BBC News with Zoe Diamond.

President Obama has presented Congress with his budget proposals for 2011, saying the United States must learn to live within its means. He said the country could not go on spending as if its deficits and waste didn't matter. Mr. Obama said America faced serious challenges, it must be prepared for a painful cuts. Kevin Connolly has this from Washington.

"Barack Obama

buffet

ed by recent election defeats to his Democratic Party has a keen political sense of the image he wants to

portray

on the economy --- that of the president forced by circumstance into

enlarging

America's already huge budget deficit in the short-term while promising in the medium-term to reduce it. So his 3.8 trillion dollar budget includes more money for education and scientific research and more for defence programmes. But it also

looks forward to

eliminating

waste and freezing many other domestic programmes."

The American Defense Secretary Robert Gates has sacked the marine general overseeing a 40-billion-dollar project to build an advanced warplane for the United States and several of its NATO allies.

Mr.Gates said the program to develop the F-35 Joint strike fighter had failed to hit performance targets.

The Somali Islamist Group Al-Shabab has for the first time said that its military campaign should be linked to Al-Qaeda. In a statement, Al-Shabab said what it described as it's Jihads in the horn in the east of Africa should be combined with Al-Qaeda's international operations.