BBC News with Sue Montgomery
Egypt’s army chief and defence minister, Field Marshal Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, has announced that he’s resigned from the military so that he can run in the presidential elections expected next month. Still wearing his military uniform, he said his mission was to restore Egypt and warned that the country was threatened by terrorists. From Cairo, Orla Guerin.
In a televised address to the nation, the army chief announced his farewell to arms. Abdul Fattah al-Sisi said he was giving up his uniform after 44 years to take on a new and difficult mission. One problem he won’t have is winning. Sisi enjoys huge support and so far has no serious rivals. Supporters see him as a strong leader who can bring stability after years of turmoil. To critics he’s a military hardliner, who has presided over a brutal crackdown on dissent.
President Obama has used a speech in Brussels to champion the right of Ukrainians to decide their own future in further warning to Russia over its annexation of Crimea. He said the United States and Europe had no interest in controlling Ukraine, which is not in Nato, and would not react militarily to Russia’s actions. But with time, Mr Obama said, Russians would realise they cannot achieve security and prosperity through brute force.
“We believe the world has benefited when Russia chooses to cooperate on the basis of mutual interests and mutual respect. So America and the world and Europe has an interest in a strong and responsible Russia, not a weak one. We want the Russian people to live in security, prosperity and dignity like everyone else, proud of their own history. But that does not mean that Russia can run roughshod over its neighbours.”
Earlier Mr Obama and European Union leaders said that the EU had to reduce its dependency on Russian oil and gas. He held out the prospect of exporting shale gas to Europe if a prospective trade agreement between the two powers were signed. But he added that Europe should not rely on US gas.
A son-in-law of Osama bin Laden has been found guilty of conspiring to kill American citizens following the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Nick Bryant has been following the case in New York.
Suleiman Abu Ghaith is the most senior al-Qaeda figure to face trial in a civilian court on American soil. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks the Kuwait-born cleric acted as the group’s mouthpiece using video tapes and impassioned rhetoric to recruit new Jihadist fighters. During his three-week trial, which took place in a Manhattan courthouse close to the site of the World Trade Center, the jury were shown frames from a video of him meeting bin Laden in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks.
World News from the BBC
Malaysia says a French satellite has located a debris field in the southern Indian Ocean containing more than 120 objects that could be from the missing airliner. The country’s acting transport minister described the new images as the most credible lead so far. The debris is in roughly the same area as objects spotted by satellites from China and Australia.
A court in Turkey has ordered the country’s ban on Twitter to be lifted. The country’s telecommunications authority allows 30 days to restore access to the microblogging site or appeal against the ruling. The Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan imposed the ban last week after Turkish users posted corruption allegations about him. The restrictions were widely flouted and criticised by among others the Turkish President Abdullah Gul.
The national emergency agency in Nigeria says three million people have affected by the ongoing insurgency by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram. The agency says those people are in need of humanitarian assistance. It also says that about 250,000 people have been displaced by the crisis in the north-east of the country.
Captain Jerry Roberts, the last of the British codebreakers to help decipher communications between Adolf Hitler and his top generals during the Second World War, has died at the age of 93. Gordon Corera reports.
Jerry Roberts joined Bletchley Park as a German linguist and was assigned to a team called the Testery named after its head Ralph Tester. Their target was not the well-known Enigma system which carried military communications, but something even more challenging—a system known as Tunny, which carried the messages of Hitler’s top generals and even the Fuehrer himself. When decades later General Roberts could finally talk about his work, he took great delight in recalling how he’d personally been able to read Hitler’s own messages—in some cases before the intended recipient.