The BBC can now pander to the Arabic World....

Just what we need in the fight against terrorism...the BBC broadcasting to the Arabic World. Sigh...

The BBC World Service is closing 10 foreign language radio services - most of them in the former eastern bloc - to pay for a new £19 million Arabic television news channel, it was announced yesterday.

Services in Hungarian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Slovak, Slovene, Kazakh and Thai will cease transmission by March, with the loss of more than 230 jobs.

Many of them were set up during the Cold War and provided listeners with their only non-state controlled news.

Journalist and broadcasting unions attacked the cuts, saying that they undermined the World Service's claim to be a truly global operation and ignored evidence that some of the affected countries were far from thriving democracies.