Pope Benedict XVI promised Wednesday that the Catholic Church would take action to confront the clerical sex abuse scandal, making his first public comments on the crisis days after meeting with victims.During his weekly public audience in St. Peter's Square, Benedict recounted his tearful weekend meeting in Malta with eight men who say they were abused as children by priests in a church-run orphanage.''I shared with them their suffering, and emotionally prayed with them, assuring them of church action,'' Benedict said.At the time of the private meeting Sunday, the Vatican issued a statement saying Benedict had told 英雄合击
** the men that the church would do everything in its power to bring justice to abusive priests and would implement ''effective measures'' to protect children.Wednesday, the public heard the words from the pope himself.Neither Benedict nor the Vatican has elaborated on what action or measures are being considered. Various national bishops conferences have over the years implemented norms for handling cases of priests who sodomize and molest children, none more stringent than the zero-tolerance policy adopted by the United States.The U.S. norms bar credibly accused priests from any public church work while claims against them are under investigation. Diocesan review boards, comprised mostly of lay people, help bishops oversee cases. Clergy found guilty are permanently barred from public ministry and, in some cases, ousted from the priesthood.Last week, the Vatican for the first time issued guidelines telling bishops they should report louboutin sale
** cases of abusive priests to police where civil laws require it. While the Vatican has insisted that was long its policy, it was never written explicitly and victims, lawyers, government-backed inquiries and grand juries have all accused the church of mounting a cover-up to keep clerical abuse secret and away from civil jurisdiction.Benedict said in a homily last week that Christians must repent for sins and recognize mistakes in comments widely interpreted as concerning the scandal. But his comments Wednesday marked his first public and direct remarks on the crisis since March 20, when he wrote a letter to the Irish faithful concerning the abuse crisis in that country.
The Taliban gunned down the deputy mayor of Kandahar, perhaps the city’s most effective and admired public official, late on Monday, demonstrating their ability to kill almost anyone in a region where security continues to worsen ahead of a massive summer offensive.And in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, a NATO convoy shot to death four unarmed civilians in a vehicle, including a police officer and 12-year-old student, according to local Afghan officials. But without offering proof, NATO described the dead as two insurgents and their “associates” — a disagreement that could prompt another dispute with the Afghan government over civilian casualties.Kandahar was capital city of the Taliban before the United States-led invasion in 2001, and attempts to secure the surrounding province from Taliban guerrillas and institute new governance programs this summer could be crucial to the fate of the 8-and-a-half-year occupation. With only weeks to go before the offensive, the Taliban have been stepping up violence mbt outlet
** in the city with a series of assassinations and attacks on American and Western contractors, political officials and religious leaders.Even so, residents were stunned by what happened Monday night: Deputy Mayor Azizullah Yarmal walked into a mosque in central Kandahar, turned toward Mecca and began to pray to Allah. As he reached the point where he and the others in the mosque knelt in unison and then bent forward to touch their foreheads to the ground, gunmen made their move, shooting him with a pistol, said Zalmy Ayoubi, a government spokesman.The gunmen escaped, and the Taliban quickly claimed responsibility.“We have killed him because he was working for this puppet government,” Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, one of the Taliban’s regular spokesmen, said in a telephone interview. “We will target all those who are working for government.”The top NATO civilian official in Afghanistan, the former British Ambassador Mark Sedwill, called the shooting “an appalling act.”“This was a man who was simply seeking to serve his people,” he said.Shaken locals said he was likely killed because he was seen as honest and effective — unlike so many other Kandahar leaders.