Election officials said it could take several days for preliminary results to be released.
Reports from Pakistan say one of the best known faces of al-Qaeda, an American-born senior spokesman for the organization Adam Gadahn, has been arrested. The reports, which’ve not yet been confirmed either in Islamabad or Washington, say Mr Gadahn was captured by Pakistani intelligence officers in the past few days. Madeleine Morris reports from Washington.
Adam Gadahn is one of the best known faces of al-Qaeda, frequently appearing in videos exhorting Muslims to commit terrorist acts against western targets. The most recent of these was posed at Sunday morning — a 25-minute speech praising a Muslim US army Major who allegedly killed 13 people on a Texas army base last year. Adam Gadahn, who converted to Islam as a teenager in California, is on the FBI's wanted list and faces charges of treason in the United States.
The Palestinian leadership in the occupied West Bank has agreed to resume indirect peace talks with Israel. The news came as the Obama administration announced a new attempt to relaunch the Middle East peace process by sending two senior envoys to the region. Previously, the Palestinians had said that they'd not re-enter any negotiations until the Israelis halted illegal Jewish settlement expansion in all the occupied Palestinian territories.
World News from the BBC.
The charity campaigner Bob Geldof has challenged the BBC to substantiate a report, alleging that some of the funds raised for Ethiopian famine victims in the 1980s ended up buying arms for rebel groups in Tigray. Mr Geldof, whose Band Aid campaign raised many millions of dollars, said the allegation of the BBC World Service program was rubbish, produced, as he put it, without a shred of evidence. The BBC said it stood by the program which said there was evidence that some of the money sent to rebel-held areas of Tigray was misappropriated to buy arms.