29/05/2014 World News Today

This is BBC World News Today with me, Daniela Ritorto. No sign of a

letup in the violence in eastern Ukraine, where rebels have shot down

a military helicopter killing 14 people. The outgoing president

claimed the rebels used a Russian weapon system.

Australian officials say that Flight MH370 is not in the area the search

was focused on. Is there any chance of finding the Malaysian plane?

Former military chief Ann wins Egypt's election. Those who voted

delivered a landslide but turnout was less than 50%.

The world's waistlines are getting wider. New research says a third of

people globally are classified as overweight or OBC. -- obese.

We start in Ukraine, where the government has

We start in Ukraine, where the government confirmed that 14

soldiers, including an army general, were killed after a helicopter was

shot down by rope -- by pro-Russian rebels in the east. This photograph

was taken shortly after the crash. The helicopter had been dropping off

soldiers at the base in Sloviansk, the city which has become the

epicentre of fighting between government and pro-Russian forces.

Local people captured the aftermath of the crash, a thick plume of smoke

rising above the wreckage of the helicopter. It was brought down by

pro-Russian rebels as it transported personnel to a military base for a

chief -- a shift change. On board were 14 people, including an army

general. Ukraine's outgoing president, Alexander Turchynov, said

the helicopter had been hit by a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile.

A real war is going on in the east. I have just heard from the East that

one of our helicopters, which was taking armed servicemen for military

rotation, has been shot down by terrorists. There is a sense of

lawlessness in eastern Ukraine. Today militia men were guarding the

airport at the nets after a theist -- fierce battle earlier in the

week. On Monday four members of the OSCE were abducted in Sloviansk by

militiamen. They have not been seen since.

We are concerned but we are using all of our contacts with the

government and the non-state actors to re-establish contact with them.

We believe they are fine they are well, but we want to see them

returned to base. In Ukraine's capital of Kiev

barriers and banners are still in place following Sunday's election.

Many people now want a return to normality. The to crush the

rebellion within hours rather than months. -- the new president has

promised to crush. He faces an immense challenge.

A former US ambassador to the Ukraine is now at the National

Institute for Health and Care Excellence. He joins us now.

Ukrainians are killing each other in their scores, what is it going to

take to end this? -- is now at the Brookings Institution. I am glad

that the Russians are prepared to say they will respect the will of

the elections. They could use their influence on the rebels to get them

to de-escalate, and then the government could de-escalate. We

have just had some news in that pro-Moscow separatists say that most

of the fighters killed at the nets could airport were from Russia. I

suppose that does not surprise you. -- Donetsk airport. The Russians

have said they want a more normal relationship with Kiev but there is

this influx of fighters and weapons into Ukraine. It has to be that if

the Russian border guards wanted the shot that down they would. On Monday

you had pro-Russian separatists attacking the airport in Donetsk and

the Ukrainian army pushed them back. The next day Moscow criticised the

Ukrainian army but said nothing about the separatists. One wonders

where the rebels are getting weaponry which can shoot down

military helicopters. That is a big question. Some years ago there was a

NATO programme working with Ukraine to eliminate those shoulder fired

shots -- surface-to-air missiles because they were a tempting target

for terrorists. Most of the infantry in Ukraine was eliminated and one

wonders where the separatists get sophisticated weapons like that. My

guess they -- my guess is that it was not at the local police

stations. Let's talk about outside players, the EU and the United

States. What would you like to see them doing? There is two things. It

looks like the Sunday collection was good in several counts, a good

turnout, it was described as free and fair, and a clear victor.

Poroshenko now has a renewed democratic mandate to tackle some of

these issues. The West needs to support him critically so that he

can address the difficult domestic challenges, and other things that

the European Union and the US can do vis-a-vis Russia so that Russia

becomes part of the solution, not the problem. We are seeing an

escalation of violence and is there a danger in this vacuum? It creates

a difficult situation. Ideally the separatists would have -- would not

have chosen Monday to take the airport, which seems to have

triggered a lot of the fighting now taking place in the city in Donetsk.

I think the plan is that he will take office in about ten days and he

is going to have a very full agenda, I think. You begin to see

some signs that he is beginning to move and take charge and put his

imprint on government policy, so I do not think time will be lost. To

the extent that events in Luhansk and Donetsk are deteriorating, that

will make it much more difficult for him from the outset. Thank you for

your analysis and your time. France next, because thousands of

people have taken to the streets of Paris to protest a victory of the

far right National front in the European Parliament elections. The

anti-immigration Eurosceptic party took 24 seats in France compared

with just three in 2009. Today the protesters, many students, gathered

in Bastille Square in the centre of Paris. They say the National Front

threatens French values of tolerance and social justice.

