BBC News with Julie Candler
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have reached a symbolic high. For the first time in human history, daily measures of CO2, which is an important factor in global warming, have topped 400 parts per million. Roger Harrabin reports.
Before the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels were 280 parts per million. The Hawaii measuring station in the Pacific far from pollution sources is reckoned to be the most authoritative monitor of daily CO2 levels and it’s now showed they have topped 400 parts per million. The last time CO2 was regularly above that level was about three to five million years ago before modern humans existed. Scientists are alarmed that CO2 levels keep rising because the climate was much warmer then. There’s no sign though that world governments have the political will to make real their promises to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.
A woman is recovering in hospital after being rescued from the rubble of the garment factory that collapsed 17 days ago in Bangladesh. She’s said to have survived by drinking from a water pipe and scavenging for food in the lunch boxes of dead colleagues. Andrew North reports from Dhaka.
Rescue teams are hailing it as a miracle. More than two weeks since the eight-storey factory complex collapsed, they’d given up hope of finding anyone else alive. But as soldiers cleared a lower floor, they heard sounds below. Detection equipment was sent in and they saw a woman waving her hand. She shouted “I’m still here” and said her name was Reshma.
Speaking from her hospital bed, Reshma told a reporter she desperately tried to alert the rescue workers.
“It was very difficult to make myself heard. I kept banging as loud as I could with my legs but no one could hear me.”
More than 1,000 people are now known to have died in the disaster.
Nigerian police say they’ve found 17 pregnant teenage girls in a raid on a house in the south-east of the country at a searching for a woman suspected of planning to sell their babies. They said they’d also found 11 children waiting to be sold. Here’s Richard Hamilton.
The police said they were still looking for the owner of the house where the babies were found called Madam One Thousand. They also said all the girls had been impregnated by just one man. The United Nations says human trafficking is the third most common crime in Nigeria after fraud and the drugs trade. Human rights groups believe children are being sold to customers in other states and even other countries under the guise of adoption. The authorities say they are taking tough action against such illegal practices.
The United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay has expressed concern over a build-up of Syrian government troops around the rebel-held western town of Qusair. She said she feared the troop build-up was in preparation for a major attack on Qusair. The government is reported to have dropped leaflets over the town, warning the population to leave.
World News from the BBC
The woman held captive longest in a house in the US city of Cleveland has left hospital. According to an initial police report, Michelle Knight, who was abducted in 2002, said she had suffered at least five miscarriages in captivity after her alleged abductor Ariel Castro had intentionally starved and beaten her. Meanwhile, DNA tests have confirmed that Castro is the father of the girl born to Amanda Berry in captivity. Jonny Dymond reports.
Ariel Castro’s DNA sample went to the laboratory late on Thursday. Forensic scientists worked through the night to see if it matched the DNA of the child born to Amanda Berry. That child born into captivity is six years old. Now Ohio’s attorney general Mike DeWine has confirmed that Ariel Castro is the father of the young girl. Castro’s DNA did not match any other Ohio cases. The state authorities are still waiting for national comparisons to come back from the FBI.
The authorities in the American state of Texas have arrested a paramedic who helped in the response to last month’s deadly fertiliser explosion in the town of West. The man, Bryce Reed, is being held for allegedly possessing a destructive device. But police would not say whether the arrest related to the blast in April.
A court in Guatemala is expected to deliver shortly a verdict on the former military president, Efrain Rios Montt, who’s charged with genocide and crimes against humanity in 1982 and 1983. General Rios Montt and his former military chief have been accused of ordering the deaths of nearly 1,800 people of the Ixil-Mayan ethnic group.
Morocco has officially started to work on the first phase of a massive solar energy complex in Ouarzazate on the edge of the Sahara Desert. It’s hoped the plant’s capacity will reach 500 megawatts by 2020. Together with four other plants gifted to be built at different sites, the combined solar capacity in Morocco should reach 2,000 megawatts by that time.