BBC News with Neil Nunes.
The Russian government has said it's willing to work with the West on averting a crisis in Ukraine but it has warned Nato against taking decisions on behalf of the Ukrainian people. The Russian foreign ministry said any resolution must take into account the interests of the country's large Russian-speaking minority. In Ukraine, the Parliament of the Republic of Crimea called a referendum on even greater self-rule. Duncan Crawford has more from Kiev.
Earlier on today, dramatic developments in Crimea when the Crimean parliament was seized by armed men. We know that there are pro-Russian supporters, and the police cordoned off the streets around the parliament building. Pro-Russian supporters in the crowds, they were shouting out Crimea is part of Russia. They are deeply suspicious about this new government which is voted in in Kiev today by the parliament, they view events here over the last few weeks as a coup as part of a Western conspiracy. And they are calling for Russia to intervene and to protect Russian citizens in Crimea.
Ukraine's new interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has accused the ousted President Viktor Yanukovych and his government of stripping the state coffers bare.
The British electronic intelligence-gathering agency GCHQ is reported to have collected webcam images from millions of Internet users. The Guardian newspaper in London says GCHQ with the help of the American National Security Agency, intercepted and stored still images of Yahoo webcam chat. Gordon Corera reports.
According to the Guardian in one six-month period, 1.8m images were collected between 3% and 11% of the image captured were said to contain what's described as undesirable nudity, leading to guidance to GCHQ staff on how to protect themselves. The image was taken from people with webcam accounts with the company Yahoo. It responded angrily to the revelations, saying it'd known nothing of the program and it represented a whole new level of violation of its users' privacy.
Tensions in Lebanon between supporters and opponents of Hezbollah have been tightened by the mysterious death of a man rumored to have written a popular anti-Hezbollah song. Sebastian Usher on *.
For the title of the song is “Dig Your Grave in Yabroud”,a Syrian town near the Lebanese border where Hezbollah is fighting alongside Syrian government forces to oust rebels. It's not quite clear why but Marwan Dimashqieh, a car mechanic, was seen as having written the fiercely anti-Hezbollah song. He was found dead in his car on Tuesday, a gun in his lap. Lebanese investigators have suggested it was suicide. But hundreds of mourners who attended his funeral held him as a martyr. They said he'd been kidnapped and killed for his outspoken attack on Hezbollah.
World News from the BBC
Britain and Germany have spoken of the need to reform the European Union to make it more flexible and to encourage growth. The British Prime Minister David Cameron said after talks in Downing Street with Chancellor Merkel that he believed there was enough common ground to deliver the change's long-been wants before her planned referendum on EU membership. Mrs. Merkel indicated there're worth areas in which the countries agreed, but she didn't go into specifics.
The English Football Association has banned the French striker Nicolas Anelka for five matches for a gesture he made celebrating a goal last December which was widely seen as anti-Semitic. The FA also fined Anelka who plays for the Premier League team West Bromwich Albion more than 130,000 dollars. Richard Colven has this report.
The three-man independent panel upheld the FA's charge that in using the controversial quenelle gesture, Nicolas Anelka acted in an abusive, indecent, insulting or improper way, and further more which had a reference to ethnicity, religious belief or racial origin. But the panel say Nicolas Anelka is not an anti-Semite, none did he not intend to promote anti-Semitism. His club West Bromwich Albion have now suspended the French striker and will launch their own internal inquiry. Nicolas Anelka meanwhile must now decide if he intends to appeal, having maintained all along, he believes he's done nothing wrong.
Parliament in Cyprus has narrowly rejected a privatization plan that was a condition for the country getting its next installment of international bailout loans in effect forcing a renegotiation. Hundreds of workers at corporations facing privatization have staged an angry protest outside the Chamber. As part of its commitments to paying down a level of debt which has brought Cyprus to the brink of Bankruptcy, the government has to sell off three of the big utilities, telecoms, electricity, and the port authority.