Starbucks: We must do more on tax

2 December 2012 Last updated at 07:38 ET

Global coffee chain Starbucks has said it is in talks with HM Revenue and Customs and the Treasury over how much UK tax it pays.

It is one of several well-known firms that were criticised over the level of their corporation tax payments.

The firm admitted that it “needed to do more” in the UK on tax.

Meanwhile, Chancellor George Osborne has pledged more funds for the British authorities to tackle tax avoidance by multinationals.

He told the BBC that an announcement would be made on Monday about the ” extra investment in the part of the Inland Revenue that tackles tax avoidance by multinational companies”.

A Public Accounts Committee report on the topic of how much tax multinational firms pay in the UK is due on Monday.

In November the committee took evidence from executives from Starbucks, Google and Amazon over the amount of tax the companies have paid in the UK.

‘Competitive’

“We have listened to feedback from our customers and employees, and understand that to maintain and further build public trust we need to do more,” said a Starbucks statement.

“As part of this we are looking at our tax approach in the UK. The company has been in discussions with HMRC for some time and is also in talks with The Treasury.”

It said more details would be released later this week.

BBC business correspondent Theo Leggett said the coffee company reported sales of nearly £400m in the UK last year, but paid no corporation tax at all.

“Much of the money it earns in this country is transferred to a sister company in the Netherlands in the form of royalty payments, leaving the UK division to report regular annual losses,” he added.

Mr Osborne did not single out any firms while making his announcement on the Andrew Marr Show.

He also said that as well as his extra funding for the UK authorities, it was also necessary to work at an international level on the issue.

“It is actually Britain who has been working with Germany and France to get those rules on the international table,” he said.

But he also warned against “pricing Britain out of the world economy”, adding that “if we make our taxes less competitive that will just mean more companies stay out of Britain”.

Monday’s PAC report is expected to be critical of the current way in which multinational firms used UK tax legislation.

After last month’s hearings, PAC chair Margaret Hodge MP said: “One of our concerns is that the ability of global companies to choose where to they put their costs and their profits gives them an unfair tax advantage that damages UK-based businesses,”

BBC News – Business

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Italy votes for center-left candidate for premier

ROME (AP) — Italians are choosing a center-left candidate for premier for elections early next year, an important primary runoff given the main party is ahead in the polls against a center-right camp in utter chaos over whether Silvio Berlusconi will run again.

Sunday’s runoff pits a veteran center-left leader, Pier Luigi Bersani, 61, against the 37-year-old mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, who has campaigned on an Obama-style “Let’s change Italy now” mantra.

Nearly all polls show Bersani winning the primary, after he won the first round of balloting Nov. 25 with 44.9 percent of the vote. Since he didn’t get an absolute majority, he was forced into a runoff with Renzi, who garnered 35.5 percent.

After battling all week to get more voters to the polling stations for round two, Renzi seemed almost resigned to a Bersani win by Sunday, saying he hoped that by Monday “we can all work together.”

Bersani, a former transport and industry minister, seemed confident of victory as well, joking about Berlusconi’s flip-flopping political ambitions by asking “What time did he say it?” when told that the media mogul had purportedly decided against running.

Next year’s general election will largely decide how and whether Italy continues on the path to financial health charted by Premier Mario Monti, appointed last year to save Italy from a Greek-style debt crisis.

The former European commissioner was named to head a technical government after international markets lost confidence in then-Premier Berlusconi’s ability to reign in Italy’s public debt and push through sorely needed structural reforms.

Berlusconi has largely stayed out of the public spotlight for the past year, but he returned with force in recent weeks, announcing he was thinking about running again, then changing his mind, then threatening to bring down Monti’s government, and most recently staying silent about his political plans.

His waffling has thrown his People of Freedom party into disarray and disrupted its own plans for a primary — all of which has only seemed to bolster the impression of order, stability and organization within the center-left camp.

A poll published Friday gave the Democratic Party 30 percent of the vote if the election were held now, compared with some 19.5 percent for the upstart populist movement of comic Beppe Grillo, and Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party in third with 14.3 percent. The poll, by the SWG firm for state-run RAI 3, surveyed 5,000 voting-age adults by telephone between Nov. 26 and 28. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.36 percentage points.

It’s quite a turnabout for Berlusconi’s once-dominant movement, and a similarly remarkable shift in fortunes for the Democratic Party, which had been in shambles for years, unable to capitalize on Berlusconi’s professional and personal failings while he was premier.

