BBC news with Mary Small
The Hamas leadership in Gaza says it wants a long term border agreement with Egypt, so that people can travel from the Palestinian territory to buy essential goods. Hamas made its comments after tens of thousands of Palestinians crossed the border between Gaza and Egypt through holes in the security barrier made by militants using explosives. Last week, Israel tightened its blockade of Gaza in response to continued Palestinian rocket fired into Israeli territory. A senior Hamas member, Ahmad Yusuf said he didn’t think the people of Gaza would allow themselves to be fenced in again as long as Israeli sanctions continued.
I don’t think that anybody will dare to cross that border, except that there is definite arrangement between Egyptian and Palestinian how to organize the people to cross to Egypt or come in from Egypt, but to keep it close and without dissolution,. I think that people will, all the time, will try to demolish the wall if the sanction will continue.
The Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi is coming under increasing pressure to step down to avoid a second confidence vote on Thursday. The lower house of Parliament has voted in Mr. Prodi’s favor, but his chances of winning the second vote in the senate are seen as slight as he has already lost his majority there. But now free liberal democrats say they’ll vote against him. Christian Fraser reports from Rome.
This is a reprieve for Romano Prodi, but the word is he’s been encouraged to abandon the vote in the senate later in the week. The visit he paid to the president Giorgio Napolitano early on Wednesday has fueled the speculation he might resign before a senate vote to make it easy to form a caretaker government. It’s the defection of three senators from the small Christian democrat party, the Udeur, that has wiped out the Prime Minister’s slender majority. He could survive with the votes of seven unelected lifetime senators, but the calculations show at best he can only win by one vote.
A key rebel group in the Democratic Republic of Congo has signed a peace deal with the government aimed at ending the long running conflict in the east of the country. The rebels led by a dissident Congolese General Laurent Nkunda have been offered an amnesty. General Nkunda’s ethnic Tutsi rebels have committed along with government troops and some militia groups to a ceasefire, with United Nations peacekeeping troops being deployed in key locations.
A French economic commission has presented a package of deregulation and a free market reform to stimulate the economy in line with President Nicholas Sarkozy’s election pledges last year to cut red tape and abolish entrenched privilege. The report calls for France to overhaul its education system, streamline regional government and encourage immigration to relieve a labor shortage. President Sarkozy had promised the report’s chairman Jacob Dali that he’d accept it in full.
World news from the BBC
Scientists in the United States say they’ve developed a new transplant technique in which patients don’t need to take drugs to enable their bodies to accept the new organ. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers say they have successfully transplanted kidneys into five patients, four of whom were subsequently able to stop taking the anti-rejection medication. Here is our science reporter Matt Mcgrath.
One of the biggest problems facing people who receive organ transplants is the fact that they have to take immuno-suppressive drugs for the rest of their lives. While the drugs prevent rejection of the organ, they leave the patients vulnerable to a wide range of infections that often prove fatal. The scientists say the key to the breakthrough is that doctors transplanted some of the donors’ bone marrow as well as the kidney. They first killed off mature immune cells in the recipient, and then transplanted the kidney and the bone marrow. When the recipient’s immune system recovered, it treated the foreign organ as part of itself.
The horse chestnut tree, which the Second World War diarist Anne Frank said brought her comfort as she hid from the Nazis, has been saved from being chopped down. Last year, Amsterdam’s city council ordered the diseased tree to be removed, fearing it could fall and damage the Anne Frank museum. But officials and conservationists have now agreed to build it a steel support. From The Hague, Geraldine Coughlin reports.
Neighbors and supporters argue that as a symbol of freedom, the tree was worth making extraordinary efforts to preserve. Even for posterity, grafts have been taken from the chestnut, and are being raised in a nursery to replace the old tree, if it turns out it can not be saved in 15 years’ time.
The last native speaker of Eyak, a symbol of a fight against language extinction has died aged 89. Marie Smith Jones was considered the last full-blooded member of the Eyak people of Alaska, and a champion of indigenous rights and conservation.
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