BBC news with Julie Candler.
High-level talks on Iran’s nuclear program are taking place at the United Nations in New York. The U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is meeting the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in the first such encounter for six years. Diplomats from China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany are also there. Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani has said he wants to reach a deal on the nuclear dispute in three to six months. Nick Bryant is at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
“Not since 2007 has the U.S. Secretary of State come face-to-face with an Iranian Foreign Minister, it’s also the first time that talks have been conducted at such a high level between the two countries on Iran’s nuclear program. And the Iranians have said they hope it would jump-start talks which have long been stalled. But the America and Britain have both expressed skepticism over Iran's recent overtures, John Kerry has indicated that Washington won't make any major concessions unless Iran takes concrete steps to show it’s serious about curbing its nuclear ambitions.”
The global police organization INTERPOL has issued an international alert for a British woman Samantha Lewthwaite at the request of Kenya. Ms. Lewthwaite has been accused of having links to the al-Shabab Militant Movement which is behind the four-day attack on the Westgate Shopping Center in Nairobi. Although there has been media speculation that she was involved in the attack, INTERPOL makes no mention of it. Here's Frank Gardner.
“She was originally wanted just simply for possessing a forge South African passport but now the Kenya has announced she is wanted in connection with possession of explosives in an alleged what dating back to December, 2011, so nearly two years ago. These don't date from the Westgate Shopping Mall attack, but she is a suspect unofficially in that ,there have been unconfirmed reports that people have seen her there, either way she is a fugitive from justice in Kenya and they want to bring her for questioning.”
More funerals have been held in Kenya for victims of the attack on the Westgate Shopping Mall in which at least 67 people were killed, at the shopping center itself, blasts have been heard. They’re believed to be controlled explosions carried out by the Kenyan security forces. International forensic experts are continuing their search of the building, a third of which was destroyed during the assault by the Somali militant group al-Shabab.
A court in northern Russia is sitting into the night to deal with 30 Greenpeace activists arrested during a protest at an offshore oil platform in the Russian Arctic. 20 have been sent to a remand prison for two months to wait trial on charges of piracy, the crime that carries a prison sentence of up to 15 years. President Putin has commented that the accused obviously not pirates but he hasn't objected to that detention. The campaigners come from 18 different countries.
World news from the BBC.
The authorities in Brazil say they have uncovered slave-like conditions for workers employed on the expansion of Sao Paulo's international airport in preparation for next year’s football world cup. An official investigation found that one of the country’s biggest building contractors forced more than 100 workers to live in miserable accommodation near the building site. They were hired hundreds of kilometers away in poorer northeastern state.
Police in Mexico have found three human heads left by a monument at the entrance of the town of Los Reyes in the southwestern state of Michoacan. Officials say that criminal gang members left notes next to the heads warning the residents of consequences of supporting vigilante groups. Michoacan is at the center of drug production and distribution.
Italian officials say divers have found human remains around the wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship which ran aground off the Italian coast in January, last year. Alan Johnston reports.
“In the aftermath of the Concordia disaster there was a major search for bodies, but when it was eventually called off, two people were still missing: an Italian woman passenger and an Indian crewman. It was thought that perhaps they have been trapped beneath the ship in the rocks. Now that the wrecks have been pulled upright as being possible to renew the search, and officials overseeing it say divers have found some remains lying just outside the hull on the seabed, they still haven't been brought ashore and processes of running DNA identification test is yet to begin.”
The Spanish authorities are to consider putting the country back on the same time zone as Britain and Portugal, reversing a decision made during the Second World War to follow Nazi Germany. A report has been presented to MPs arguing that Spain on the western edge of Europe has been out of think with national patterns of behavior based on sunrise and sunset.