But Berlusconi’s 2011 downfall and a series of recent political party funding scandals that have targeted mostly center-right politicians have contributed to the party’s rise as Italy struggles through a grinding recession and near-record high unemployment.

Angelino Alfano, Berlusconi’s hand-picked political heir, seemed again exasperated Sunday after a long meeting with his patron over Berlusconi’s plans. News reports have suggested Berlusconi might split the party in two and re-launch the Forza Italia party that brought him to political power for the first time in 1994.

“We have to work to reconstruct the center-right, and reconstructing it means having a big center-right party,” not a divided one, Alfano said.

He added that Berlusconi didn’t say one way or another if he would run himself. “It’s his choice,” he said. “If there are any decisions in this regard, he’ll be the one to say so.”

___

Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

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Katie Holmes in “Dead Accounts”: what did the critics think?

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – With her marriage to Tom Cruise firmly ensconced in the rearview mirror, Katie Holmes has returned to Broadway to star in Theresa Rebeck‘s “Dead Accounts.”

But the “Dawson’s Creek” actress who will forever be synonymous with one mega-star’s epic Oprah freakout, got credit from many critics for giving it the proverbial college try – although most reviewers savaged the production.

“Dead Accounts” centers on a hotshot Wall Street-type (Norbert Leo Butz) who returns to his Cincinnati home with a dark secret. Holmes plays his sister who is still living at home and nursing their father through a kidney stones attack. It marks her second appearance on the Great White Way after a tepidly received turn in a 2008 revival of Arthur Miller‘s “All My Sons.”

“Dead Accounts,” which also stars Josh Hamilton and Jane Houdyshell, premiered Thursday at the Music Box Theatre.

In the New York Times, Ben Brantley was surprisingly gentle in his treatment of Holmes even as he dripped acid over Rebeck’s attempt to say something profound about America’s post-Recession doldrums.

“Let me assure you that Ms. Holmes, who was a tad unsteady in her Broadway debut four years ago in Arthur Miller‘s ‘All My Sons,’ appears much more at ease playing a worn-down country mouse to the hyped-up city mouse of Mr. Butz,” he wrote. “Gamely unkempt and lumpen, Ms. Holmes suggests what might have happened to Joey Potter, the ultimate girl-next-door she once portrayed on TV in ‘Dawson’s Creek,’ had she never found true love or left town.”

His overall assessment of the action onstage was far more dire, faulting it for devolving “…into a limp chain of anticlimaxes.”

Also declaring “Dead Accounts” D.O.A. was New York magazine, which, in an unbylined piece, compared Rebeck to Tyler Perry for white people (sorry, “Madea Goes to Jail” fans, it’s not a compliment). However the critic was charitable in assessing the third Mrs. Cruise.

“Holmes is insanely miscast but sunnily game in the role of a ground-down never-was with body image issues and a crater where her confidence should be,” the reviewer wrote.

Those relatively benign notices aside, some critics were clearly sharpening the kitchen-ware for Holmes. In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli took a cleaver to the actress and the play.

“She’s got one note – shrill, impatient – and yells it at top volume, making a vein bulge on her slender neck. (A recurring joke about Lorna going on a diet falls flat.),” Vincentelli wrote.

Of the play, the Post critic said it should be back to the drawing board; “With its cardboard characters and implausible developments, ‘Dead Accounts‘ feels like a rough first draft.”

Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune was far kinder when it came to Rebeck’s writing, admiring her for taking on weighty topics, even as he complained she often fell flat in her execution. His views on Holmes were harder to decipher. Though never pejorative, Jones seemed to feel that Holmes’ tabloid past interfered with her stage work.

Still, he was intrigued by the way her own Midwestern background intermingled with that of her character.

“‘Dead Accounts’ hints at the very worthwhile notion that two Americas have grown up alongside each other, one in the thrall of religion, the other of money,” Jones wrote. “Holmes, one suspects, knows a good deal more about that kind of stuff than her character ever gets to say here.”

People Magazine’s Tom Gliatto praised Holmes’ for doing what she could with an underwritten role. He didn’t exactly make her seem Tony bound, but he argued that the fault rests more with the script than the actress.

