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The Vatican has sanctioned a Belgian bishop who resigned last year after admitting he had sexually abused his nephew to no longer act as a priest in public and warned that he may risk further church sanctions.

Belga archives, AFP/Getty Images

A December 1984 photo of Bishop Roger Vangheluwe. He tendered his resignation amid speculation of phedophilia.

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Belga archives, AFP/Getty Images

A December 1984 photo of Bishop Roger Vangheluwe. He tendered his resignation amid speculation of phedophilia.

The Vatican on Tuesday clarified the punishment against the former Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe after Belgian bishops reported over the weekend that he had merely been sent outside Belgium for spiritual and psychological counseling, a seemingly cushy punishment given the seriousness of the crime.

The decision was the first known application of the Vatican

Several thousand supporters of President Hosni Mubarak, including some riding
horses and camels while wielding whips, have attacked anti-government
protesters as tensions in Egypt escalate.

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TelegraphPlayer-8299373

6:46PM GMT 02 Feb 2011

Mr Mubarak’s supporters were out in the streets for the first time in large
numbers, with thousands demanding an end to the anti-government movement a
day after the president went on national television and rejected demands for
him to step down.

Those calling for Mr Mubarak to go have been out in Cairo and many other
cities for more than a week, and they drew by far their largest crowd on
Tuesday, when at least 250,000 packed Tahrir Square and the area around it.

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Article extracted from telegraph.co.uk

Tens of millions of Americans were bracing themselves for a ‘major
life-threatening storm’ on Tuesday, having been warned by the government to
stay inside their homes.

A storm warning was issued in New York City, where pavements are still covered in huge mounds of snow Photo: AP

By Jon Swaine, New York

5:04PM GMT 01 Feb 2011

More than 4,000 flights were cancelled at major airports across half of the USA,
and schools and businesses were closed, as snow fell on the mid-west at a
rate of three inches per hour.

The National Weather Service issued an urgent warning stating: “Do not
travel! Stay inside! Strong winds and blinding snow will make travel nearly
impossible.”

States of emergency were declared from Oklahoma in the south to Illinois in
the north, while 600 members of the National Guard were dispatched in
Missouri, in the centre of the country.

Chicago was set for up to 20 inches of snowfall, which would be its third
heaviest on record, while central states such as Kansas were anticipating a
foot or more.

Meanwhile winds in excess of 60 miles per hour were expected across the
region, with temperatures set to plummet well below zero as far south as
Texas.

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Article extracted from telegraph.co.uk

Muslims will be more than one-quarter of the Earth’s population by 2030, according to a study released today.

By Garrett Hubbard, USA TODAY

Umaid Qureshi leading an afternoon prayer for family members in their home in Herndon, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C.

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By Garrett Hubbard, USA TODAY

Umaid Qureshi leading an afternoon prayer for family members in their home in Herndon, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C.

The number of U.S. Muslims will more than double, so you are as likely to know a Muslim here in 20 years as you are to know someone Jewish or Episcopalian today.

Those are among key findings in ” The Future of the Global Muslim Population,” the first comprehensive examination of Muslims, whose numbers have been growing at a faster rate than all other groups combined.

Article extracted from usatoday.com

During Pope John Paul II’s 2005 funeral, crowds at the Vatican shouted for him to be made a saint immediately. “Santo subito!” they chanted for one of the most important and beloved pontiffs in history.

His successor heard their call. On Friday, in the fastest process on record, Pope Benedict XVI set May 1 as the date for John Paul’s beatification — a key step toward Catholicism’s highest honor and a major morale boost for a church reeling from the clerical sex abuse scandal.

He set the date after declaring that a French nun’s recovery from Parkinson’s disease was the miracle needed for John Paul to be beatified. A second miracle is needed to be canonized a saint.

Benedict himself will preside at the May 1 ceremony, which is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Rome for a precedent-setting Mass: Never before has a pope beatified his immediate predecessor.

Although the numbers may not reach the 3 million who flocked here for John Paul’s funeral, religious tour operators in his native Poland were already preparing to bus and fly in the faithful to celebrate a man many considered a saint while he was alive.

“We have waited a long time and this is a great day for us,” said Mayor Ewa Filipiak of John Paul’s hometown of Wadowice, where the faithful lit candles Friday and prayed at a chapel in the town church dedicated to John Paul.

The Rev. Pawel Danek, who runs a museum in John Paul’s family home, said Benedict had listened to the prayers.

