finance minister of France and a central figure in the fast-moving debt crisis in the euro area. Critics of her appointment are concerned that she's too close to those storms. In her first public remarks as IMF boss, she stressed the global nature of the challenges she faces, referring to the uneven nature of the recovery from the recent global recession. It took almost five minutes before she mentioned the euro. She insisted that no country deserves special treatment.
A court in Colombia has sentenced eight soldiers to 60 years each in jail for killing four farmers. It's the latest prosecution in the so-called "false positive" scandal, where security forces are believed to have killed civilians and then passed them off as guerrillas in order falsely to inflate their success rates. Jeremy McDermott reports from Antioquia.
Yarumal is a town here in Antioquia that clings precariously to the side of the Andes mountains. In 2006, it was the site of the killing of four farmers. The army claimed they were Marxist rebels killed in a battle. Investigators were called in and determined that the four men had been murdered, then dressed in guerrilla uniforms. This is not an isolated incident. The attorney general's office is investigating more than 1,400 cases.
Officials in eastern Afghanistan say at least 33 border police have died after Taliban fighters attacked several checkpoints. Five civilians also died, two of them women. The governor of Nuristan province told the BBC the fighting lasted for two days. He said the militants had crossed from Pakistan.
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The commanding officer of the Fort Hood US military base, where 13 people were shot dead and more than 30 were injured, has said that the soldier accused of the shooting is to be tried by a military court. Major Nidal Hasan, a US army psychiatrist, is accused of entering a medical building in Fort Hood in Texas in November 2009 and opening fire with an automatic weapon.
The United Nations has welcomed an announcement by the Somali Islamist group al-Shabab to allow aid agencies to resume relief operations in areas it controls. However, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told the BBC it would need security guarantees before its staff could start helping people affected by the region's worst drought in 60 years. Al-Shabab forced out aid agencies in 2009, accusing them of being anti-Muslim.
The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, says his social networking site is linking up with Skype so that users can chat by video while they are on their Facebook page. Here's Tom Esslemont.
Unveiling Facebook's newest feature, Mark Zuckerberg described it as "awesome" because it involves what he called the "best technology" available for video chat. This latest device is likely to face competition from Google, which introduced its own social networking feature, Google+, just a week ago. But integrating Skype into Facebook could, say experts, be good for another big multinational player in the IT world, Microsoft. It is already in the process of acquiring Skype for $8.5bn.
The South Korean county of Pyeongchang has been chosen to host the Winter Olympics in 2018, beating off bids from more established venues in Germany and France. It was the third successive bid from South Korea's main winter sports venue, which won on the first round with a large majority of the votes. The Korean bidding team said the games would boost winter sports throughout Asia.
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