“Holmes gets her moments in the second act: Lorna is given a simple, tender monologue about planting a tree when she was a child, followed by a full-throttle, over-the-top tirade against money, banks and fiduciary wickedness,” Gliatto wrote. “Holmes gets a big laugh there, but you have the nagging realization that the little memory about the tree slipped by without registering emotionally – that it was a lot more meaningful than the tirade, and that Holmes should have been directed to dig deeper. Or that Rebeck, creator of NBC’s Smash, should have written deeper.”

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Top 10 Rules for a Flat Belly

For all the effort you’ve put into toning it–and for all the cupcakes you’ve given up to maintain it–your midsection should be as rock-hard as a diamond and just as much fun to show off. So why does it seem like your quest for a sexy stomach always hits a bump…right about belly-button level?

You’re not alone in feeling frustrated: Sixty-two percent of women say the body part they’re most self-conscious about is their belly. But don’t give up hope–just change your thinking. Turns out, some of the old food advice you’ve been following for years may actually be working against you, says Alan Aragon, a nutritionist in Westlake Village, California. The latest research is full of new culinary strategies for shrinking your stomach (and slimming down all over). After wading through the data to answer your most common questions, Aragon presents his core counsel.

The No-Crunch Ab Workout

Will eating smaller meals curb my hunger?

Contrary to what you’ve heard, the five-small-meals-a-day mantra doesn’t work for everyone. The new thinking? You’ll eat healthiest if you eat your way–meaning, if you prefer substantial meals fewer times a day, there’s no reason to force yourself to do the opposite, says Aragon. But while the number of meals doesn’t matter, their size does.

According to Purdue University researchers, the biggest problem with our noshing behavior is that snacks have become meals, and meals have become feasts. In the past 30 years, snack sizes have increased from 360 calories to a whopping 580! When you consider that the average woman snacks twice during each workday, you’re looking at almost 500 extra calories a day. In just two weeks, these oversize bites–no matter how “healthy” they are–can contribute to an extra pound of fat. The takeaway: However many times you eat, always make sure that you’re keeping an eye on your portions.

7 Ways to Stop Food Cravings

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More from Women’s Health:

Avoid the Foods That Make You Do Bad Things

Transform Your Whole Body

Stomach Cures From Top Doctors

Best Foods for Flat Abs

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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South Korea November exports show fragile, uneven global recovery

SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korean exports last month marked their first back-to-back growth of the year, but demand from the advanced economies was weak, data showed on Saturday, indicating any global recovery would be fragile at best.

November exports grew by 3.9 percent over a year earlier to $ 47.8 billion on top of a revised 1.1 percent rise in October, while imports last month rose by 0.7 percent to $ 43.3 billion, the Ministry of Knowledge Economy data showed.

The November data, released for the first time by a major exporting economy, and the robust survey findings in China disclosed earlier in the day offered fresh signs of the global economy regaining some momentum.

Shipments to China and the southeast Asian countries posted sharp gains over a year earlier, whereas demand from the United States and the European Union shrank, according to break-down figures for the November 1-20 period released later.

“Robust data from China and today’s Korean data increase the chances for Korean exports maintaining a modest recovery,” said Park Sang-hyun, chief economist at HI Investment & Securities.

RARE ANNUAL DROP IN EXPORTS

Data released earlier on Saturday showed China’s manufacturing sector activity was at a seven-month high in November, while South Korea’s October industrial output also expanded for the second straight month.

“But as Europe and the U.S. are not getting any stronger soon, any global recovery will be an uneven and fragile one for the time being,” Park added.

Analysts in a Reuters survey had forecast November exports would grow a median 2.6 percent over a year before on top of a revised 1.1 percent gain in October, when overseas sales posted their first growth in four months.

The ministry’s data showed South Korea ran a trade surplus of $ 4.48 billion for November, compared with a revised surplus of $ 3.73 billion in October. The country’s trade balance has been in black for all but two months since early 2009.

Meanwhile, exports for the January-November period were 0.8 percent less than the comparable period of 2011, making it highly likely the country will miss its export target of a 3.5 percent gain set for the whole of 2012.

Reuters calculations show South Korean exports this year would post an annual loss unless shipments in December grow 9 percent or more on a year-on-year basis. The country’s exports grew in all but three years for the past 50 years at least.

South Korea is home to some of the world’s largest suppliers of cars, smartphones and ships. It sends roughly a quarter of its total exports to China and about 10 percent each to the European Union and the United states.