It has been nearly three months and still nobody seems to have any idea

about what happened to Flight MH370, which was carrying 239 people. A

robotics arena has just finished scouring an area of the sea bed off

the Australian coast. -- a robotic machine.

After nearly three months, almost back to square one. The underwater

search in the southern Indian Ocean using this automated submarine

lasted six weeks. It was focusing on an area where kings, or signals, had

been detected, possibly from the plane's black box, but nothing was

found. -- pings. The safety bureau has advised that the search can be

considered complete. In its professional judgement the area can

now be discounted as the final resting place for Flight MH370. It

is another blow for the families of the 239 people who were on board. It

is a far cry from the optimism the Australian prime minister showed

last month. We have very much narrowed down the

search area and we are very confident that the signals we are

detecting are from the black box on Flight MH370.

Investigators will continue to scan the ocean floor. Commercial

contractors will be brought in. But the search area is having to be

massively extended to an area of over 60,000 square kilometres,

roughly half the size of England. The cost is massive. The Australian

government allocated recently a further 80 million US dollars to the

search but both time and money have failed to solve the mystery of

Flight MH370. They may not even be looking in the right place.

Let's talk to Simon Boxall, and oceanographer with the University of

Southampton. Not even looking in the right place, that is a drug testing

-- depressing prospect. Yes, and the next stage is to widen the search to

about 60,000 square miles. That will get bigger as time goes on. It has

gone from a difficult task to one that is almost impossible because

they are searching such a large area in such deep water. I think there is

little chance of finding anything now. What makes you think that? The

enormity of the task. You are looking at a task of several years,

so it will run into not tens of millions but possibly hundreds of

millions of pounds over the next few years. As in all of these things,

they could turn lucky and tripped over it on day one but this main

lead of picking up the pings from the plane, that was the best they

had to go on. I would not dismiss the area they have been surging

incompletely. We know from the air France flight that landed in the

Atlantic a few years earlier, they had survey the area where they

finally found it and finally they found it. -- they had searched the

area. What would be the right equipment to use? There are wetter

tools which are more expensive and need more support, but given the

amount of investment that has been put in so far, they need a system

capable at much deeper areas, because the Bluefin-21 is not really

designed for this kind of task. Do you think they need to revisit the

data that got them there in the first place? Very quickly, for the

sake of the families, you say it may never be found, but they can't give

up, surely? There is a point where... They really are looking for

a needle in a field of haystacks so it is probable, I want say

definite, that they won't find it. The Chinese and the Malaysians are

keen to continue but it starts to open up a massive issue over, how

long does one go on for before one says, look, we have searched the

area 's we thought we might have found the aircraft, do we broaden it

or stop? -- searched the areas. I really appreciate your thoughts,

thank you very much. Let's look at some of the other top

stories. Pakistani's prime minister has demanded immediate action after

a pregnant woman was bludgeoned to death with bricks outside the High

Court in Lahore. She was killed on Tuesday by men in her family for

marrying against their witnesses. Eyewitnesses say the police were

present but had nothing. That has been denied by the head of the

police force. One man has been arrested and

charges have been made against other men in India over the rape of two

girls. Three policemen have been suspended.

International medical aid teams have arrived in eastern Sierra Leone to

start dealing with an out rake of the Ebola virus. They face a,

catered task, -- a complicated task. Turkey's constitutional court has

ordered YouTube the -- to be unblocked Thomas saying it violates

freedom of expression. -- to be unblocked, saying. In April the

court lifted the ban on Twitter as well.

The former army chief in Egypt, Pardeep Singh, has won the

presidential election with more than 90% of the vote. The left if --

leftist candidate has conceded defeat and the Muslim brotherhood

and other groups boycotted it. We can now look at some of the numbers.

Only 3% opted to vote for his opponent. Despite the crushing

victory, I want to take a closer look at these numbers. This is not

the mandate that he wanted to legitimise the overthrow of the

previous regime. There was an assumption the turnout would be a

lot higher than it was. You can see the authorities seem very concerned

about that. On the second day of voting, the final day of voting, but

abruptly, the committee declared that they would make a third day of

voting, and extended day of voting, which indicated to many people in

the capital that the authorities were very worried about the turnout.

There were all sorts of messages. Celebrities were telling people not

to vote. Is this getting embarrassing for Abdel-Fattah

el-Sisi? It is certainly not what the authorities had in mind. Some of

the big shopping centres were closed. You also had the media

pushing a huge campaign on all sorts of media to try and get people out

to vote. There was hysteria on some of the private channels. This is not

want people in authority wanted to see. You would hope they would take

notice of this going forward that there was a passive boycott of

people who simply did not want to be involved and not because they oppose

the system. But there was certainly an active one as well and that

represent something that we hope the state authorities would take

seriously in the way forward. In many ways, winning the election was

the easy part for Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi. He has a lot of problems in

the country. The likes of health care, education. Yes, I knew budget

was signed off on by the interim government and those will have quite

dramatic repercussions on social policies with eejit the economic,

slow set of economic problems that are unfolding, they do not seem to

be getting any better. Summer is coming. The hottest months of the

year. The most electricity will be consumed, which put a strain on

energy consumption. This will be a difficult period going forward. It

is unclear, because we have not seen any proper programme. We have not

seen what Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi is going to do about this problem.

