BBC news with Fiona McDonald.
Voting has begun in the Serbian province of Kosovo, in general and local elections dominated by the issue of independence. The majority ethnic Albanian population wants to break away from Serbia. The Serbian government in Belgrade has urged Serbs in the province to boycott the polls. From the capital Pristina, here's Nick Hawton.
The ballot box is arriving at this primary school-turned polling station half an hour before the doors were due to open to the public. Counts of Europe election monitors were already here. The buildings like Preshtinara are covered in a layer of snow which fell overnight. Four and a half thousand people are entitled to vote at this particular polling station. There are more than 2,000 polling stations around Kosovo in Albanian and Serb areas. International monitors will be present at some of them. There have been threats of a boycott by many Serbs who have been encouraged by Belgrade not to participate in the elections.
The president of Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf has said the country's nuclear weapons are safe as long as the military stays in charge. He said that if the elections promised in January went ahead under what he called disturbed conditions, there was a danger that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal could fall into unsafe hands. Speaking to the BBC, general Musharraf said he could not see how emergency rule would interfere with the elections.
"I don't know how emergency clashes with the fairness of the elections. The emergency is to maintain law and order; emergency is to prevent agitation. The fairness of the election has to do with the polling system, the system of balloting, and the very fact that we are going to do ballot under observers from the world."
An Pakistani television news channel Geo has been forced to shut down completely after refusing to agree to restrictions the government of President Musharraf wanted to impose on its reporting. Some of the television networks taken off the air two weeks ago have been allowed to resume broadcasting.
The latest report from the Intergovernmental panel on climate change delivers a stern warning to politicians that climate change may have abrupt, far-reaching and irreversible consequences. Delegates at the conference in Spain have finished thrashing out the final details of the document which will be formally adopted later today. Our environment analyst Roger Harrabin has this report.
A clear and unambiguous warning from the world's most authoritative climate body is that the climate is heating, that it's more than 90% likely to be mainly our fault, and we should start cutting emissions now. Two very strong new messages are incorporated; one that there is a small but real chance that instead of warming gradually, the climate might abruptly shift into a much hotter state, that would leave us no time to adapt. The second that some of the changes in climate are likely to be irreversible, no going back with the experiment on the planet.
World news from the BBC.
Military ships and helicopters are trying to reach thousands of survivors of a powerful cyclone that struck southern Bangladesh on Thursday. More than 600 deaths have been confirmed, but officials fear that figure could rise possibly to more than 1000 as rescuers reach more remote areas. Our correspondent in Darka, Mark Dummett reports.
Relief and rescue teams are hopeful of getting to all the remote villages along Bangladesh's southwestern coast in the coming hours. Only then will a full picture of the damage left behind by the massive storm become known. The relief effort will be huge. The government, local and international NGOs are already working hard to bring aid to the affected population. Tens of thousands of houses were destroyed, fields and harvests ruined; roads have been blocked, telephone and electricity lines disrupted. Many fishermen have reported missing.
Police in Uganda say 4 people have been killed in the floods in the capital Kampala following heavy rain early on Friday. A motorcade taking President Yoweri Museveni to Uganda's international airport Entebbe was briefly stranded on a flooded route in a Kampala's suburb.
A five and a half meter long minke whale has been spotted deep inside the Amazon rainforests, more than 1,600 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean. Local people have been splashing water on the whale while it was exposed to the hot Amazon sun. Our correspondent Mark Duffy reports on the whale's plight.
Reports from the area say it is about five and a half meters long and weighs about 12 tons. Efforts have been continuing to dislodge the whale but it appears to have freed itself overnight and disappeared. A biologist said it was thought the animal became separated from its group and swam upstream until it ran aground near Santarem in Para state. While this is not unprecedented, it is unusual for whales to venture so far into fresh water.
Mark Duffy, BBC News.
Glossary
thrash out: 研究解决
If people thrash out something such as a plan or an agreement, they decide on it after a great deal of discussion.
NGO: Non-Government Organization