(Editing by Ron Popeski)

Economy News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Cargo plane crashes in Brazzaville, 3 dead

BRAZZAVILLE, Republic of Congo (AP) — A cargo plane owned by a private company crashed Friday near the airport in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, killing at least three people, officials said.

The Soviet-made Ilyushin-76 belonged to Trans Air Congo and appeared to be transporting merchandise, not people, said an aviation official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The plane was coming from Congo‘s second-largest city, Pointe Noire, and tried to land during heavy rain, he said.

Ambulances rushed to the scene in the Makazou neighborhood, located near the airport, but emergency workers were hampered by the lack of light in this capital, which like so many in Africa has a chronic shortage of electricity.

“At the moment, my team is having a hard time searching for survivors in order to find the victims of the crash because there is no light and also because of the rain,” Congolese Red Cross head Albert Mberi said.

He said that realistically, they will only be able to launch a proper search Saturday, when the sun comes up.

Reporters at the scene fought through a wall of smoke. Despite the darkness, they could make out the smoldering remains of the plane, including what looked like the left wing of the aircraft. A little bit further on, emergency workers identified the body of the plane’s Ukrainian pilot, and covered the corpse in a blanket.

Firefighters were trying to extinguish the blaze of a part of the plane that had fallen into a ravine. They were using their truck lights to try to illuminate the scene of the crash. Although the plane was carrying merchandise, emergency workers fear that there could be more people on board.

Because of the state of the road connecting Pointe Noire to Brazzaville, many traders prefer to fly the roughly 400 kilometers (250 miles).

Africa has some of the worst air safety records in the world. In June, a commercial jetliner crashed in Lagos, Nigeria, killing 153 people, just a few days after a cargo plane clipped a bus in neighboring Ghana, killing 10.

Africa News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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RIM stock rises after Goldman Sachs upgrade

TORONTO (AP) — Research In Motion rose Thursday after Goldman Sachs upgraded the phone maker’s shares, saying there’s a “30 percent chance” RIM‘s much-delayed BlackBerry 10 smartphones will be a success.

THE SPARK: Goldman Sachs analyst Simona Jankowski lifted RIM to “Buy” from “Neutral,” the latest analyst to voice a slightly more optimistic view for the troubled company. Goldman lifted its 12-month price target to $ 16 from $ 9.

THE BIG PICTURE: RIM was once Canada’s most valuable company, with a market value of more than $ 80 billion in 2008, but shares have sunk due to ground lost to Apple Inc.‘s iPhone and phones running Google Inc.‘s Android system.

Now the company’s new BlackBerrys, expected sometime after Jan. 30, are considered critical to its survival. The new system includes a touch screen and the apps experience that customers now expect.

THE ANALYSIS: Jankowski noted positive early reviews for the new operating system and broad-based support by carriers who are looking to sell a third operating system beyond Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

She predicted that RIM will become profitable in the year ending in February 2014. Analysts polled by FactSet expect a loss. Still, she expects RIM to revert to a loss the next year.

Last week, National Bank Financial Kris Thompson increased his price target to $ 15 from $ 12, while Jefferies analyst Peter Misek doubled his price target from $ 5 to $ 10, saying the BlackBerry 10 operating system has a 20 to 30 percent chance of succeeding.

SHARE ACTION: Shares of Research In Motion added 67 cents, or 6.4 percent, to $ 11.77 in midday trading on the Nasdaq. The stock is up 78 percent since late September — but it’s down 23 percent this year through Wednesday’s close, and has lost more than 90 percent from its 2008 high.

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Ukraine fights spreading HIV epidemic

BUCHA, Ukraine (AP) — Andrei Mandrykin, an inmate at Prison No. 85 outside Kiev, has HIV. He looks ghostly and much older than his 35 years. But Mandrykin is better off than tens of thousands of his countrymen, because is he receiving treatment amid what the World Health Organization says is the worst AIDS epidemic in Europe.

Ahead of World AIDS Day on Saturday, international organizations have urged the Ukrainian government to increase funding for treatment and do more to prevent HIV from spreading from high-risk groups into the mainstream population, where it is even harder to manage and control.

An estimated 230,000 Ukrainians, or about 0.8 percent of people aged 15 to 49, are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Some 120,000 are in urgent need of anti-retroviral therapy, which can greatly prolong and improve the quality of their lives. But due to a lack of funds, fewer than a quarter are receiving the drugs — one of the lowest levels in the world.

