华师

BBC news 2011-05-21 BBC News with Jerry Smit The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has held talks in Washington a day after President Obama launched a new policy on the Middle East. President Obama said the changes sweeping across the Middle East presented a moment of opportunity. Mr Netanyahu said everyone wanted a peace that would endure, that a peace based on illusions would crash on the rocks of reality in the Middle East. Paul Adams reports from Washington. The two leaders tried hard not to show what a difficult encounter this had been. President Obama said only that there were some differences on what he called "precise formulations and language". This, he said, would happen between friends. Mr Netanyahu also said there were differences "here and there". But unlike his host, he proceeded to lay them all out, saying that Israel could not go back to the lines that existed before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and that Israel would have to have a long-term military presence in the Jordan Valley. Syrian troops have opened fire on anti-government protesters, killing at least 27 people across the country. In the third largest city Homs, reports said a child was among those shot dead in the protests. Foreign journalists are barred from Syria, so the reports cannot be independently confirmed. An eyewitness told the BBC about how the security forces handled the situation. "The protests took off in Homs straight after Friday prayers from many mosques and some smaller side streets. The surprise today is that the security forces are resorting to several tactics to disperse the protests. These include firing shots at protesters and driving their vehicles in the middle of the protests." The United Nations refugee agency says it believes around 4,000 people have fled Syria to Lebanon in recent weeks. The agency said many of those fleeing reported heavy bombardment in the Syrian town of Talkalakh. The UNHCR says the refugees need food, shelter and medical help. Syria had denied shelling the town. It said that the area was full of smugglers and there had been fighting between them and the security forces. The former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has been freed on bail from a prison in New York and sent to a temporary home in Manhattan. The release came after what seemed to be a last-minute hitch over where he'd stay. Mr Strauss-Kahn is accused of a serious sex assault on a hotel maid, the charge he denies. Laura Trevelyan reports. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was going to be detained in a smart apartment block on the Upper East side of Manhattan, but some neighbours apparently objected to the disruption this would cause. So Dominique Strauss-Kahn's lawyers went back to court and argued that he should move, instead, into a temporary location run by the security company overseeing his electronic monitoring and 24-hour guard. The judge approved this location temporarily. It's only suitable for a few days, and then Mr Strauss-Kahn must go somewhere else. BBC News Political prisoners who were released in Burma earlier this week have been speaking about their treatment in jail. One of the prisoners, a Buddhist monk, told the BBC he'd been hung upside down and hit with a bamboo rod. The Burmese government released more than 14,000 detainees, but only about 50 are tho