BBC News with David Austin.
The Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been given a hero's welcome on his return from the United Nations in New York. He was back in Ramallah after securing an enhanced recognition for Palestinians. Yolande Knell is in Ramallah.
Cheers as the Palestinian president took to the stage. He hailed the upgrade in status to observer state at the UN as a decisive landmark in the history of the Palestinian national struggle. The world is on our side, he said, but there will references too to the challenges ahead. In response to the UN vote, Israel has already said it will freeze the transfer of tax revenues it had collected on behalf of Mr. Abbas' Palestinian authority and announced the construction of 3,000 new settler homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The organization representing Egyptian judges has announced that its members will not supervise a referendum on a draft constitution in two weeks time. The statement by the judge's club comes after a confrontation between Egypt's highest court and Islamist supporters of President Mohamed Mursi. The Constitutional Court announced it was suspending its work indefinitely after its members were prevented earlier today from ruling on the legitimacy of the Islamist-dominated body which drew up the new constitution. The opposition says the document undermines basic freedoms.
The emergency services in Japan say that a lorry driver who managed to telephone for help from inside a collapsed motorway tunnel has been found dead. Rescue workers also found the charred remains of several bodies inside another vehicle which caught fire when huge sections of the tunnel ceiling collapsed. Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports from Tokyo.
Terrified drivers described watching in disbelief as the roof imploded around them. Close circuit television pictures from inside the tunnel showed huge slabs of concrete, each weighing more than a ton, lying on the roadway. Cars crushed beneath them. For a time there was hope that the lorry driver was alive under the rubble. But by nightfall, rescuers had only found five dead bodies, including that of the lorry driver. People here are now wondering how much more of Japan's aging infrastructure is a lot less safe than they had imagined.
Suspected Islamist fighters have killed ten Christians in the northeast of Nigeria. Witnesses say the attackers used guns and machetes in an overnight rampage in the village of Chibok. There have been several other attacks in the same region over the weekend with two police officers killed. Islamist fighters, belonging to the Boko Haram sect, have killed hundreds of people since launching an uprising against the government three years ago. They often target security forces, government officials or Christians who they view as infidels.
World News from the BBC.
With time running out for a budget deal in the United States before a year-end deadline. Officials of the two main parties have blamed each other for the stalemate. The Republicans have rejected the latest Democratic proposals for raising taxes for the rich. But the Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ruled out any deal without higher taxes for the wealthy. He was speaking on CBS's Face the Nation.
I think we have a very good chance for coming together on an agreement that not just protects 98% of Americans from a tax increase and protects the economy from deeply damaging upfront spending cuts and protects the economy from leaving us vulnerable to periodic threats of defaults by politicians. I think we can do better than that and do something good for the long-term future of the American economy.
Failure to reach a deal will automatically trigger tax rises and spending cuts.
Heavy snow has caused a 50-kilometer-long traffic jam on a highway that links Russia's largest cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Thousands of vehicles are stuck. Some of them have been in the queue for more than two days after extreme snow brought traffic to a halt on Friday.
A 200-year-old letter in which the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte gave the order to blow up Kremlin citadel in Moscow has been sold at auction for almost 200,000 dollars. Hugh Schofield has this report from Paris.
This letter is of a particular interest, partly because it's in code, a not very complex number for letter substitution, but also because it was written at the turning point of Napoleon's career. As he invaded Russia in 1812, he's captured Moscow, but with the Russian army being withdrawn and winter approaching. He knows he has to turn back. So the letter, to his foreign minister at Vilnius in modern-day Lituania, described how he was given the order of the Kremlin to be destroyed. In the event, only part of the walls were demolished. The emperor himself began the long and disastrous journey back to France, for two years later, he would be defeated and forced to abdicate.
And that's the BBC News.