Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, says they are close to getting what they want. Even if the president and the leaders of both parties can agree, it doesn't mean they can sell a deal to their troops. Many Democrats will be unhappy that deep cuts aren't matched with tax increases. Republican supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement will worry that the cuts can't be enforced while some don't think the debt limit should be raised at all.

Police in Mexico say a suspected cartel leader they arrested on Friday has

confessed to

ordering the murder of 1,500 people in the northern city of Juarez. The man, Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez, is also suspected of

mastermind

ing the attack on an American consulate worker and her husband last year. Vanessa Buschschluter reports.

The security forces said the raid, in which Mr Acosta Hernandez was captured, had been long in the planning. The suspect, who's better known as El Diego, is accused of being the leader of the La Linea gang, whose members work as hired killers for the Juarez cartel. The cartel controls some of the main drug smuggling routes from Ciudad Juarez into the United States. Police believe El Diego is also behind a car bomb attack which killed four people in the border city, the first such attack in Mexico's spiralling drug-related violence.

Indonesian police say 17 people have died in election violence in the remote province of Papua, in the east of the country. They were killed in clashes between supporters of two rival candidates for local elections later this year. Papua has been the scene of low-level separatist insurgency for decades, and the area is heavily militarised.