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Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service, live from London.

This is Owen Bennett-Jones.

And coming up a little later in the programme, five former US officials have criticised the Pentagon

for not acknowledging potential

American involvement in a deadly strike on an Iranian school earlier this year.

Basically, it's the prosecutor's equivalent of we don't comment on ongoing investigations,

which is pathetic and completely inadequate at this point.

Has there been even an admission this was a US missile one?

There has been no admission. It's not a complicated set of circumstances. I think everybody

in the world now knows what's happened. We need to admit it and deal with it instead of

stalling. And our Washington correspondent,

Tom Bateman, will have more on that in around 30 minutes.

Also in the programme,

a new copy of the earliest poem in English

has been discovered in Rome.

New eschur and herga,

heffin rich is wade,

methude is mechty on his mode, you think.

Work, woldorfeida,

swight he wonder your hoss, etchidritten or astalda. He eras chup, a urdu-bearnum,

heaven to hrotha, halleag shepend. Full marks, we've got it, English, as we don't really know it anymore. We'll explain all of that later on.

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