“He was one of the officials who was dedicated to his job and he was actually committed to his work,” said Mr. Ayoubi, who described him as an honest problem-solver. “We really lost a good person.”The assassination was not the only attack of note in Kandahar on Monday. Hours before, militants trussed a bomb to a donkey and led it to the checkpoint in front of the home of one of President Hamid Karzai’s most important political allies in Kandahar, the former governor of Spin Boldak district.The former governor, Haji Fazluddin Agha, who had also served as Mr. Karzai’s top campaign official in Kandahar 传奇私服
** Province, was unhurt when the militants detonated the bomb using a remote-control device. But the blast killed three of his grandchildren, who were 15, 13 and 12. Two bystanders and two policemen were also wounded.In Khost province in eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, a dispute emerged almost immediately over the deaths of the four men shot by the NATO convoy early Monday evening.Local Afghan officials, including the governor of Gurbuz district, said the four were slain at 6 p.m. as they drove home in a white Toyota. One official identified the men as Maiwand, a police officer; Faizullah, a 12-year-old student; and two shopkeepers at the Khost bazaar, Amirullah and Nasratullah.The governor of Khost, Abdul Jabar Naimi, also described the four as a policeman, a student and two shop owners. “I am deeply saddened that these four civilians were killed by NATO forces on the way to their home,” he said. “We are still doing our investigation to see if they were involved in any criminal activities against the government.”An Afghan interpreter who works with NATO forces in the province also described the four victims as civilians.The American-led NATO military command in Kabul confirmed the shooting but offered a vastly different assessment: It said two of the dead men were identified after the fact as “known insurgents.” A NATO spokesman in Kabul said that identification was made using “biometric data” but he could not say how that specifically tied the men to the militancy.In a statement issued in Kabul, NATO said the military convoy was returning to its base after defusing a roadside bomb when the vehicle approached from the opposite direction.The troops “attempted to flag the vehicle down, and flashed its lights,” the statement said, but the “driver of the unidentified vehicle responded by turning off the vehicle’s headlights and accelerating toward the convoy.”NATO troops fired warning shots, the military said, but the vehicle continued to accelerate. designer shoes
** “Several rounds were fired in an attempt to disable the vehicle, and finally shots were fired into the vehicle itself.”The commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley A. McChrystal, has said that he sympathizes with troops on checkpoints and in convoys who have to make critical decisions in an instant about whether to fire on vehicles perceived to be a threat because they are traveling too fast or too close.But last month, General McChrystal said that in the nearly 10 months since he took command there had not been a single checkpoint or convoy shooting that caused casualties where, later, “it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it.”
As Europe grounded most airline flights for a fourth day on Sunday because of a volcanic ash cloud spreading from Iceland, increasingly desperate airlines ran test flights to show that flying was safe and pressed aviation authorities to loosen the flight ban. Airlines complained that European governments were overreacting to the threat, relying on incomplete data from computer models rather than real-world safety tests in the air above Europe. In a blunt statement Sunday, representatives of Europe’s airlines and airports called for “an immediate reassessment of the present restrictions.”Europe’s transportation ministers decided to meet in Brussels on Monday to discuss how and when to get planes back in the air.“It is clear that this is not sustainable,” the European Union’s transport commissioner, Siim Kallas, told 传奇私服
** reporters in Brussels. “We cannot just wait until this ash cloud dissipates.”Europe remained a scene of travel chaos, with deserted airports and grounded planes; stranded travelers stormed ports and bus and train stations. London’s St. Pancras train station, where Eurostar trains leave for Paris and Brussels, was packed with people anxious to find a way to Continental Europe.Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, finally arrived back in Germany from San Francisco, after a three-day odyssey through North Dakota, Portugal and Italy via plane, armored car and bus. And one group of intrepid Samaritans tried to evacuate stranded travelers by dinghy from Calais, France, to Dover, England.The closing of European airspace has dealt a severe blow to the beleaguered airline industry. The crisis has cost the airlines at least $1 billion so far in lost revenue and could wipe out weaker carriers if it continues much longer, analysts say. Airlines have already suffered losses of $50 billion over the last decade after the attacks of 9/11, the SARS epidemics of 2004, the rise in fuel costs in 2008 and the recession.Authorities are concerned that if an airplane moves through the ash cloud, which contains high levels of silica, a glasslike dust, the engines could seize or stall.But several airlines, including Lufthansa of Germany and KLM of the Netherlands, completed successful test flights on Sunday, and said they saw no damage to their planes. The chief executive of British Airways, Willie Walsh, hopped