The leading Republican in Congress John Boehner said further tax increases were not the way to address the deficit.
The U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has described as objectionable a comment made by the Turkish prime minister about Zionism. Recep Tayyip Erdogan had described Zionism as a crime against humanity which Mr. Kerry said complicated the task of making peace in the Middle East.
The president of Chad Idriss Deby says his troops in northern Mali have killed one of the senior commanders of al-Qaeda in North Africa, Abdelhamid Abou Zeid. It was reported on Thursday that Abou Zeid had been killed but this hadn’t been independently confirmed. Richard Hamilton reports.
President Deby said that Abou Zeid was killed in fighting on the 22nd of February in the Ifoghas Mountains north of Kidal near the Algerian border. However other reports suggested he may have been killed in an aerial bombardment by the French military and that Chadian forces recovered the corpses later. Algerian security services are said to be taking DNA samples at the request of the French from two of Abou Zeid’s relatives who are in jail in Algeria.
World News from the BBC
A Russian multimillionaire who is wanted on charges of fraud by the authorities in Moscow has been granted asylum in Britain. Andrei Borodin is accused of carrying out the fraud while he was head of the Bank of Moscow. He says the charges are politically motivated and accuses the former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev of being behind the move. The Russian authorities have criticized the British decision.