“The Holy Father has confirmed what we all felt somehow,” he said. “For us, John Paul II’s holiness is obvious.”

Benedict put John Paul on the fast track to possible sainthood just weeks after he died, waiving the typical five-year waiting period before the process could begin. But he insisted that the investigation into John Paul’s life be thorough to avoid any doubts about his virtues.

The beatification will nevertheless be the fastest on record, coming a little more than six years after his death and beating out Mother Teresa’s then-record beatification in 2003 by a few days.

It is not without controversy, however. While John Paul himself was never accused of improprieties, he has long been accused of responding slowly when the sex abuse scandal erupted in the United States in 2002. Many of the thousands of cases that emerged last year involved crimes and cover-ups during his 26-year papacy.

Critics have faulted John Paul’s overriding concern with preserving the rights of accused priests, often at the expense of victims — a concern formed in part by his experiences in communist-controlled Poland, where priests were often accused of trumped-up charges.

The most damaging case linked to John Paul concerned the Rev. Marciel Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a conservative order beloved by the late pope because of its orthodoxy, fundraising prowess and ability to attract priestly vocations.

Allegations that Maciel had raped young seminarians were brought by the victims to the Vatican in the 1990s, but under apparent orders from John Paul’s No. 2, a canonical trial was shelved.

Only after Benedict became pope was Maciel sanctioned in 2006; Maciel died two years later.

Despite the Maciel case, Vatican officials have said there was nothing in John Paul’s record that put his beatification into question. Vatican watchers noted on Friday that beatification isn’t a “score card” on how John Paul administered the church but rather a recognition that he led a saintly life.

Carl Anderson, head of the Knights of Columbus, one of the world’s largest Catholic fraternal service organizations, said John Paul’s life was a model of “love, respect and forgiveness for all.”

“We saw this in the way he reached out to the poor, the neglected, those of other faiths, even the man who shot him,” Anderson said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “He did all of this despite being so personally affected by events of the bloodiest century in history.”

The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano described his saintliness in these terms Friday: “A passionate witness to Christ from his childhood to his last breath.”

The last remaining hurdle before beatification concerned Benedict’s approval that the cure of the French nun, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, was a miracle due to the intercession of the late pope.

The nun has said she felt reborn when she woke up two months after John Paul died, cured of the disease that had made walking, writing and driving a car nearly impossible. She and her fellow sisters of the Congregation of Little Sisters of Catholic Maternity Wards had prayed to John Paul.

On Friday, Simon-Pierre said John Paul was and continues to be an inspiration to her because of his defense of the unborn and because they both suffered from Parkinson’s.

John Paul “hasn’t left me. He won’t leave me until the end of my life,” she told French Catholic TV station KTO and Italy’s state-run RAI television.

Wearing a white habit and wire-rimmed glasses, she appeared in good health and showed no signs of tremors or slurred speech, common symptoms of Parkinson’s.

“John Paul II did everything he could for life, to defend life,” she said. “He was very close to the smallest and weakest. How many times did we see him approach a handicapped person, a sick person?”

Last year, there were some questions about whether the nun’s original diagnosis was correct. But in a statement Friday, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints said Vatican-appointed doctors had “scrupulously” studied the case and determined that her cure had no scientific explanation.

Once he is beatified, John Paul will be given the title “blessed” and can be publicly venerated, or worshipped. Many people, especially in Poland, already venerate him privately, but the ceremony will allow Catholics to publicly worship him.

The Vatican said John Paul’s entombed remains, currently in the grotto underneath St. Peter’s Basilica, will be moved upstairs to a chapel just inside a main entrance for easier access by the public.

Visitors are expected in droves. Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno had a previously scheduled audience with Benedict on Friday and said he had assured the pope that the city was up to the task.

Born as Karol Wojtyla in 1920, John Paul was the youngest pope in 125 years and the first non-Italian in 455 years when he was elected pontiff in 1978.

He brought a new vitality to the Vatican, and quickly became the most accessible modern pope, sitting down for meals with factory workers, skiing and wading into crowds to embrace the faithful.

His Polish roots nourished a doctrinal conservatism — opposition to contraception, euthanasia, abortion and female priests — that rankled liberal Catholics in the United States and Western Europe.

But his common touch also made him a crowd-pleasing, globe-trotting superstar whose papacy carried the Catholic Church into Christianity’s third millennium and emboldened eastern Europeans to bring down the communist system.

