LONDON — Buckingham Palace accounts showed Thursday that Queen Elizabeth II had a good year financially — the monarch will receive a 5 percent income boost following record portfolio profits.

The Crown Estate, a vast property portfolio that includes much of London's Regent Street and also Windsor Great Park, made $380 million in the last financial year, a 5.2 percent annual increase.

The queen receives 15 percent of Crown Estate profits through a grant supplied by the British government that funds the monarch's spending as head of state. The annual grant is currently $55 million but will rise in 2014 to include a 5 percent increase.

Keeper of the Privy Purse Alan Reid said a significant part of the grant increase would be used on property maintenance at the royal palaces.

Anti-monarchy activists Republic called on the queen to reject the 5 percent increase.

JERUSALEM — The McDonald's restaurant chain refused to open a branch in a West Bank Jewish settlement, the company said Thursday, adding a prominent name to an international movement to boycott Israel's settlements.Irina Shalmor, spokesman for McDonald's Israel, said the owners of a planned mall in the Ariel settlement asked McDonald's to open a branch there about six months ago. Shalmor said the chain refused because the owner of McDonald's Israel has a policy of staying out of the occupied territories.The decision was not coordinated with McDonald's headquarters in the U.S., she said. In an e-mail, the headquarters said “our partner in Israel has determined that this particular location is not part of his growth plan.”The Israeli branch's owner and franchisee, Omri Padan, is a founder of the dovish group Peace Now, which opposes all settlements and views them as obstacles to peace.

VATICAN CITY — A Vatican official was arrested today by Italian police for allegedly trying to bring $26 million in cash into the country from Switzerland aboard an Italian government plane, his lawyer said.Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, already under investigation in a purported money-laundering plot involving the Vatican bank, is accused of fraud, corruption and slander stemming from the plot, which never got off the ground, attorney Silverio Sica told The Associated Press.It was the latest financial scandal to hit the Vatican and came just two days after Pope Francis created a commission of inquiry into the Vatican bank to get to the bottom of the problems that have plagued it for decades and contributed to damaging the Vatican's reputation.Sica said Scarano was a middleman in the Swiss operation. Friends had asked him to intervene with a broker, Giovanni Carenzio, to return 20 million euros they had given him to invest. Sica said Scarano persuaded Carenzio to return the money, and an Italian secret service agent, Giovanni Maria Zito, went to Switzerland to bring the cash back aboard an Italian government aircraft. Such a move would presumably prevent any reporting of the money coming into Italy.The operation failed because Carenzio reneged on the deal, Sica said.