BBC News with David Austin
The bodies of dozens of men who appeared to be victims of a mass summary execution have been found in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. A video posted on the internet by opposition activists shows the corpses in a small river. Jim Muir reports
Strewn along the riverbed, covered in grey mud, laid body after body, some singly, some in groups or even heaps, they are all appeared to have been killed by a single shot to the head or the back of the neck and many of them clearly have their hands bound. Activists were quick to blame government forces for what is one of the most gruesome discoveries of the war so far. But the identities of many of the victims have yet to be established. The bodies were found in an area that’s controlled by the opposition. That led government officials to insist that the bodies were those of people who had been abducted by armed rebels and their gruesome deaths publicized by activists in order to blame the regime.
President Obama has said the time has come for a commonsense, comprehensive reform of immigration laws in the United States. The president said he was encouraged by a plan outlined by a group of Democratic and Republican senators on Monday to offer a pathway to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants. He said there was a nationwide consensus that something must be done.
“Most Americans agree that it’s time to fix a system that’s been broken for way too long. Business leaders, faith leaders, labor leaders, law enforcement and leaders from both parties are coming together to say now is the time to find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America’s the land of opportunity.” President Obama.
Israel has made an official protest to Argentina over its agreement to set up a joint investigation with Iran into the bombing in 1994 of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Argentine courts blamed Iran for the attack in which 85 people were killed but Iran has always denied involvement. Wyre Davies reports.
This week’s decision by Argentina and Iran to create a joint commission into the 1994 attack has exasperated and angered the Israeli government and Jewish groups in Argentina. Announcing the agreement, Argentina’s President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner said five independent judges would finally allow suspects to be questioned but an Israeli spokesman said it was tantamount to inviting a murderer to investigate his own killings.
Residents of Malian cities captured in recent days by French-led forces have attacked targets associated with the Islamist militants who ruled for much of the past year. In Gao, there are reports of a youth militia going door-to-door in search of suspects. In Timbuktu, shops and businesses with Arab or Tuareg owners were looted.
World News from the BBC
The French government says that in the next few days it’d expel a number of foreign imams that it accuses of promoting Islamist radicalism. The interior minister Manuel Valls made the announcement at a conference in Brussels but gave no details. He said the aim was to prevent indoctrination of Muslims citing the case of Muhammad Marah who killed seven people in and around the city of Toulouse last March.
A former Ukrainian police general has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a prominent investigative journalist whose decapitated body was found in a forest more than 12 years ago. During the trial, the general, Olexiy Pukach admitted strangling Georgiv Gongadze but insisted it had been an accident. He said he’d wanted only to intimidate the journalist who’d exposed high-level corruption.
The Roma artist and holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka has died in Austria at the age of 79. As self-taught painter she contributed much to international awareness of Roma suffering during the holocaust. Here is Nick Thorpe.
Ceija Stojka was a Roma from the Lovari tribe. Her family lived as horse traders traveling through Austria before the Second World War when they were deported to Nazi concentration camps like all Roma. Her father and brother were killed in Auschwitz. She was only 12 years old when she was liberated from Bergen-Belsen. Her autobiography We Live in Seclusion published in 1988 and a film made about her drew international attention to the plight of the Roma in the past and present.
In football, the defending champions Zambia have been knocked out of the Africa Cup of Nations in the first round. They have drawn 0:0 with Burkina Faso who progressed to the quarterfinals as winners of Group C. Nigeria also went through to the last state after beating Ethiopia 2:0. It’s the first time in 21 years that the defending champions have failed to make it beyond the first round of the tournament.
And those are the latest stories from BBC News