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BBC News with Kathy Clugston.
The White House has said the United States will not issue a visa to the man nominated by Iran to be its next ambassador to the United Nations, which has its headquarters in New York. Hamid Aboutalebi has been linked to the group which stormed the US embassy in Tehran in 1979. From Washington Rajini Vaidyanathan.
It's unusual for a government to intervene in a country's choice for UN ambassador, but deep misgivings about Hamid Aboutalebi are why the White House says it won't issue him a visa to take up the post in New York. A veteran diplomat who served in many countries, it is connections to the Iran hostage crisis which raised huge concerns. Mr. Aboutalebi was a member of a Muslim student group which held 52 Americans hostage in 1979, he maintains he was only a translator and a negotiator.
The United States Treasury is imposing sanctions on seven more people in connection with Russia's annexation of Crimea. From Washington, Beth McLeod reports.
This is the third round of sanctions linked to the Ukraine crisis imposed by the US Treasury. The earlier wave mostly targeted Russian officials and business people, this time the Treasury has frozen the US-based assets of one former Ukrainian official and six Crimean leaders, including the chairman of the Crimea electoral commission and the mayor of Sevastopol. The new sanctions also targeted a subsidiary of the Ukrainian state gas company, whose assets have been seized by the Crimean authorities.
The senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat says the Palestinian authorities' decision to sign up to the Geneva conventions doesn't mean the territory is breaking off the current round of peace talks. Israel has vehemently opposed the move now approved by Switzerland, and it's supplied new economic sanctions. Here is our diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus.
They argued that this through the whole effort to negotiate with Palestinian into dispute, because they say this was one of the conditions that will set down the Palestinians would not pursue a member of this type international organization whilst those talks are underway. The talks, of course, due to end on April 29th, there are some in limbo at the moment that the Palestinians for their parts say that was the Israelis who broke the conditions that had been laid down by not going through with the force of the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Pope Francis has said that he takes personal responsibility for the evil of the priests who sexually abuse children. During a meeting with the representatives of the children's organizations, the Pope asked the victims to forgive him and said those responsible must face sanctions. He said the Church needed to be even stronger in dealing with such scandals in the future.
Pope Francis has been criticized for not making the issue of priority. And a BBC correspondent in Rome says these remarks were his strongest yet.
World News from the BBC.
Police in Brazil said they've detained six people as part of a wider investigation into a money laundering that includes a former director of the country's oil giant Petrobras. They said they'd also obtained documents from the Brazilian state-run company and that was cooperating with the authorities.
The group of 20 leading nations has agreed to give the United States until the end of the year to ratify the reforms to the International Monetary Fund. The reforms which give emerging economies a bigger role in the fund have been held up by political rival reason in the United States Congress. If Washington fails to approve the plans agreed back in 2010, the G20 said it would then ask the IMF to study alternative options.
Serbian archaeologists have used heavy machinery to move the skeleton of a prehistoric mammoth from a coal mine. The female's skeleton, nicknamed Vika, was unearthed in the east of the country five years ago. Here is our Belgrade correspondent Guy De Launey.
Moving a prehistoric pachyderm as naturally, a mammoth task, especially when like Vika, she is reckoned to be about a million years old. The preparations took months. First, the archaeologists had to encase the mammoth in 60 tons worth of sand and rubber to stop the bone shifting about, then cranes and bulldozers have moved in to transferred remains to a permanent resting place. Vika will go on show in a next exhibition center, a few kilometers from the open Kostolac mine where she was found.
Guy De Launey.
The ashes of a French Resistance veteran have been buried near a mass grave of comrades who perished at a concentration camp in Germany during the World War II. Louis Bertrand, who survived several months at the Langenstein-Zwieberge camp, has expressed a wish to be given a final resting place alongside more than 4,000 colleagues who lost their lives there. Mr. Bertrand himself died last June at the age of 90.
BBC News.
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