BBC News with Marion Marshall

Police in South Africa say they’ve arrested eight of their own officers on suspicion of murdering a taxi driver from Mozambique. Mobile phone video later shown on South African television shows the man tying to the back of a police van and dragged through the street. Peter Biles reports

In the township of Daveyton an hour’s drive east of Johannesburg crowds maintain at presence all day outside the police station where 27-year-old Mido Macia died in police custody on Tuesday. His sister-in-law Lindiwe Ngwenya condemned what she said was police brutality.

“I’m really shocked and really disappointed. What they did to my in-law I love I don’t up such a thing. I thought they were people to help us, to protect us, but now are the people who are killing us.”

Earlier South Africa’s National Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega told reporters that all eight policemen responsible for tethering Mr. Macia to a police vehicle and dragging him along the street were been suspended and disarmed.

President Obama has described a raft of government spending reductions as ‘dumb and arbitrary cuts to things people depend on.’ The cuts are due to start taking effect later today after his latest talks with Congressional Republicans on reducing the deficit broke up without any sign of a deal. Mark Mardell reports from Washington.

The meeting at the White House lasted less than an hour and solved nothing. It was largely theater with the president determined to blame this latest crisis on Republicans who control the House of Representatives. These automatic cuts were designed two years ago to be so harsh that the politicians will be forced to do a deal but they are as far apart as ever. The president said the pain of the 85 billion dollars worth of cuts wouldn’t be felt right away, it will be a slow grind costing 750,000 jobs, damaging growth and making the economy weaker.

The leading Republican in Congress John Boehner said further tax increases were not the way to address the deficit.

The U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has described as objectionable a comment made by the Turkish prime minister about Zionism. Recep Tayyip Erdogan had described Zionism as a crime against humanity which Mr. Kerry said complicated the task of making peace in the Middle East.

The president of Chad Idriss Deby says his troops in northern Mali have killed one of the senior commanders of al-Qaeda in North Africa, Abdelhamid Abou Zeid. It was reported on Thursday that Abou Zeid had been killed but this hadn’t been independently confirmed. Richard Hamilton reports.

President Deby said that Abou Zeid was killed in fighting on the 22nd of February in the Ifoghas Mountains north of Kidal near the Algerian border. However other reports suggested he may have been killed in an aerial bombardment by the French military and that Chadian forces recovered the corpses later. Algerian security services are said to be taking DNA samples at the request of the French from two of Abou Zeid’s relatives who are in jail in Algeria.

World News from the BBC

A Russian multimillionaire who is wanted on charges of fraud by the authorities in Moscow has been granted asylum in Britain. Andrei Borodin is accused of carrying out the fraud while he was head of the Bank of Moscow. He says the charges are politically motivated and accuses the former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev of being behind the move. The Russian authorities have criticized the British decision.

The Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki has appealed his fellow countrymen to vote peacefully in Monday’s general elections. Mr. Kibaki who’s stepping down after two terms in office said he was making a passionate plea for all Kenyans to ensure a free, fair, just and peaceful election. More than 1,000 people died in violence following the last disputed presidential poll in 2007.

Forest rangers in northeast India say they’ve fought a seven-hour gun battle with heavily armed poachers but were unable to prevent them killing a rare one-horned rhinoceros. Most of the world’s remaining 3,300 one-horned rhinos live in India’s Kaziranga National Park which is a world heritage site. Warren Bull has this report.

Rangers from the Kaziranga National Park said that after the gun battle they found the dead rhino riddled with bullets with its horn removed alongside the carcass was spent rifle ammunition. Kaziranga’s warden said poachers had killed 13 rhinos in two months at the park which is a UNESCO world heritage site and an attractive target for poachers because it’s home to about 2,200 one-horned rhinos, all 2/3 of the world’s population.

A man in Florida has been swallowed up by a ten-meter wide sinkhole that opened up underneath a bedroom of his house. It’s not yet clear whether Jeff Bush survived the fall. His brother said he heard a loud crash followed by screams as the six-meter deep hole opened up. Officials in the town have suspended rescue efforts until they can establish that the ground is safe.

BBC News