BBC News with Sue Montgomery
There are reports of fierce clashes in the Syrian capital Damascus around the airport and in eastern districts after most communications in the country went down. Sebestian Usher reports.
It’s been difficult to get information out of Syria since the internet and phone lines went down at midday, but activists say a major battle is taking place in the east of Damascus, towards and around the airport. They said the airport road has been closed and flights have stopped. The government denies this, but the BBC has managed to speak to several people in the central of the city. They say they can hear what they call an unprecedented clash in eastern districts held by the rebels. It’s not clear yet if the clashes were initiated by the army of offensive or a rebel attack on the airport.
The United Nations General Assembly is considering a resolution to upgrade the Palestinian’s status of UN and will vote it shortly. Member States will decide whether the Palestinians should become an observer state rather than simply an observer. The Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said he had come to the General Assembly because his people were in desperate need of peace.
Palestine comes today to the General Assembly because it believes in peace and because its people, as proven in past days, are in desperate need of it. Palestine comes today to this prestigious international forum, representative and protector of international legitimacy, reaffirming our conviction that the international community now stands before the last chance to save the two-state solution.
The American soldier accused of passing thousands of secret US documents to the WikiLeaks website, Bradley Manning, is giving testimony for the first time before a US military judge in Maryland. General Bryan reports from Washington.
The pretrial military hearing at Fort Meade in Maryland has been held out of the sight of television cameras, but reporters in the court say 24-year-old Bradley Manning looked nervous and startled as he tried to answer questions from his defense lawyer. He claims he has already been punished enough for his part in the WikiLeak's scandal, which caused intense embarrassment to the US government. Earlier in the day, the judge accepted terms under which he will plead guilty to 8 lesser charges, which include leaking of video of US troops shooting at Iraqis from a helicopter.
A yearlong inquiry into press standards in Britain has issued a damning conclusion on the role played by some of the countries newspapers which hacked people’s phones. In his report, Lord Justice Leveson said tougher self-regulation of the industry was needed because newspapers have wreaked havoc with the lives of innocent people.
World News from the BBC
The body drafting Egypt’s new constitution has been voting on the contents of a final draft and made a growing confrontation between the Islamist President Mohammed Mursi and his secular and liberal opponents. The panel, which is dominated by President Mursi’s supporters, has kept the principles of Islamic law as the main source of legislation. Liberals and Christian members of the panel boycotted it, saying that they’ve been marginalized. The President’s decree last week to grant himself extensive new powers has sparked protest across the country.
President Obama has met his Republican challenger Mitt Romney for the first time since the US presidential election earlier this month. They’ve had a private lunch at the White House, fulfilling a promise Mr. Obama made in his victory speech to work with the Republican Party.
A major new study in the polar ice sheets has discovered that the rate of melting has accelerated in the past 20 years. David Shukman is our science correspondent.
Remote, vast and inaccessible, the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica are extremely difficult to measure. But by comparing readings from different satellites, researchers have come up with a single estimate for the rate at which the ice has been melting into the ocean. Over the past twenty years, they say, melting is added about 11mm to the global sea level. And crucially, they found that this loss of ice is accelerating. Greenland is losing ice the fastest. Western Antarctica is also shedding some, but eastern Antarctic is gaining ice while it remains well below zero.
The new manager of the Brazilian football team Luiz Felipe Scolari has angered the bank workers with remarks made soon after his appointment to lead the squad into the 2014 World Cup. Scolari said players who didn't want to face pressure should get a job at the country state bank, Banco do Brasil, where they would in his words sitting in an office doing nothing.
BBC News.