Pope leads Easter service in rain-lashed Vatican square
Pope leads Easter service in rain-lashed Vatican square
VATICAN CITY — In an Easter peace wish, Pope Francis on Sunday praised the framework nuclear agreement with Iran as an opportunity to make the world safer, while expressing deep worry about bloodshed in Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa.
Cautious hope ran through Francis’ “Urbi et Orbi” Easter message, a kind of papal commentary on the state of the world’s affairs, which he delivered from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Square.
He had just celebrated Mass in rain-whipped St. Peter’s Square for tens of thousands of people, who huddled under umbrellas or braved the downpour in thin, plastic rain-slickers.
Journalism school to release review of discredited gang rape article
RICHMOND, Va. — News organizations following up on Rolling Stone’s horrifying tale of a gang rape at the University of Virginia exposed serious flaws in the report and the Charlottesville Police Department said its four-month investigation found no evidence that the attack happened — or that the man who allegedly orchestrated it even exists.
Now the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism is about to explain how it all went so wrong. The school’s analysis of the editorial process that led to the November 2014 publication of “A Rape on Campus” will be released online at 8 p.m. EDT Sunday.
The article focused on a student identified only as “Jackie” who said she was raped by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house more than two years earlier.
WWI inscriptions uncovered in medieval quarry
NAOURS, France — A headlamp cuts through the darkness of a rough-hewn passage 100 feet underground to reveal an inscription: “James Cockburn 8th Durham L.I.”
It’s cut so clean it could have been left yesterday. Only the date next to it — April 1, 1917 — roots it in the horrors of World War I.
The piece of graffiti by a soldier in a British infantry unit is just one of nearly 2,000 century-old inscriptions that have recently come to light in Naours, a two-hour drive north of Paris. Many marked a note for posterity in the face of the doom that trench warfare a few dozen miles away would bring to many.
“It shows how soldiers form a sense of place and an understanding of their role in a harsh and hostile environment,” said historian Ross Wilson of Chichester University in Britain.
Etchings, even scratched bas-reliefs, were left by many soldiers during the war. But those in Naours “would be one of the highest concentrations of inscriptions on the Western Front” that stretches from Switzerland to the North Sea, said Wilson.
By wire sources