BBC News with Iain Purdon.
Euro zone finance ministers have granted Greece a conditional 4-month extension of its international bailout. Speaking after crisis talks in Brussels, the president of the Euro group Jeroen Dijsselbloem said Greece had pledged to honor all its debts in a timely manner and not to pursue any unilateral matters that might affect the budget targets. Lucy Williamson has more.
This is a very complicated arrangement. The 4-month deal were shorter than the Greeks had asked for. They had asked for 6 months so there was compromise there and also it’s not been rubberstamped yet. We were told today that the Greek government would have to provide a list of reforms by Monday for the institutions of the member countries to have a look at. And if all is well if they are happy with that list of performs then it gets rubber stamped and sent to the Natioanal Parliament all before of course the end of the week when that existing agreement would finish.
The Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said the deal had proved his government was right to resist austerity. "We averted the view that the country that is heavily indebted ending the program can not possibly claim that elections can change something. We stood upright from the beginning of negotiations to the very end."
The president of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has announced that a nation-wide curfew imposed last year to combat the Ebola outbreak would be lifted on Sunday. Thomas Fessy reports.
Recent figures show that the transmission of the deadly virus is seriously declining in the country. It is now recording just a handful of new cases every week. Schools slowly began to re-open earlier this week 6 months after they were closed to try to curb the epidemic. American soldiers have started to go home. Only one hundred of them will remain in the country down from 3,000. Together with Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone have pledged to achieve zero ebola infections within next 2 months.
The Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has accused a senior Russian official of directing foreign sniper groups who shot and killed protesters during the uprising in Kiev exactly a year ago. The accusation came as Ukrainians gathered to mark the first anniversary of the uprising in which over 100 people died. David Stern reports.
The proceedings on Kiev’s Maidan Square were both an anniversary and commemoration ceremony. A symphony orchestra played Mozart’s requiem and the city’s churches rang their bells for 20 minutes. Petro Poroshenko ,Ukraine’s president, said the Maidan clashes were the beginning of a battle against what he called Russian aggression. Earlier in the day, he said a top advisor to Russian president Vladimir Putin directed snipers who fired on the activists.
World News from the BBC.
United Nations investigators are considering publishing the names of an estimated 200 individuals suspected of committing war crimes in Syria in what would be a radical change of policy.The UN’s independent commission of inquiry said there had been an exponential rise in atrocities. It said not naming suspects would reinforce the impunity of alleged war criminals.
A man who was racially abused by a group of Chelsea football fans in Paris and prevented from boarding an underground train says he felt humiliated by the incident. Speaking to the BBC, the man, Souleymane S who is of Mauritanian descent says he couldn’t believe what have happened and felt deeply wounded. The manager of Chelsea football club Jose Mourinho has apologized.
The Italian fashion giant Benetton has announced to pay compensation into a UN backed fund for victims of the Rana plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013. More than 1100 people were killed and two and a half thousand more injured. Charles Haviland reports.
Benetton is one of 29 international brands that source their clothes from the fore factories of the Rana plaza. Until now, it’s paid some compensation but through its own channels. Now it’s agreed to go through the main trust fund as some others have already done. The campaigning website Avaaz set up a petition 9 days ago urging Benetton to compensate. It says that by attracting over a million signatures, it prompted Benetton’s announcement. A labor right activist XXX told the BBC he was glad the Italian company would be giving money and has yet undisclosed some. But he said it should have happened much earlier.
Health officials in India are struggling to contain an outbreak of swine flu after the number of cases doubled within a week. More than 11 thousand people have the disease and it’s killed over 700 since mid-December.