Ukraine’s AIDS epidemic is still concentrated among high-risk groups such as intravenous drug users, sex workers, homosexuals and prisoners. But nearly half of new cases registered last year were traced to unprotected heterosexual contact.

“Slowly but surely the epidemic is moving from the most-at-risk, vulnerable population to the general population,” said Nicolas Cantau of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, who manages work in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. “For the moment there is not enough treatment in Ukraine.”

Stigma is also a big problem for those with HIV in Ukraine. Liliya, a 65-year-old woman who would give only her first name, recently attended a class on how to tell her 9-year-old great-granddaughter that she has HIV. The girl, who contacted HIV at birth from her drug-abusing mother, has been denied a place in preschool because of her diagnosis.

“People are like wolves, they don’t understand,” said Liliya. “If any of the parents found out, they would eat the child alive.”

While the AIDS epidemic has plateaued elsewhere in the world, it is still progressing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, according to Cantau. Nearly 21,200 new cases were reported in Ukraine in 2011, the highest number since the former Soviet republic registered its first case in 1987, and a 3 percent increase over 2010. As a result of limited and often delayed treatment, the number of AIDS-related deaths grew 17 percent last year to about 3,800.

Two years ago, Mandrykin, the prisoner, was on the verge of becoming part of that statistic, with his level of crucial CD4 immune cells — a way to measure the strength of the immune system — dropping to 11. In a healthy person, the CD4 count is usually over 600.

“I was lying in the hospital, I was dying,” said Mandrykin, who is serving seven years for robbery, his fourth stint in jail. “It’s a scary disease.”

After two years of treatment in a small prison clinic, his CD4 count has risen to 159 and he feels much better, although he looks exhausted and is still too weak to work in the workshop of the medium-security prison.

The Ukrainian government currently focuses on testing and treating standard cases among the general population. The anti-retroviral treatment of more than 1,000 inmates, as well as some 10,000 HIV patients across Ukraine who also require treatment for tuberculosis and other complications and all prevention and support activities, are paid for by foreign donors, mainly the Global Fund.

The Global Fund is committed to spending $ 640 million through 2016 to fight AIDS and tuberculosis in Ukraine and then hopes to hand over most of its programs to the Ukrainian government.

Advocacy groups charge that corruption and indifference by government officials help fuel the epidemic.

During the past two years, Ukrainian authorities have seized vital AIDS drugs at the border due to technicalities, sent prosecutors to investigate AIDS support groups sponsored by the Global Fund and harassed patients on methadone substitution therapy, prompting the Global Fund to threaten to freeze its prevention grant.

Most recently, Ukraine’s parliament gave initial approval to a bill that would impose jail terms of up to five years for any positive public depiction of homosexuality. Western organizations say it would make the work of AIDS prevention organizations that distribute condoms and teach safe homosexual sex illegal and further fuel the epidemic. It is unclear when the bill will come up for a final vote.

AIDS drug procurement is another headache, with Ukrainian health authorities greatly overpaying for AIDS drugs. Advocacy groups accuse health officials of embezzling funds by purchasing drugs at inflated prices and then pocketing kickbacks.

Officials deny those allegations, saying their tender procedures are transparent.

Much also remains to be done in Ukraine to educate people about AIDS.

Oksana Golubova, a 40-year-old former drug user, infected her daughter, now 8, with HIV and lost her first husband to AIDS. But she still has unprotected sex with her new husband, saying his health is in God’s hands.

“Those who are afraid get infected,” Golubova said.

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Amazon’s Robotic Future: A Work in Progress

If you were watching Bloomberg TV recently, you may have seen our correspondent, Cory Johnson, standing in the middle of Amazon’s (AMZN) newest distribution center in Arizona. It’s an impressive facility, brand-new and owned by one of the hardest-charging, most-innovative companies to come onto the retail scene since Sam Walton opened a five-and-dime.

So where are the robots?

After all, aren’t robots supposed to be the future of such places as distribution centers and warehouses? Didn’t Amazon buy a robot manufacturer, Kiva, in March? The online retailer announced in October that it was taking on 50,000 additional part-time workers for the holiday season. Shouldn’t some of those spots be taken up by mechanical arms and wheels?

