BBC News with Julie Candler.
The United Nations Security Council is meeting in emergency session to discuss allegations that Syrian government forces used chemical weapons when they shelled an area outside the capital Damascus on Wednesday. The main opposition National Coalition described it as a massacre. The Syrian government has denied that it used chemical weapons. Nick Bryant reports from New York.
The focus of diplomatic efforts from Britain, America and France has been on getting the UN weapon’s inspection’s team immediate to an unrestricted access to the site of the alleged attack. That’s more complicated than it sounds. The 20 strong team is staying just 15 minutes away from Damascus suburb where hundreds were killed. But under the terms agreed beforehand with the Syrian government it’s only been allowed access to three sites of previous alleged attacks. In Damascus, the head of the UN weapon’s team, the Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom is in talks with the Syrian government.
People who say they’ve been treating those killed and wounded in Syria have told the BBC and other international media that victims started arriving at treatment centers in the early hours of the morning. With more, here is Frank Gardner.
Video footage uploaded to the internet shows body after body brought into a makeshift morgue allegedly victims of a massive chemical attack. Some of the survivors have twitching with convulsions. The dead have frozen, paralyzed faces. None bear any visible wounds. A local doctor Haswan Budanni said there is evidence of the use of poison gas but Syria’s information minister Omran al-Zoubi said the rebel’s claims would time to coincide with the visit by UN inspectors.
Egyptian’s state television has reported that the former president Hosni Mubarak will be put under house arrest following his release on corruption charges. The order was issued by a military official. Early in the day a court had ordered his release after judges dealt with the last corruption charges against him. Prosecutors are not appealing against the decision and his lawyers say he could be released from prison on Thursday. The 85-year-old still faces charges of complicity in the killing of protesters during the uprising that forced him from power in 2011.
The lawyer of the American soldier Bradley Manning has asked President Obama to pardon his client who’s been sentenced to 35 years in prison after leaking hundreds of thousands of secret documents to the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. His lawyer David Coombs says whistleblowers should be protected.
“The time for our president to focus on protecting whistleblowers instead of punishing them is now. Early next week I will file on behalf of my client Pte Manning a request that will be rounded through the secretary of the army for the president, a request that the president pardon Pte Manning or at very least commute his sentence to time served.”
World News from the BBC.
A Swedish politician has been injured in an ambush in the Somali capital Mogadishu. Witnesses say Ann Margarethe Livh was been driven back to her hotel after delivering a university lecture on good governance when gunmen shot at her car killing her driver and translator. No one has said they carried out the attack.
The United States Federal Reserve has published a minutes of a key policy-making meeting with suggests the central bank is likely to reduce its efforts to stimulate the country’s economy. Share prices fell moderately. Andrew Walker reports.
It is increasingly likely that the Federal Reserve will start to cut back on the 85 billion dollars a month it's pumping into the financial markets later this year. The minutes of the July policy-making meeting do reinforce the expectation that it will happen but they don’t provide much more clarity which the markets would have liked on exactly when or how quickly the Federal go about it. The prospective reduce Fed action has already hit stock markets and also the currencies of many emerging economies.
Also in the United States the final installment of the tapes recorded in the White House by former president Richard Nixon have been released by the National Archives. They were recorded over three months in 1973 and covered the culmination of the Watergate’s scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation. David Willis reports.
The tapes cover an intense period of time that included the resignation of Nixon’s two close aides and two other senior administration officials in one day, the same day that Nixon made a public statement accepting blame for the Watergate scandal. But they also showed the president actively engaged in global diplomacy discussing a summit meeting with the Russians and taking a close interest in the soaring relations with China which the president described as the key to world peace. At one point Nixon can be heard describing the Chinese as the ablest people in the world.
BBC News.