US president Barack Obama moved to reassure Jewish party donors that he strongly supported Israel, pledging to devote all his administration’s “creative powers” to bringing about peace in the Middle East.

IT wasn’t the man he had travelled across the Atlantic to see. But when Taoiseach Enda Kenny yesterday found himself in the same Washington Hotel lobby as Duke Special he would have been forgiven for asking the Belfast songwriter for a rendition of his hit I Never Thought This Day Would Come.

New York governor Eliot Spitzer has apologised to his family and the public following a report that he was involved in a multi-million pound worldwide prostitution ring.