BBC News with Sue Montgomery.
Senior bishops reviewing Roman Catholic teaching on the family have called on the church to adopt more a positive stance on homosexuality. A preliminary statement issued by the bishops at the Vatican Senate said the church should recognize some positive aspects of civil unions, even though it stressed the traditional belief that valid marriage could only take place between a man and a woman. David Willy reports from Rome.
There is an unusual change of tone in the Vatican document as a result of pressure by Pope Francis to recognize what he calls the gifts and qualities that gay couple may offer to the church. The Catholic Church is said to condemn all homosexual relations as intrinsically disordered. But Pope Francis has recommended a new more compassionate attitude towards gays, expressed in his now famous remark to journalists last year: Who am I to judge?
The United Nations has warned of a new refugee crisis in Iraq's western Anbar Province where as many as 180,000 people fleeing the city of Hit. The UN agency Odd Chirr says tens of thousands of families have left in the past few days as Islamic State fighters consolidate their hold in the area. Sally Nabulus is in Baghdad.
What happened today is that the so called Islamic State militants managed to fully control the Hit military base after the Iraqi troops withdrew leaving behind a lot of ammunition, weapons and armed vehicles under the control of the militants. This actually will give them a boost to escalate the offensive across the Anbar Province. Now they control around 70% of this strategic province.
The Pentagon says US and Saudi warplanes have carried out eight airstrikes in the last 24 hours against the Islamic State positions around the Syrian town of Kobani. Syrian opposition activists said an Islamist suicide bomber detonated a truck loaded with explosives in Kobani's northern district close to the Turkish border.
The American and British governments are stepping up efforts to fight the spread of the deadly Ebola virus outside West Africa where it's killed more than 4,000 people. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States Tom Frieden has urged hospitals to look out for symptoms in people arriving from three West African countries. The US has already begun screening for Ebola symptoms at JFK Airport in New York. Britain's Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced the UK will begin screening passengers at Heathrow on Tuesday.
Passengers will have their temperature taken and complete a questionnaire asking about their current health, recent travel history, and whether they might be at potential risk through contact with Ebola patients. They'll also be required to provide contact details.
World News from the BBC.
The authorities in Kenya have launched a nationwide tetanus immunization campaign despite stiff opposition from the Catholic Church which alleges the vaccine can cause sterility in woman. The campaign is targeting more than two million women and girls of reproductive age. The Health Ministry said the vaccines were safe and had been approved by the World Health Organization.
The government of Somalia has launched the country's first postal service in more than two decades. It's also introduced post codes nationwide for the first time in Somalia's history. Our Africa editor Richard Hamilton reports.
The Minister for Post and Tele Communications Muhammad Ibrahim told the BBC that the new postal service was being unrolled in three phases. The first step was for Somalia to become a member of The Universal Postal Union, a United Nations body that coordinates international posts. The Second was to start receiving letters from abroad, and the third is to send the mail out of the country. Somalis born after the collapse of the government in 1991 have never known a postal service and no Somali has ever had a post code. This is another sign that life is slowly returning to normality. Last week a private bank in Mogadishu opened the city's first ever cash machine.
An Italian Judge has ordered the opening of a criminal investigation against two formal South American presidents and other retired officials over the killing of Italian citizens in the 1970s. The Judge said 23 Italian citizens were kidnapped and killed by security forces during military rule in Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Uruguay.
British members of parliament are holding a symbolic debate on whether the government should recognize Palestine as a state. The move was intended to raise the political profile of the issue following the collapse of peace talks and the conflict in Gaza earlier this year. The British Prime Minister David Cameron said the vote would not affect government policy.