He survived an assassination attempt in St. Peter’s Square in 1981 — and promptly forgave the Turk who had shot him.

After suffering for years from the effects of Parkinson’s, he died in his Vatican apartment on April 2, 2005. He was 84.

Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul’s most trusted friend and aide who was at his bedside that night, gave thanks Friday from Krakow, where he is archbishop.

“We are happy that this process came to an end, that what people asked for — “Santo subito” — was fulfilled,” Dziwisz said. “I express great joy on behalf of the entire diocese of Krakow — and I think I am also authorized to express this on behalf of all of Poland.”

The selection of May 1 — the first Sunday after Easter — as the beatification date is significant. It’s the Feast of Divine Mercy, which John Paul himself inaugurated in 2000 after canonizing Sister Faustina Kowalska, a 20th century Polish mystic to whom he was particularly devoted.

It’s also May Day or labor day, what was once a major communist holiday. While there was some irony in the date, few in Poland noted it and Poles today celebrate May 1 as a welcome and uncontroversial holiday like the rest of Europe.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Tucson shooting suspect Jared Loughner’s recent history of instability — including five disruptions at his community college and bizarre rants on YouTube videos — probably would have been sufficient to commit him to a psychiatric facility, even against his will, experts said.

Arizona makes it easier than most states to commit mentally ill people to psychiatric care, even against their will. But that doesn’t mean that everyone gets the help they need.

“The state laws are some of the best in the country,” said Jack Potts, a forensic psychiatrist in Phoenix. “The follow-up is not.”

Under Arizona law, anyone can call the county or regional health authorities with concerns about a person’s mental health, and authorities are required to send out mobile units to assess the person’s condition, said Brian Stettin, policy director at the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va., which advocates for involuntary commitment for mental illness.

The person who files a request for commitment must list the names of two witnesses who can attest to the subject’s behavior, although they don’t have to sign the document themselves, Potts said.

REPORTS: Loughner had ‘dark personality’

POLL: Conservatives not to blame for Ariz. shooting

Typically, states allow involuntary commitment only if people pose a danger to themselves or others, or if they are profoundly disabled by their mental illness, to the point of being unable to take care of themselves, said Paul Ragan, associate professor of psychiatry at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville.

But Arizona allows for involuntary commitment if someone is deteriorating from a mental illness and could benefit from treatment, Potts said. The law is intended to catch people before they do something dangerous.

He said he knows of a high school principal, for example, who requested a mental health evaluation for an unstable student.

The law also provides up to 90 days of inpatient hospital treatment, Potts said. A judge can order a patient to take his medication; patients who refuse can be sent back to the hospital.

Yet Arizona often lacks the resources to treat people, he said. The state has one of the lowest ratios in the country for inpatient psychiatric beds for its population size.

Across the USA, budget cuts have forced hospitals to close 4,000 inpatient psychiatric beds since 2009 — leaving them less able to take in the mentally ill, said Michael Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).

Arizona has eliminated hundreds of positions for mental health case workers, who help coordinate patients’ care, Fitzpatrick said.

In a national score card rating the accessibility of mental health services, the alliance in 2009 gave Arizona a C, “which is pretty close to a failing grade,” said psychiatrist Anand Pandya of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles; 21 states scored a D, and none earned an A.

To create the score card, the alliance had volunteers in each state try to schedule an appointment with a mental health professional.

“It’s very hard to get an appointment with a psychiatrist in Arizona,” Pandya said. “Pretty much across the board, it takes a lot of time. There’s no one clear number to call, and it’s hard to figure out where to go from their website, even if you are completely mentally competent. The services in Arizona just aren’t designed to be readily accessible.”

PARENTS: Mental health lessons from the Tucson tragedy

Arizona state officials, for example, were unable to tell NAMI how many patients they actually serve, according to the report.

Arizona residents who spoke to NAMI for the report said they had many problems getting care, facing six- to eight-week waits to see a psychiatrist. Others complained of overworked case workers with nearly 100 clients.

One unnamed patient quoted in the report told NAMI, “When I first tried to get help after attempting suicide, I was told that I wasn’t sick enough to qualify.”

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Anglicans defecting to Rome are being told they must leave their churches with
clergy even been asked to move away from their parish.

Fr Ed Tomlinson (L) is leading the defectors at St Barnabas 

By Jonathan Wynne-Jones, and Rebecca Lefort

9:00PM GMT 08 Jan 2011

They have worshipped together for decades on the pews of their parish church.
Generations of their loved ones have been baptised, married and buried there.