Private letters between former British Prime minister Tony Blair

and George W Bush, written in the run up to the Iraq War will not be

published in full. The chairman of the inquiry into the Iraq War, Sir

John Chilcott, has said that only quotes or suggestions of the notes'

content, will be made public. The inquiry completed its public

hearings in 2011 and today's announcement comes amid mounting

criticism of the delay in releasing the report. The report contains some

For many, it was the war which never really ended, which cost so many

ways, some say 100,000. Some people say it is many times that figure.

There is still no official version of events as to what led to Great

Britain and the United States attacking Iraq. What was said

between the British Prime Minister to the American President, what had

he promised? An enquiry was launched a staggering 58 months ago to find

the full story. It was there that Tony Blair came to give his account

of his actions and was told to spell out exactly what he had told George

Bush in 130 private conversations. I said we would stand shoulder to

shoulder with them. We did in Afghanistan and I was determined to

do that once more. Today, we learnt of the deal done. In a letter to a

top civil servant, the enquiry chairman said he will only publish

quotes and suggestions, not full documents. They should not reflect

the views of President Bush. Direct quotations from the document should

be the minimum necessary. The mother of one of the 179 soldiers from

Great Britain killed in the conflict was very disappointed. We want to

know, so we can understand what led to the invading Iraq. We want to

know the correspondence between Tony Blair and George Bush. It is more

than ten years since the invasion. Tony Blair has always insisted that

the dramatic and bloody story contains no secrets and that he

wants the enquiry out as soon as possible. We should be able to read

it later this year. It is not just rich countries

anymore - the whole world is getting fatter. New research conducted here

in the UK by the medical journal The Lancet suggests that more than two

billion people are now overweight, one third of the entire global

population. Once an element of rich countries,

it is no people of all ages and incomes who are tipping the Scales.

The heavy burden is no greater than ever before. Not one country has

succeeded in bringing down the problem. The survey found a

staggering 2.1 billion people worldwide are overweight or obese.

The United States tops the list. China came in second, followed by

India, together making up 15% of the world 's obese. Also in the top ten

where Pakistan and India uneasy. Two thirds of those who are obese are

living in developing countries, which is an example of new

prosperity and greater access to Western fat foods. It is destroying

the indigenous food culture. It is perceived in those countries as

being rather chic to eat there. We have not had that in their lives.

There are these wonderful stores where you can eat very easily. The

study also found that in developing countries women are more likely to

be overweight than men, the reverse is true in developed nations. It is

the most comprehensive study of its kind. With obesity rates rising in

children by 50%, a urgent changes needed at government level before

the next generation is also consumed by this.

Professor Nick Finer is Chair of Clinical Care with the World Obesity

Federation. He joins us from Cambridge.

I would guess that these findings do not shop queue at all? No, we have

known for a while that this is getting worse, most rapidly in

developing countries. It is a devastating and bleak future for the

evolving health care systems in those countries. What is happening

there. And the getting richer and doing less exercise and eating the

wrong foods, following the West? That is part of it. There are also

changes in the interior of which could affect obesity and its

complications. But the bottom line is that the mechanism is more food

in, less energy out. The real question is what is on the causes

behind these mechanisms. We know that there are changes in our

society. We are eating too much and not exercising enough, but it has

been 30 years since last major study like this. Why are we not reversing

the trend? I do not think is simple. It involves a concerted approach,

which I think has to be led by government. There has to be a

recognition by people, individuals, society, that obesity is a disease.

It is a major health risk. It is now threatening to reverse the advances

in longevity that we have made over the last 30-40 years. And the next

generation may actually die younger than the current generation. On the

one hand, there is a conflict. We have food industries and agriculture

and all sorts of action and bodies they do not want to upset. If you

label obesity as a disease, but does not take away the personal

responsibility for a person 's health? It meets all the criteria

for a disease. There is a physiology that causes obesity print

environments change and I do not think it takes away people 's

responsibility any more than someone with diabetes does not have the duty

to look after that disease. But if we do not recognise it for what it

is, governments will continue to ignore the overwhelming evidence

that they have got to do something about this. Thank you very much for

speaking tours. We will see you again very soon.

Good evening. Things have settled down quite nicely for the end of the

week. There is a good deal of dry and bright weather tomorrow. They

will be a fair bit of cloud, as well. The high pressure is building

from the North. We have got this week whether from just popping the

South West of