9/11 commemorations in New York and around the world

US President Barack Obama and former President George W Bush stood in silence today and a church bell rang twice on the precise moment ten years after the first plane struck the World Trade Centre.

Mr Obama read Psalm 46 that reminds the faithful that God is a refuge and that strength dwells in his city while Mr Bush read a Civil War letter from President Abraham Lincoln to a mother who lost all five of her sons.

As cellist Yo Yo Ma played mournful background music, relatives of the September 11 dead began entering a transformed Ground Zero, the centrepiece of a day of mourning and remembrance around the nation and world to mark 10 years since the worst terrorist attack on American soil.

The heart of the ceremony to consecrate the memorial began was the reading of the names of nearly 3,000 people who died in the attacks.

The memorial opens to the public tomorrow. It sits next to a construction project where office towers, a transportation hub and a cultural centre are taking shape. The signature skyscraper, One World Trade Centre, is rising quickly and will be the tallest in the country when completed.

The relatives - some in solemn, black suits, others in fire department T-shirts - crowded into a space in front of a podium where Mr Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Mr Bush and his wife, Laura, watched solemnly above the memorial. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg served as master of ceremonies.

At sunrise, an American flag fluttered over six storeys of the rising 1 World Trade Centre. The sky was clear blue with scattered white clouds and a light breeze, not unlike the Tuesday morning 10 years ago.

The site was utterly changed from previous September 11 anniversaries. Along with the names in bronze, there were two manmade waterfalls where the towers once stood. Dozens of white oak trees competed for sunlight with surrounding skyscrapers.

Elijah Portillo, 17, whose father was killed in the attack, said he had never wanted to attend the anniversary because he thought he would feel angry. But this time was different, he said.

"Time to be a big boy," Elijah said. "Time to not let things hold you back. Time to just step out into the world and see how things are."

The anniversary revived memories of a September morning when terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, and a fourth plane crashed into a field in rural western Pennsylvania. It was a time to recall heroism and Samaritans and unthinkable fear and of nearly 3,000 killed at the hands of a global terror network led by Osama bin Laden, himself now dead.

People across America gathered to pray at cathedrals in their greatest cities and to lay roses before fire stations in their smallest towns. Around the world, many others will do something similar because so much changed for them on that day, too.

Yesterday in rural western Pennsylvania, more than 4,000 people began to tell the story again.

At the dedication of the Flight 93 National Memorial near the town of Shanksville, Mr Bush and former President Bill Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden joined the families of the 40 passengers and crew aboard the jet who fought back against their hijackers.

"The moment America's democracy was under attack our citizens defied their captors by holding a vote," Mr Bush said. Their choice cost them their lives.

The passengers and crew gave "the entire country an incalculable gift: They saved the Capitol from attack," an untold amount of lives and denied al Qaida the symbolic victory of "smashing the centre of American government," Mr Clinton said.

They were "ordinary people given no time at all to decide and they did the right thing," he said.

"And 2,500 years from now, I hope and pray to God that people will still remember this."

As the anniversary arrived around the world, people paid tribute in formal ceremonies and quiet moments.

In Japan, they gathered Sunday to lay flowers before a glass case containing a small section of trade centre steel, and remembered 23 employees of Fuji Bank who never made it out of the towers.

A village in the Philippines offered roses, balloons and prayers for an American victim whose widower built 50 brightly coloured homes there, fulfilling his late wife's wish to help the Filipino poor.