BBC News with David Legg.

United States authorities have announced a series of sweeping measures aimed at boosting confidence in the embattled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said the government would make further funds available to the banks and would if needed buy in equity in them. From New York, Greg Wood reports.

The Bush administration has decided that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are too important to be allowed to fail, and it's decided to step in. After a day of emergency meetings, the US Treasury announced that the two companies will be allowed a temporary increase in the amount of money they can borrow from the governments. The Treasury will also be given the authority to buy shares in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The US Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, is to be given additional powers in regulating them.

At least nine American soldiers have been killed in clashes with Taliban militants close to Afghanistan's border with Pakistan. It's one of the biggest single losses of life among coalition forces in one day since the start of military operations in Afghanistan in 2001. Details are sketchy, but reports say that the militants attacked an American military outpost and that a number of the attackers were also killed.

The French President Nicolas Sarkozy has launched a new international body with 43 member nations aimed at strengthening regional ties and ending conflict to the Middle East. At the opening summit of the Union for the Mediterranean in Paris, Mr. Sarkozy urged Middle Eastern countries to end what he called the "deadly spiral of war”. Nick Childs reports from Paris.

Mr. Sarkozy said it had been an extraordinary gamble to invite all the disparate leaders but they'd shown courage especially the Arabs sitting at the same table with the Israeli leader. The concrete agreements are modest even dull on pollution in the Mediterranean maritime highways disaster relief. But the political overturns to Mr. Sarkozy's clear sense of the new union as a possible vehicle for Middle East diplomacy may have given it a purpose and focus it otherwise lacked. But the summit's also been a reminder of the problems there too, even though the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had earlier said an Israeli-Palestinian Accord had never been closer.

One of Poland's foremost anti-communist intellectuals Bronislaw Geremek has died in a car crash, he was 76. From Warsaw, Adam Easton looks back at his life.

Professor Geremek was widely regarded as one of the most successful figures in recent Polish history. As a teenager, he joined the Polish Communist Party, but he left in 1968 in a protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1989, he played a leading role in the Round Table Talks which negotiated the end of communism in Poland. As foreign minister in 1999, he presided over the country's entry to NATO. He was also a committed supporter of the EU, and was elected to the European Parliament four years ago.

World News from the BBC.

The Democratic Party contender for the US presidency, Barack Obama, says he'll make immigration reform a top priority if he's elected in November. Mr. Obama said it was essential for the US to allow the estimated 12 million illegal Latino immigrants the right to come out of the shadows and secure a legal status.

Workers from Brazil's state-run oil company Petrobras are due to start a five-day strike at midnight local time. It will affect production in the offshore Campos Basin which accounts for more than 80% of the country's 1. 8 million barrels a day output. Petrobras's management say they have contingency plans to to maintain output but union leaders have vowed to disrupt production.

The first openly gay bishop in the worldwide Anglican Communion, Gene Robinson, has criticized the decision not to invite him to a major conference in Britain of Anglican leaders. Conservatives, who believe the Bible forbids homosexual acts, are threatening to sever ties with the Anglican Communion, a formal breakaway body over the American bishop's ordination five years ago. Bishop Robinson told the BBC he'll try to attend the conference informally.

"I've come to know this God of love in my life who I know beyond any shadow of a doubt loves me, loves me as a gay man. And I want to share that joy with whomever wants to sit and talk with me. You know, I think, miracles happen when people who are divided by something sit and talk with each other, get to know one another as human beings and as brothers and sisters in Christ. And that's why I'm going to offer myself in that way."

An international coalition of forest conservation organizations has warned that rising food prices and the use of land for bio-fuels will seriously threaten the world's woodlands. Researchers from the US-based Rights and Resources Initiatives say that by 2030 the world will need so much extra land that millions of hectares of forests will be rapidly turned over to the production of food and fuel.

BBC News.