But now a Church of England congregation is being torn apart by the Pope’s
offer to welcome disaffected Anglican traditionalists into the Catholic
Church.

In a vote which has split the local community and left long-standing friends
on opposite sides of a growing divide, 54 parishioners at St Barnabas
Tunbridge Wells have indicated that they intended to become Catholics while
18 said they would remain in the established Church.

While the Kentish churchgoers are among the first to take such a stand,
congregations up and down the country will soon follow suit as worshippers
and clergy weigh up whether to enter the Ordinariate, the structure set up
by Pope Benedict XVI to embrace defectors from the established Church.

At St Barnabas the move
towards Rome is being led by the vicar, Fr Ed Tomlinson. He believes
that traditionalists who oppose the ordination of women have been badly let
down by Church leaders.

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Article extracted from telegraph.co.uk

The new show from the Canadian circus act Cirque du Soleil is disappointingly
stale and complacent. Rating: * *

Po-faced: Massimiliano Medini Denise Garcia-Sorta performing in Totem at the Albert Hall Photo: Alastair Muir

By Charles Spencer

6:22PM GMT 06 Jan 2011

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It’s easy to admire Cirque du Soleil, much harder to love it. The circus acts
are usually superb but there is something curiously soulless about this
world-conquering Canadian organisation whose shows have now been seen by 100
million people in more than 300 cities around the world.

No wonder the company’s founder Guy Laliberté could afford to pay £22 million
for a twelve day trip into space with the Russians a year or so ago. With
corporate packages selling at £195 a head and the best seats going for £90
at the Albert Hall, the show has become a licence to print money.

This year, however, hopes were high. Robert Lepage, one of the most
imaginative and engaging theatre-makers working anywhere in the world today,
is both writer and director of the new show, Totem. I was expecting
him to revolutionise the stale format, in which desperately unfunny clowns,
bland world music, and flimsy narratives that combine the pretentious and
the incomprehensible, have all become de rigueur.

In fact, even Lepage hasn’t been able to rouse the company from its
complacency. The clowns are still there, as fey and irritating as ever,
while the big theme of creation and evolution doesn’t amount to much more
than having humans dressed as monkeys and a bearded fellow who might be
Charles Darwin pottering around the stage.

There’s a genuine coup at the start when the ensemble is discovered performing
amazing acrobatics on a gigantic turtle skeleton, and a neat re-creation of
the famous image of evolution in which an ape is shown metamorphosing into
man. But as far as narrative and depth go, that’s just about it. The
lighting and projection effects that often seem to flood the stage with
water are brilliant but otherwise you would never guess that a man as
inventive as Lepage was at the helm. Meanwhile, his decision to send in the
clowns, rather than shoot the blighters, is a craven cop-out.

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Article extracted from telegraph.co.uk

An overwhelming majority of Americans are frustrated that it’s too difficult to get rid of bad teachers, while most also believe that teachers aren’t paid enough, a new poll shows.

The Associated Press-Stanford University poll found that 78% think it should be easier for school administrators to fire poorly performing teachers. Yet overall, the public wants to reward teachers — 57% say they are paid too little, with just 7% believing they are overpaid and most of the rest saying they’re paid about right.

School districts have struggled for years over how to keep good teachers. This has led to controversial techniques like using standardized test scores to measure how much a student has learned in a teacher’s class. Some districts, like New York City schools, are considering making the data public so parents know how teachers rate.

The Los Angeles school district announced in late August it would adopt such a model to assess teacher performance. Unions have fought against the release of such data, saying it’s an unproven methodology that doesn’t truly reflect how a teacher is performing in the classroom.

Carmen Williams, 53, an office manager from Yates City, Ill., said the issue is simple: Pay teachers more and get rid of the bad ones.

“Good teachers are hard to find, and one of the reasons they are hard to find is because they’re not paid enough to support themselves, especially if they have a family,” she said. “There are very good teachers out there, but there comes a day when they need to retire and they don’t and what happens at that point is the kids suffer.”

It’s not just bad teachers that people want set loose. Nearly as many in the AP-Stanford poll — 71% — say it should be easier to fire principals at schools where students are performing poorly.

Half say that teachers’ salaries should be based on their students’ performance on statewide tests and on the evaluations they receive from local school officials. About 1 in 4 say pay should be determined solely by school administrators’ ratings, while under 1 in 5 say salaries should be based only on how well students do on statewide testing.

