BBC News with Marion Marshall
The French foreign minister Laurent Fabius who’s representing his country in multi-party nuclear talks with Iran in Geneva says negotiators remain divided over Teheran’s nuclear programme. Mr. Fabius said Iran was resisting French demands that work on a plutonium producing reactor be suspended and its stockpile of higher enriched uranium be downgraded. But Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has told the BBC a deal is possible as Jeremy Bowen reports.
He’s saying that it would help matters if the people who is facing on the other side of the table essentially the five permanent members of Security Council plus Germany would effectively get the same story, get their act together. In so far as they might have a common negotiating position. He doesn’t seem to believe that they have that. And he says that some people are growing from maximum position. And he accepted that French foreign minister Fabius has made some public comments which he alluded to and what Mr. Fabius has been saying is that there are concerns about a plutonium reactor which hasn’t been finished yet, which potentially could produce material for nuclear weapon and also what exactly they do with existing stocks of enriched uranium and that apparently has been a big sticking point today.
There are estimates that many hundreds of people may have been killed when the powerful typhoon Haiyan swept through the central Philippines affecting four million people. The Philippine Red Cross says that as many as a thousand people could have been killed in just one city, Tacloban.
The opposition leader in the Maldives Mohammad Nasheed has secured the most votes in the presidential elections but has fallen short of the 50% mark that would have given him an outright victory. Here is Charles Havilland.
Mohammad Nasheed, the first democratically elected leader of this country, famous for luxury holiday resorts will be disappointed not to have won outright in this first round. His score of 47% was slightly up when his share in the September election later annulled by the Supreme Court. The runner-up Abdulla Yameen is a brother of the former un-elected president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom while a wealthy hotelier, Gasim Ibrahim came third and was knocked out.
Spanish police say they’ve arrested the leader of one of Colombia’s most violent drug’s gangs. Cipriam Manuel Palencia Gonzalez was detained by officers in Madrid under an international arrest warrant. Here is Tom Burridge.
Cipriam Manuel Palencia Gonzalez is according to Spanish police a leading member of the notorious Colombian gang known as Urabenos. He stands accused of drug smuggling, extortion and of ordering the murder of police officers in his native Colombia. The gang he allegedly ran was partly formed by members of paramilitary groups which was set up in Colombia in the 1980s to fight against leftwing guerillas during the country’s long civil war. Spanish police say he was planning on running another drug trafficking operation from Spain.
World News from the BBC
The Nigerian military says two soldiers and five suspected Islamist militants were killed in shootouts outside the northern city of Kano. The spokesman for the security services said the militants were planning simultaneous suicide attacks in Kano as well as in the capital Abuja. He also said the security forces had confiscated nearly 50 AK-47 rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
The United States Navy has christened the first of its new Ford-class of nuclear-powered aircraft carrier at a ceremony in Virginia. The new super carrier which will weight 100,000 tons when completed in 2016 is named after the former president Gerald Ford.
The head of Football’s world governing body Sepp Blatter has said that the 2022 World Cup which the Gulf State Qatar is due to host will take place in November or December that year. FIFA has set up a task force to look into feasible alternative dates as it looks to switch the competition away from the fierce heat of Qatari summer. Sepp Blatter said he wanted to avoid the World Cup clashing with the Winter Olympics at the start of 2022.
“It is logic to play this competition at the end of the year. And it is the end of the year, it will be November, December, I don’t know exactly the dates but it could be from tenth to tenth whatever.”
The final decision on when the 2022 World Cup takes place remains with FIFA’s executive committee.
For the first time an Olympic torch has been taken on a spacewalk ahead of the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi. Two Russian cosmonauts stepped out of the International Space Station with the unlit torch. After taking photographs the torch was return to the space station to allow the cosmonauts to continue with other tasks on the spacewalk that was to last about.