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BBC News with David Austin.

More than 200 Roman Catholic bishops from all over Africa have urged corrupt political leaders there to repent or step down. In an unusually blunt message to their flock, issued from the Vatican, the bishops said that Africa needed leaders who would work for the good of the people. David Willey reports.

The bishops accused Catholic leaders in Africa of having fallen woefully short in their performance in office. The synod calls on such people to repent or quit the public arena and stop causing havoc to the people. The bishops named no names, but the Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe and the Angolan President Eduardo Dos Santos, whose country's recent elections have been marred by fraud, are two prominent Catholic leaders accused by their critics of corruption.

The Iranian government has asked for more time before giving its response to the latest international proposals for solving the deadlock over Iran’s nuclear programme. The United Nations nuclear agency had set today as the deadline for accepting or rejecting the proposed deal. Here’s our Tehran correspondent Jon Leyne.

Iran is giving extremely mixed messages over this important deal and has missed the deadline from the UN to give its verdict. Either Tehran is playing for time, or there are genuine differences within the Iranian government. Under the deal, Iran would allow a large part of the uranium it's already enriched to be shipped out of the country. Then it would be further processed and sent back as fuel for a Tehran research reactor. On Wednesday, the Iranian State TV said Tehran could not accept the key part of the agreement, shipping the nuclear material out of the country. Later, Iran told the UN nuclear watchdog that it was considering the plan favourably, but needed more time to respond.

The Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas has decreed presidential and legislative elections to be held in January. His announcement comes after the failure of Egyptian attempts to broker a reconciliation between President Abbas’s Fatah Party and its rival Hamas movement that controls the Gaza Strip. Mr. Abbas said the elections would take place across the Palestinian territories including Gaza. Hamas has said it disapproves of a January election and correspondents say the date may have to be rescheduled.

On the eve of campaign for Afghanistan’s presidential runoff election, the United States special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, has expressed cautious optimism about the vote.

"It is reasonable to hope that there will be less irregularities this time for several reasons. One, there are only two candidates; two, there is the experience factor; three, the international community including the forces under General McChrystal’s command are going to go all out to help make this a success."

Mr. Holbrooke said his relationship with President Hamid Karzai was fine and if he was reelected in the contest against Abdullah Abdullah, the US looked forward to working with him.

This is the World News from the BBC.

The American State Department says that the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will travel to Pakistan for high-level talks soon, but that the specific date cannot be released for security reasons. The announcement came as at least 24 people were killed and dozens more injured in separate bomb attacks in northern Pakistan on Friday.

New figures have ended expectations that the British economy might be emerging from recession. Instead of showing an improvement as had been predicted, the economy shrank in the three months to the end of September. It makes this the longest recession in Britain since records began more than half a century ago. Lucy Hooker has this report.

Economists had predicted a small rise in Britain’s output for the third quarter of the year. But hopes of an end to the recession were dashed with figures showing the value of goods and services sold fell by a little under a half percent between July and September. By contrast, France, Germany and Japan have all returned to growth already in the second quarter while America's economy shrank only very slightly over the summer. But Britain suffered badly both from the problems in the financial sector and the housing price bubble.

A group of rich Germans has launched a petition, calling for higher taxes for the wealthy. They say the extra revenue, which they estimate at 150 billion dollars, could be used to help Germany weather the current economic crisis. Forty-four wealthy Germans have joined the campaign. They say anyone with more than 750,000 dollars in the bank should pay more tax. Germany’s new coalition government has pledged to cut taxes.

Football’s governing body FIFA says it will be doing random medical scans on players in the Under-17 World Cup in Nigeria, which kicks off this weekend. A BBC correspondent says it follows complaints that some countries have been fielding overage players. This time FIFA will be giving the under-17s MRI, that’s magnetic resonance imaging scans, which can tell a person’s age by measuring the fusion of bones.

And that’s the BBC News.

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