BBC news with Mike Cooper.
A day after the death of one of Italy's most popular and controversial church figures Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, an interview has been published in which he strongly criticizes the Roman Catholic Church. The interview was with a fellow Jesuit priest. From Rome, David Willey.
Cardinal Martini said the church was 200 years behind the times and Catholics lacked confidence in it. "The church is tired", he said. "Our culture has grown old. Our church is big and empty. And the church bureaucracy rises up. Our religious rites and the vestments we wear are pompous.” He urged the Catholic church to recognize its errors and embark on a radical path of change, beginning with the Pope and his bishops. He said unless the church adopts a more generous attitude towards divorced persons, it'll lose the allegiance of future generations.
The Jordanian government has sharply increased the amount of money it says it needs from the international community to cope with the influx of refugees from Syria. Jordan said it urgently needed 700m dollars. Dale Gavlak reports from Amman.
Earlier in the week, the information minister estimated that Jordan hosts more than 190,000 Syrian refugees, the largest number in the region. The UN Refugee Agency's representative to Jordan Andrew Harper says that as the violence deepens in neighbouring Syria, the numbers fleeing to Jordan are expected to increase and more international help from donors is desperately needed.