While eager to send bad teachers packing, just 35% say a large number of bad teachers is a serious problem in America’s schools and only 45% say teachers’ unions are to blame. In contrast, more than half are critical of parents and federal, state and local education officials, and 55% say the inability to recruit and keep good teachers is a big problem.

Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, says some of the public’s negative views come from frequent criticism from policymakers and in news reports.

“It’s become a throwaway line: ‘Oh, sure U.S. schools are lousy,’” said Cuban. “I think we have schizophrenia in the U.S. that we believe all U.S. schools are lousy except the schools we send our kids to.”

To help school districts cope, the Obama administration has begun programs like the $4 billion “Race to the Top,” which gave money to 11 states and Washington, D.C., in exchange for promises of innovative reforms to raise student achievement and improve graduation rates. Part of the requirements for getting the money included a teacher performance pay program and better use of student achievement data to make sure teachers are doing their jobs.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the poll results show that parents understand that teachers are not to blame for all the woes in public education.

“The scapegoating of teachers must stop and collective responsibility must start,” Weingarten said. “This should be a wakeup call to education leaders and policymakers that all of us have to do our part. Of course teachers are important, but they can’t do it all and policymakers have to stop blaming them.”

People in the poll were closely divided over whether teachers should be allowed to strike, with just over half in favor.

The AP-Stanford poll on education was conducted Sept. 23-30 by Abt SRBI, Inc. It involved interviews on landline and cellular telephones with 1,001 adults nationwide and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

Stanford’s participation in this project was made possible by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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The push to turn down the lights in American cities is gaining broad support from several unlikely allies — from conservationists and builders to city planners and the military.

Dark-sky legislation — laws requiring such measures as shielding outdoor lighting to reduce light pollution — has been embraced by about 300 counties, cities and towns.

More than 50 state bills have been introduced in the past two years, and seven were enacted. Eighteen states —Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming — have adopted dark-sky legislation in recent years, according to Bob Parks, executive director of the Tucson-based International Dark-Sky Association.

EARTH HOUR: Landmarks, cities worldwide cut power

The laws have won support in states such as Texas, home to several military bases, because lights at night can interfere with military drills. Trying to simulate flying over remote parts of Afghanistan is difficult when skies are aglow from city-light glare.

“It’s a broad environmental issue, and it’s also a safety issue,” Parks says. “It’s a pure waste of energy, dollars, and it contributes to greenhouse emissions. … For every watt of electricity used needlessly, somewhere a coal power plant is generating that electricity.”

The association, which has 5,000 members worldwide, was founded in 1988 by an astronomer in Tucson who noticed an impact of city lights on stargazing. Local ordinances were enacted to direct lights toward the ground instead of the sky and to not light areas that don’t need illumination, Parks says.

Since then, evidence has mounted that nighttime lights disturb animals and ecosystems. This month, findings presented at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco showed that sky glow over cities interfered with chemical reactions that naturally clean the air at night.

Fairfax County, Va., a suburb of Washington, adopted standards in 2003 that prohibit outdoor lights from shining upward.

“It still provides quality lighting and lighting that’s not intrusive,” says Jack Reale, county planner.

Before the ordinance, the glare of outdoor lights often spreads outside property lines and “in many cases was shining in a neighbor’s window,” he says. “The intent was to establish outdoor lighting standards that reduce the impact of glare, light trespass and overlighting and to promote safety and energy conservation. … It’s designed to put light where it’s needed.” Fairfax County is working to strengthen its standards.

Separately, the Virginia Department of Transportation has replaced many streetlights with fixtures that shield the light from shining upward.

Smaller cities have been more aggressive in changing outdoor lighting laws. Southampton, N.Y., recently passed an ordinance after more than a two-year tug of war that pitted environmentalists against citizens concerned about safety. The law sets wattage limits and the hours that outdoor lights can be left on.

“Cities and local governments can adopt policies … but it’s more forceful if the state legislature comes in,” says Melissa Savage, program director in Washington for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Some developers oppose the restrictions, but most support guidelines that don’t change when they build outside city limits, Parks says.

His group is working with the Illuminating Engineering Society, a professional group that sets design guidelines, to develop standard lighting ordinances that municipalities can adopt for new construction.

Builder Ted Clifton, head of Clifton View Homes in Coupeville, on Washington state’s Whidbey Island, is a fan.

“It’s just going to save you money,” he says. “You can burn 4 watts instead of 100, and it’s all lighting the surface you’re walking on.”

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