Maybe not. For all the anxiety over robots coming to take jobs, there are still limitations to what they can do—or what they can do well. Bruce Welty is chief executive officer of Quiet Logistics, an order-fulfillment company that manages the online inventory and distribution for retailers like Gilt, Zara, and Bonobos. He uses robots made by Kiva, the company Amazon purchased, but his warehouse in Massachusetts is not bereft of humans. “Robots aren’t very good at picking up things,” he says. “They aren’t very good at looking at a bin of different things and distinguishing one item from another.”

Welty’s robots do one task and one task only: They move racks of merchandise to workers, who then remove the products from the racks and pack them up for shipping. Saving workers the time and effort to retrieve products offers considerable benefit. “In a typical warehouse, that’s about 60 to 70 percent of the labor,” Welty says.

In addition to what the current state of robotic arts does well, there are further reasons for the continued presence of human beings in warehouses. Labor flexibility is one of the larger ones. “Automation won’t help Amazon in periods of peak demand,” says Stephen Graves, a professor of management science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “People are far more flexible.”

The capital expense to add robots means they need to make sense 12 months out of the year, not two. “The only way to handle spikes in demand is by adding temporary workers,” says Jim Tompkins, CEO of supply-chain consultancy Tompkins International. “If you bought a whole bunch of robots to handle the holiday shopping season, you’d have a whole bunch of robots looking at you, come January.”

So if Amazon just spent nearly a billion dollars buying Kiva, but the robots they produce can’t make a huge difference in how the company operates, what are Amazon’s intentions?

For starters, it’s still early. An acquisition like that of Kiva will take a while to digest, during which time new applications for the robots will surely be devised. “They’re really in a test mode,” says Welty. “They’re going to work on getting it right before any major rollout.”

The Kiva acquisition may have had as much to do with software as it does with hardware, adds Tompkins. “Mechanically, there’s nothing that special about Kiva,” he says. “But what they do have is software that makes sure the robots are in the right place at the right time. This was a software play.”

That’s not exactly how most people would view the deal. But it may be just the head-fake that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos intended. “I bet Jeff Bezos loves that people are running around trying to put more robots in their distribution centers,” Tompkins says.

Businessweek.com — Top News

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African Union asks UN for immediate action on Mali

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — In an open letter Thursday to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the president of the African Union urged the U.N. to take immediate military action in northern Mali, which was seized by al-Qaida-linked rebels earlier this year.

Yayi Boni, the president of Benin who is also head of the African Union, said any reticence on the part of the U.N. will be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the terrorists now operating in Mali. The AU is waiting for the U.N. to sign off on a military plan to take back the occupied territory, and the Security Council is expected to discuss it in coming days.

In a report to the Security Council late Wednesday, Ban said the AU plan “needs to be developed further” because fundamental questions on how the force will be led, trained and equipped. Ban acknowledged that with each day, al-Qaida-linked fighters were becoming further entrenched in northern Mali, but he cautioned that a botched military operation could result in human rights abuses.

The sprawling African nation of Mali, once an example of a stable democracy, fell apart in March following a coup by junior officers. In the uncertainty that ensued, rebels including at least three groups with ties to al-Qaida, grabbed control of the nation’s distant north. The Islamists now control an area the size of France or Texas, an enormous triangle of land that includes borders with Mauritania, Algeria and Niger.

Two weeks ago, the African Union asked the U.N. to endorse a military intervention to free northern Mali, calling for 3,300 African soldiers to be deployed for one year. A U.S.-based counterterrorism official who saw the military plan said it was “amateurish” and had “huge, gaping holes.” The official insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter.

Boni, in his letter, said Africa was counting on the U.N. to take decisive action.

“I need to tell you with how much impatience the African continent is awaiting a strong message from the international community regarding the resolution of the crisis in Mali. … What we need to avoid is the impression that we are lacking in resolve in the face of these determined terrorists,” he said.

The most feared group in northern Mali is al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, al-Qaida’s North African branch, which is holding at least seven French hostages, including a 61-year-old man kidnapped last week.

On Thursday, SITE Intelligence published a transcript of a recently released interview with AQIM leader, Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, in which he urges Malians to reject any foreign intervention in their country. He warned French President Francois Hollande that he was “digging the graves” of the French hostages by pushing for an intervention.

Also on Thursday, Islamists meted out the latest Shariah punishment in northern city of Timbuktu. Six young men and women were each given 100 lashes for having talked to each other on city streets, witnesses said.

___

Associated Press writer Virgile Ahissou in Cotonou, Benin and Baba Ahmed in Bamako, Mali contributed to this report.

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