Washington, Sep 13 : Republican presidential candidate John McCain has taken a slender lead over his rival Barack Obama less than two months before elections, a poll on the presidential race has said.

The Arizona senator has a 13-percentage-point lead over his Democratic rival both with men and senior citizens, and a 23-point advantage among rural residents, according to the Associated Press-GfK Poll of likely voters.

Warsaw  - A rural district in southern Poland on Friday became the first in the country to display German signs, in what some said was an attempt to reconcile the area's troubled history.

The first of 67 signs was unveiled in the small district of Radlow, which boasts some 28 per cent Germans, the daily Wyborcza reported.

"You can see similar bilingual signs in many places in Europe," said Christoph Berger, a German government attorney dealing with minority issues.

Paris - Pope Benedict XVI spent the first day of his four-day visit to fiercely secular France trying to revive Catholicism in a country known traditionally as "the Church's eldest daughter."

Addressing 10,000 young people gathered late Friday in the square in front of Notre Dame Cathedral while tens of thousands of others watched the event on large screens erected around the venerable church, the 81-year-old Pontiff resurrected a phrase used by his popular predecessor John Paul II: "Do not be afraid!"

Athens - Greece's merchant marine minister resigned on Friday over allegations of unethical business transactions which were harming the reputation of the ruling conservative government.

Giorgos Vougarakis, 49, is the second minister to resign due to scandals since the conservative New Democracy Party was elected in September 2007.

He has been accused of setting up an offshore real estate company with his wife and using it to avoid paying property tax.

Voulgarakis has also been linked to a scandal involving a monastery in northern Greece which allegedly traded low value plots of land for prime real estate.

Vienna  - Austrian political parties introduced 50 social and welfare bills worth around two billion euros (2.8 billion dollars) in parliament on Friday, in order to sway voters ahead of the September 28 general elections.

Most of the bills were initiated by Austria's ruling Social Democratic Party (SPOe), in a bid to sharpen its social profile.

Werner Faymann, the party's new leader, has proposed an anti- inflation programme consisting of raising several government subsidies, including home care for patients and family support, as well as a bill on retirement payments for manual labourers and a cut of sales tax on food.

The SPOe also seeks to make education at public universities free.

Havana  - Hurricane-hit Cuba on Thursday accused the United States of lying about its conditional offers to help the communist country as it struggles to recover and rebuild.

"The United States government is behaving cynically. It tries to suggest that it is desperate to cooperate with Cuba, and that we refuse. They lie unscrupulously," the Cuban Foreign Ministry said in a statement.