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This is Danielle Jalowiecka with the BBC News. Hello.
Donald Trump has hailed Syria's president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, as a strong leader following talks at the White House. Mr. Trump said he believed Syria could be very successful under Mr. al-Sharaa, the one-time leader of an al-Qaeda affiliate who had a $10m U.S. bounty on his head. "He comes from a very tough place and he's a tough guy. I liked him, I get along with him, the president, the new president of Syria. We have to make Syria work. Syria is a big part of the Middle East and I will tell you, I think it is working really well. We're working also with Israel on, you know, getting along with Syria, getting along with everybody." As the two men met, the U.S. Treasury announced a six-month suspension of sanctions on Syria. President Trump has threatened to sue the BBC over a documentary which misrepresented his comments before his supporters stormed the Capitol building in January, 2021. His lawyers have given the corporation until Friday to make a full and fair retraction. Meanwhile, the BBC chair Samir Shah has apologized to British MPs as Nick Watt explains. This is a change because the leading figures in BBC News thought there wasn't an intention to mislead and they didn't think it was a problem. What he is apologizing for is falsely giving the impression that Donald Trump, when he was talking about fight, meant going to Capitol Hill. That's for 10 seconds of a documentary that lasts around about an hour and the lawsuit talks about retracting the entire thing. So that's where you potentially see a difficulty in any negotiations the BBC may have with the White House over this lawsuit. U.S. travelers are facing mounting frustration as flight delays and cancellations continue amid a shortage of air traffic controllers caused by the ongoing government shutdown. More than 6,000 flights were delayed and nearly 2,000 cancelled on Monday alone. The Senate is considering a short-term spending plan to end what has become the longest shutdown in U.S. history. The measure would reopen the government temporarily until January. The U.N. climate change conference, known as COP30, has formally opened in the Brazilian city of Belém, a gateway to the Amazon rainforest. Addressing some of the 50,000 delegates from around the world, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva described the summit as the COP of "implementation." From Belém, here's Matt McGrath. The absence of the United States continues to cast a shadow over this gathering. Brazil's President Lula said this cop would be the one to defeat the denialists. It will also be a COP that will "hear and believe the science," said André Corrêa do Lago, the man tasked with leading these talks over the next two weeks. Despite the rallying calls, organizers are worried that progress here will be slow. Some developing countries are angry that the richer nations aren't moving fast enough to cut carbon despite promising to do so. World news from the BBC. An explosion near one of the Indian capital's most famous buildings has killed at least nine people and injured 20 others. Delhi police say the blast occurred in a car carrying passengers on the crowded road near the historic Red Fort. Videos showed plumes of fire billowing from the vehicle. The authorities have stepped up security in Delhi. The governor of a Colombian region on the border with Venezuela has survived an attack in which gunmen opened fire on his convoy. Renson Martínez Prada, the governor of Arauca, was leaving the town of Fortoul when his vehicle was targeted. It isn't known who carried out the attack, but the region has seen growing instability as rival Colombian insurgent groups fight to control cross-border smuggling. Lebanon has released Hannibal Gaddafi, the youngest son of the deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, after nearly ten years in detention without trial. He was freed on bail of $900,000. The Lebanese authorities accused him of concealing information about the fate of a Lebanese Shia cleric, who disappeared in Libya in 1978 when Hannibal was just two. A British-Hungarian writer David Szalay has won this year's Booker Prize, the U.K.'s top literary award, for his novel called "Flesh." The story features a shy 15-year-old boy from a Hungarian housing estate who becomes a driver and security guard for London's ultra-rich. Mr. Szalay spoke to the BBC after the award. "I wasn't really sure how the book would be received. I guess I didn't really have a very strong expectation for how the book would be received. So I kind of knew what I was trying to do with the book, but I wasn't at all sure until the book was published and started being read. That would be how readers perceived it too, but by and large I think it is, which is really fantastic." The chairman of the judging panel described the novel as "dark" and "a joy to read." And that's the latest BBC News. |