BBC news with Marion Marshall.
Dozens of Syrian rebels and members of the security forces are reported to have been killed in a major clash in the northern city of Aleppo. The violence began with an enormous explosion. Militants loyal to an Islamic group called the Nusra Front which has links with al-Qaeda say they carried out the attack. Jim Muir reports.
“Residents said the blast shocked most of Aleppo after rebels set off a large quantity of explosives in a tunnel dug under the area of the much feared air force intelligence headquarters. There are conflicting accounts whether the building itself was damaged or destroyed. It's been a key target for the rebels ever since the battle for Syria's largest city began more than two years ago. They've tried many times to capture it. Immediately after the explosion, heavy fighting broke out with rebel factions bombarding the area and trying to advance while government forces shelled back and called in airstrikes.”
Defense lawyers for the man accused of bombing the Boston Marathon in the United States in 2013 have admitted he was involved. But they say Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was acting under the influence of his elder brother who is killed by police. His charge was killing three people and wounding more than 200 others at the race. Gary O'Donoghue is in Boston.
“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's attorney Judy Clarke told the court that the defendant did carry out the bombings. But she will argue Tamerlan who died in a shootout with police three days after the bombing was the ringleader. Earlier, the prosecution said Tsarnaev's goal on that day was to kill or maim as many people as possible. In a legal ruling, the defense suffered a setback when a judge said that they would be limited from an extent to which they could make the influence of his elder brother part of the case.”
A jury in New York has found a Pakistani man guilty of being part of a failed al-Qaeda conspiracy to attack the city's underground railway network as well as other targets in Britain and Denmark. Abid Naseer said he was a moderate Muslim who was falsely accused. This report from Nick Bryant in Manhattan.
“Abid Naseer was in charge of an al-Qaeda cell that was part of a transatlantic conspiracy to repeat the devastation of 9/11. Undercover MI5 officers believe he decided to attack the Arndale shopping center in Manchester during the Easter holiday in 2009. The key piece of evidence was an E-mail that he sent to his al-Qaeda handover in Pakistan. They talked a plan for a wedding with a woman called Nadia, code words for the attack and a type of bombs that would be used. Found guilty on all three charges, he now faces up to life imprisonment.”
The president of Chad Idriss Deby has threatened to kill the leader of the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram if he doesn't given himself up. The Chadian leader said his forces knew where Abubakar Shekau was hiding. Boko Haram extended its attacks to the neighboring countries of Chad, Niger and Cameroon. They in turn have joined forces with Nigeria against the militants.
World news from the BBC.
An investigative committee of the US House of Representatives is expected to subpoena e-mails from two personal accounts belonging to the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. There are allegations of the accounts were used to conduct official businesses in contravention of federal law. The committee is investigating the deadly attack on the US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi in 2012.
A prosecutor in Argentina has appealed against the judge's decision to throw out a controversial case against President Christina Fernández de Kirchner. She's been accused of covering up the alleged involvement of senior Iranian officials in the 1994 attack against a Jewish center in Buenos Aires which killed 85 people. The prosecutor described last week's ruling as hasty and premature. President Fernández has always rejected the allegations.
Israel says it's doubling the amount of water it supplies to the Gaza strip. Gaza has a chronic water shortage leaving tap water undrinkable and forcing the Palestinians to pump huge amounts of untreated sewerage into the sea. Israel said it would begin increasing the annual flow from 5 billion to 10 billion cubic meters.
Examination of a fossilized jawbone discovered in Ethiopia has led scientists to push early human history back for further 400,000 years. Our science correspondent Pallab Ghosh has the details.
“This good fossil evidence for ape is with some human traits living in the region around three million years ago. There are also the remains of humans in east Africa dating back two million years. Just what happened in between is shrouded in mystery. Now, the discovery of a lower jawbone indicates that the first humans may have emerged 2.8 million years ago in Ethiopia. This occurred while the climate in the area had become dryer. Forests made way for grassland creating a new ecological niche for the first of our kind to thrive.”