aboard a Boeing 747 flying from London’s Heathrow Airport to Cardiff, Wales, to gather data on the ash.National aviation authorities continued to send conflicting messages to airlines and passengers on Sunday. While some isolated airports, like Frankfurt, Berlin and Warsaw, cleared the way for a handful of flights heading away from the ash cloud, most flights in northern and central Europe remained grounded.The British transportation secretary, Andrew Adonis, ruled out any immediate change, saying flights across northern Europe “will not be safe” on Monday. But Scandinavian Airlines said it planned to operate flights Sunday night from the United States to Oslo and Stockholm.Complicating any decisions is the continued eruption of the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajokull.As the ash cloud from the volcano has spread, it has shut down airports from the British Isles to Ukraine, disrupting the travel plans of nearly seven million travelers, according to one industry estimate. Delta Air Lines, Cathay Pacific of Hong Kong, Qantas of Australia and China Airlines of Taiwan were among those that canceled Europe-bound flights through Monday.Since the ash cloud first appeared over European airspace Thursday, more than 63,000 flights have been canceled. Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based agency that coordinates air traffic management across the region, said that 20,000 flights, out of a regularly scheduled 24,000, were canceled on Sunday.The interruption in service, particularly across the Atlantic, comes as the industry had just started to recover from the global recession, with business and international travel picking up.After the spike in oil prices in 2008, several airlines went bankrupt, including Eos, an all-business-class 传奇私服
** carrier that offered flights between Kennedy International Airport in New York and Stansted Airport outside London. Analysts said Europe’s legacy flag carriers, including British Airways, Lufthansa and the Air France-KLM combination, would feel the most pain from the shutdown because they have high fixed costs.European airlines were already suffering from the slow pace of economic recovery there. Even before the latest crisis, the International Air Transport Association had projected that the industry would lose $2.8 billion this year, down from last year’s loss of $9.4 billion.“These disruptions could not have come at a more difficult time as airlines in Europe and elsewhere struggle,” said Steve Lott, a spokesman for the industry group. “The big wild card is, how long does this last and how long before we can get flights back in the air?”In a conference call Sunday with Eurocontrol, one airline representative sharply chastised national civil aviation authorities for being inconsistent in applying flight restrictions and stressed that the flight bans were creating “a serious economic issue for us.”“I understand the requirement for safety,” said Dale Moss, the chief executive of OpenSkies, the Paris-based, all-business-class subsidiary of British Airways. “But the level of frustration is painfully high” for both airlines and passengers, he said. “We need some scientific data quick, so that we can start projecting and putting contingency plans in place.”KLM received permission from authorities to fly three cargo planes to Asia on Sunday night. The airline’s chief executive, Peter Hartman, suggested that passenger flights would be safe “with the exception of an area in the north between Iceland and Russia,” according to Dutch news services.The events in Europe have also had an economic effect on American carriers. The four-day closing of European airports so far has meant lost revenue of $80 million for United States carriers that fly the lucrative trans-Atlantic route, said Michael Boyd, an aviation consultant. It also meant a loss of connecting passengers, who often fly from Europe to the United States, and then on to another domestic destination.“We’ve never seen such a wall across the Atlantic,” said Mr. Boyd. “If you are heavily dependent on traffic to Europe, you are in a world of hurt right now.”Even if flights resumed this week, it could take days for the situation to return to normal, said Darin Lee, an airline specialist at LECG, an economic consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.“Reaccommodating several days worth of passengers can take quite a while, since there just louboutin shoes
** aren’t as many empty seats on flights as there used to be,” Mr. Lee said. “Some passengers could face very long waits before being able to take their journey, and for many passengers, it simply won’t be practical to reschedule.”While much of Europe’s airspace remained closed, the airport in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, was still open for business since southern winds were pushing ash away from the small rocky island in the North Atlantic.The shutdown of Heathrow airport, near London, also allowed authorities for the first time to inspect runways on foot in broad daylight instead of in the middle of the night.