BBC News:奥巴马支持乌克兰决定自身命运
Egypt’s army chief and defence minister, FieldMarshal Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, has announced thathe’s resigned from the military so that he can runin the presidential elections expected next month.Still wearing his military uniform, he said his mission was to restore Egypt and warned thatthe country was threatened by terrorists. From Cairo, Orla Guerin.
In a televised address to the nation, the army chief announced his farewell to arms. AbdulFattah al-Sisi said he was giving up his uniform after 44 years to take on a new and difficultmission. One problem he won’t have is winning. Sisi enjoys huge support and so far has noserious rivals. Supporters see him as a strong leader who can bring stability after years ofturmoil. To critics he’s a military hardliner, who has presided over a brutal crackdown ondissent.
President Obama has used a speech in Brussels to champion the right of Ukrainians to decidetheir own future in further warning to Russia over its annexation of Crimea. He said the UnitedStates and Europe had no interest in controlling Ukraine, which is not in Nato, and would notreact militarily to Russia’s actions. But with time, Mr Obama said, Russians would realise theycannot achieve security and prosperity through brute force.
“We believe the world has benefited when Russia chooses to cooperate on the basis of mutualinterests and mutual respect. So America and the world and Europe has an interest in a strongand responsible Russia, not a weak one. We want the Russian people to live in security,prosperity and dignity like everyone else, proud of their own history. But that does not meanthat Russia can run roughshod over its neighbours.”
Earlier Mr Obama and European Union leaders said that the EU had to reduce its dependencyon Russian oil and gas. He held out the prospect of exporting shale gas to Europe if aprospective trade agreement between the two powers were signed. But he added that Europeshould not rely on US gas.
A son-in-law of Osama bin Laden has been found guilty of conspiring to kill American citizensfollowing the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Nick Bryant has been following thecase in New York.
Suleiman Abu Ghaith is the most senior al-Qaeda figure to face trial in a civilian court onAmerican soil. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks the Kuwait-born cleric acted asthe group’s mouthpiece using video tapes and impassioned rhetoric to recruit new Jihadistfighters. During his three-week trial, which took place in a Manhattan courthouse close to thesite of the World Trade Center, the jury were shown frames from a video of him meeting binLaden in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks.
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Malaysia says a French satellite has located a debris field in the southern Indian Oceancontaining more than 120 objects that could be from the missing airliner. The country’s actingtransport minister described the new images as the most credible lead so far. The debris is inroughly the same area as objects spotted by satellites from China and Australia.
A court in Turkey has ordered the country’s ban on Twitter to be lifted. The country’stelecommunications authority allows 30 days to restore access to the microblogging site orappeal against the ruling. The Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan imposed the ban last weekafter Turkish users posted corruption allegations about him. The restrictions were widelyflouted and criticised by among others the Turkish President Abdullah Gul.
The national emergency agency in Nigeria says three million people have affected by theongoing insurgency by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram. The agency says those peopleare in need of humanitarian assistance. It also says that about 250,000 people have beendisplaced by the crisis in the north-east of the country.
Captain Jerry Roberts, the last of the British codebreakers to help decipher communicationsbetween Adolf Hitler and his top generals during the Second World War, has died at the age of93. Gordon Corera reports.
Jerry Roberts joined Bletchley Park as a German linguist and was assigned to a team called theTestery named after its head Ralph Tester. Their target was not the well-known Enigma systemwhich carried military communications, but something even more challenging—a systemknown as Tunny, which carried the messages of Hitler’s top generals and even the Fuehrerhimself. When decades later General Roberts could finally talk about his work, he took greatdelight in recalling how he’d personally been able to read Hitler’s own messages—in some casesbefore the intended recipient.
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