BBC News with Jim Lee.
The two most notorious drug gangs in Honduras have promised to end the violence which’s claimed tens of thousands of lives in the Central American country. A spokesman said the two gangs would commit to zero violence on the streets. Will Grant reports from Mexico City.
“We ask for forgiveness,” the representatives of two violent drug gangs announced, “The ceasefire is with God, with society and with the authorities.” they said at a press conference inside a prison in the most violent city in the world San Pedro Sula. Following mediation from the Catholic Church and the organization of American States, the two groups called Mara Salvatrucha and Mara Dieciocho promised zero crime and zero violence in the streets. It's a significant step forward towards a full peace accord and comes after a similar pact which reached over a year ago in neighbouring El Salvador. There the peace agreement has roughly held together over the past 12 months and contributed to a significant reduction in the murder rate and incidence of other violent crimes.
The former President of Guatemala Alfonso Portillo has pleaded not guilty of money laundering in a US court. Prosecutors in New York accused Mr. Portillo of using US banks to launder 70 million dollars in public funds while in office. He was extradited from Guatemala to the US last week. In the past, the 61-year-old former president said he was the victim of political persecution.
Prosecutors in the United States have indicted the world's largest digital currency exchange accusing it of laundering money on a massive scale. The US attorney's office said the Costa Rica based company Liberty Reserve had laundered six billion dollars. It offered online facilities which for a small fee and without a complicated registration process allowed customers to deposit money and convert it into a digital currency that could be transferred to a different account and withdrawn.
The British Foreign Secretary William Hague has said that Britain can't start at arming Syrian rebels from now but has no active plans to do so. Russia responded to the EU decision not to renew its arms embargo on the Syrian opposition with an announcement that it would go ahead with a planned sale over a sophisticated air defence system to Syria saying it would restrain outside forces who wanted to get involved. Our world affairs correspondent Allan Little reports.
It's looking more and more like a very polarized situation with Britain and France being drawn into Syria's conflict on the opposite side to Russia's involvement and the risk is now clearly that those two sides will fight a proxy war on Syrian soil and it will be the Syrians doing the fighting and the Syrians dying. We are still a long way from that, but clearly the intension by Britain and France, and they had to persuade their very skeptical European partners about this is not to send weapons immediately but to try to use the credible threat of the sending of weapons as a lever to try to extract concessions from Bashar al-Assad.
World News from the BBC.
The French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has urged African nations to coordinate efforts to tackle a growing Islamist militant threat in southern Libya. Mr. Fabius was speaking from Niger where suicide bombers suspected to have come from Libya carried out two attacks last week killing 24 soldiers and a civilian. There has been a flood of militants and heavy weapons out of Libya since Colonel Gaddafi was toppled in 2011. Correspondents say much of southern Libya has become ungovernable since then.
Members of parliament in Kenya have voted to give themselves a big pay rise in defiance of government appeals for restraint. They've granted themselves a monthly salary of 10,000 dollars, an increase of about 50%. Kenya's new President Uhuru Kenyatta had implored them to accept lower pay to help cut the public sector wage bill. Richard Hamilton reports.
With an average wage of around 1,700 dollars a year, it's easy to see why MPs salaries arouse such anger. Two weeks ago, protesters released a pig and its piglets outside parliament to highlight the issue. A new body, the Salaries and Remuneration Commission had recommended the wages be cut by nearly half. In the previous parliament, outgoing MPs voted to award themselves a retirement bonus of more than 100,000 dollars together with an armed guard, a diplomatic passport and access to VIP airport lounges.
An Italian university has found what it believes is the world's oldest complete scroll of the torah, Judaism's most important text. According to the University of Bologna, it could be more than 800 years old. The scroll had been deemed of a little worth by a librarian in 1889 and wrongly categorized. But when University's professor of Hebrew, Mauro Perini took another look at it, he noticed that the script isn't the old Babylonian tradition which experts say means it's extremely old. The 36-meter long scroll of soft sheep leather was also subjected to carbon dating tests.