BBC在线收听下载:西班牙四年内或迎来第三次大选

BBC News. Hello, I'm Jerry Smit.

The President and Prime Minister of Sri Lanka have attended a televised Christian ceremony a week after suicide bombers carried out devastating attacks on churches and hotels. The service was hosted by the archbishop of Colombo, Malcolm Ranjith who described the killings a week ago as an insult to humanity. Church services have been cancelled because of safety fears, but worshipers gathered to pray outside Saint Anthony's in Colombo, which was badly damaged in the attacks. The BBC's Clive Myrie was able to take a look inside the church. This place simply is not safe. Work is going on too. Try to improve things, but it's gonna take a while. And that's why a little earlier on today, worshipers have to pray out on the street, lighting candles and praying for the more than two hundred fifty people who lost their lives, the hundreds more who were injured and also praying that this place of worship, their home, spiritual home will be restored soon. But the authority's reckoned it's gonna be about a month, maybe a month and a half before this place will be given back to the people.

Voting has begun in Spain's third general election in four years and the most divisive in decades. For the first time since the death of the military dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, a far-right party VOX has returned to mainstream Spanish politics. Our correspondent in Madrid, Guy Hedgecoe says the campaign was dominated by issues such as equality and national identity, including Catalonia's failed bid for independence. The response to that territorial crisis by the political parties has created enormous tensions and enormous division in society and in politics. Parties on the left, including Pedro Sanchez's Socialists, prefer to take a more conciliatory approach to the pro-independence movement and the pro-independence government up in Catalonia. And the parties on the right, including that far-right VOX party, take a much tougher unionist line and that has really created a lot of tensions.

Police in California are questioning a nineteen-year-old man who they say opened fire with an assault rifle inside a synagogue near San Diego, killing a woman and injuring three other people. They've identified him as John Earnest, a local resident, and say he fled after the shooting, but then surrendered. Chris Buckler reports. Police officers arrived to find what they described as a chaotic scene and four people injured, among them a young girl. The attack comes exactly six months after a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania in which eleven people died. President Trump says he believes this incident on the other side of the country in California was like the earlier killings, a hate crime. And that's the BBC news.