BBC news 2010-09-17 加文本

BBC news 2010-09-17

BBC News with Jonathan Izard

Pope Benedict has urged Britain to stay faithful to its Christian roots even in an age of religious disbelief. On the first day of his state visit, Pope Benedict addressed tens of thousands of people at an open-air mass in the city of Glasgow. Colin Blane reports.

The pope used the open-air mass in one of Glasgow's largest parks, Bellahouston, to put forward a strong defence of Catholicism in the face of what he'd earlier called "aggressive secularism".  The pope said some sought to exclude religious belief from public discourse, but it was, he said, a guarantee of liberty and respect. He had a particular message for young Catholics, telling them the temptations of drugs, money, sex and alcohol would not bring happiness; instead, they were destructive and divisive.

In earlier remarks, he acknowledged that church authorities were too slow in responding to revelations of child sexual abuse by priests.

The French President Nicolas Sarkozy has had sharp exchanges with the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso over France's expulsion of hundreds of Roma migrants. Mr Sarkozy confirmed reports that they had argued at a lunch for EU leaders in the wake of an earlier comparison made by an EU commissioner, Viviane Reding, between the expulsions and mass deportations during the World War II. Mr Sarkozy said the other European leaders had all agreed that those comments were outrageous.

"All the leaders and heads of the European states were shocked by the comments made by the vice president of the commission. I don't want to argue about this. Madame Reding has apologized for the very injurious comments she made, but all the heads of state without exception indicated that it was deeply shocking that someone should address themselves in such a manner with reference to the past, which deeply hurt all their compatriots."

Mr Barroso said that some excessive comments had been made, but it was now time to move beyond useless rhetoric.

Official figures in the United States suggest the number of Americans regarded as living in poverty increased by nearly four million in a single year between 2008 and 2009. The US Census Bureau says one in seven Americans is now poor. Mark Mardell reports.

The Census Bureau's figures for 2009 show for the third year in a row, poverty in the world's richest country is continuing to rise. The bureau says it's the most significant increase since 2004 and the sharpest jump in poverty since 1994. It indicates Americans of Asian origin are the richest, black people the poorest. It's hardly surprising that poverty was rising last year as the economic crisis continued to bite. More disturbing are figures that have been released today showing more American homes were repossessed last month than at any time since the financial crisis began.

The major industrialized countries have agreed to cancel Liberian government debts worth more than $1 billion. The decision was taken by the group known as the Paris Club which issued a statement welcoming Liberia's determination to implement measures to reduce poverty and aid economic growth.

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The new United Nations envoy for Somalia says that the international peacekeeping force there may need to be trebled to cope with what he calls the increased threat from insurgents. The troops for the African Union mission in Somalia are defending the transitional government from al-Shabab Islamist militants, who control much of the capital Mogadishu and have been linked to al-Qaeda. The envoy, Augustine Mahiga, told the security council that more troops were needed to stop foreign fighters and weapons getting into the country through the port of Kismayo which is under the control of al-Shabab.

The security forces in Mexico say they've killed 19 people in a seven-hour gun battle in the northeast of the country. The soldiers say they returned fire when they were attacked at an illegal roadblock 100km east of Monterrey.

The authorities in Burma are barring several areas of the country from taking part in the general election in November, a vote already described by critics as a sham. State media said polling would not take place in a number of townships in five states where, they said, the vote would not be free and fair. Vivien Marsh of our Asia Pacific desk reports.

It isn't clear exactly how many of Burma's several hundred constituencies have been erased from the vote, but they are in five states, mostly along the eastern and northern borders which are all home to armed ethnic groups. They have been resisting the Burmese government's attempts to bring them into a border guard force. Burma hasn't had a general election for 20 years. The last one was won by the pro-democracy party led by Aung San Suu Kyi, but the military authorities annulled the results.

A researcher at the Internet giant Yahoo has calculated the number of pi to its two-quadrillionth digit more than doubling all previous records. Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction, and consequently its decimal representation never ends or repeats. The researcher calculated the number in 23 days using 1,000 computers.

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