Pope stands firm on reforming "radical feminist" U.S. nuns

Pope Francis has reaffirmed the Vatican's criticism of a body that represents U.S. nuns which the Church said was tainted by "radical" feminism, dashing hopes he might take a softer stand with the sisters.
Francis's predecessor, Benedict, decreed that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), a group that represents more than 80 percent of the 57,000 Catholic nuns in the United States, must change its ways, a ruling which the Vatican said on Monday still applied.

 

Last year, a Vatican report said the LCWR had "serious doctrinal problems" and promoted "radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith", criticizing it for taking a soft line on issues such as birth control and homosexuality.
The nuns received wide support among American Catholics, particularly on the liberal wing of the Church, as LCWR leaders travelled around the United States in a bus to defend themselves against the accusations.
On Monday the group's leaders met Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, the new head of the Vatican's doctrinal department, and Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle, who has been assigned by the Vatican to correct the group's perceived failings.
"Archbishop Mueller informed the (LCWR) presidency that he had recently discussed the doctrinal assessment with Pope Francis, who reaffirmed the findings of the assessment and the program of reform, " the Vatican's statement said.
The Vatican reminded the group that it would "remain under the direction of the Holy See," the statement said.
It was the nuns' first meeting with Mueller, who succeeded American Cardinal William Levada as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Levada, who retired last year, oversaw the Vatican's investigation of the U.S. nuns.
A statement from the LCWR said the "conversation was open and frank" and added: "We pray that these conversations may bear fruit for the good of the Church".
In April 2012, the doctrinal department criticized the LCWR for challenging bishops and for being "silent on the right to life," saying it had failed to make the "Biblical view of family life and human sexuality" a central plank of its agenda.
The nuns supported President Barack Obama's healthcare reform, part of which makes insurance coverage of birth control mandatory, while U.S. bishops opposed it.
Many nuns said the Vatican's report misunderstood their intentions and undervalued their work for social justice.
Supporters of the nuns said the women had helped the image of the Church in the United States at a time when it was engulfed in scandal over sexual abuse of minors by priests. They were praised by many fellow Catholics and the media for their work with the poor and sick.
Monday's Vatican statement expressed gratitude for the "great contribution" American Catholic nuns had made in teaching and caring for the sick and poor.

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Afghan electric company struggles to make powerful customers pay

How do you collect a $200,000 electricity bill from an Afghan warlord? Try cutting him off from the grid. Then turn off your cell phone so he can't yell at you.
General Rashid Dostum - one of Afghanistan's most powerful militia leaders - found someone else to reconnect him within hours, said Mirwais Alami, the chief commercial officer at Afghanistan's national power company.
"This will take years to collect," Alami said wryly. "But I am determined. If he doesn't pay, his son will pay."
Although Dostum is still holding out, others grudgingly paid up after the utility started cutting their power connections. The company cut off 1,000 defaulters last year and collected $230 million, a 40 percent increase in the last three years.
The approach is beginning to pay dividends. Three years ago, the company lost more than half its power to theft. Last year, that had fallen to a third. The utility is now breaking even in the capital. It's a small victory in an industry beset by woes.


Afghanistan desperately needs to build an electricity network to generate jobs, develop its trillion-dollar mineral deposits - a process that will take decades - and win support for a government that has delivered few tangible benefits to its citizens.
There has been progress, but it is slow. The national electricity utility, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS), was set up in 2008. The next year, donors constructed power lines from neighboring Uzbekistan, which supplies most of Afghanistan's electricity, to the capital of Kabul.
The imports helped boost Afghanistan's power to 1,100 megawatts last year. It's about a quarter of what is needed, but a definite improvement on the 291 MW the country had a decade ago.
"(DABS) has shown striking progress for such a young organisation trying to run a national utility in a country that never had that before," said Roseann Casey, a top USAID official overseeing infrastructure in Afghanistan.
Around 80 percent of Afghan power is imported from neighboring countries, mainly Uzbekistan, so officials have to collect cash from customers if they don't want their country cut off. It's a struggle.
"We face a lot of problems. Some people think they should have free power, so when we try to collect they refuse to pay or get Parliament to call us in and give us problems," said Alami, brandishing letters he has sent to prominent Afghans and the attorney general's office.
FOREIGN HELP
Since DABS can't collect all its cash, foreign donors, led by the United States, Germany and India, are funding expansion. They hope to lay a power line down from Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar by 2016 - right through Taliban country.
Currently DABS in Kandahar is powered by U.S.-supplied diesel generators and U.S.-supplied diesel. The cost of the fuel alone is 400 percent of the revenue DABS collects in Kandahar, according to a report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
The city is one of Afghanistan's "power islands," urban centers electrified by generators, hydro plants or imports from Iran, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan. There's very little power in the countryside.
In total, donors are spending $1.6 billion in current projects for the power sector and have allocated $6.3 billion to improve electrical infrastructure until 2019, according to a recent World Bank report.
It doesn't always go smoothly. Last year the U.S. paid a contractor nearly $13 million for electrical meters to replace old, faulty meters in Kandahar. SIGAR auditors found the equipment stashed in a warehouse months later. DABS says the new meters are faulty.
The installation of a third turbine in Kajaki Dam in southern Helmand province, near Kandahar, should bump up capacity from 33 MW to 51.5 MW, but Kajaki has become another troubled project.
British troops fighting off insurgent attacks hauled the turbine to the dam five years ago but Chinese engineers dropped out after the area was attacked. A U.S. firm frequently criticized by U.S. government auditors was awarded the contract, but then Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he wanted DABS in charge.
Now another round of bidding is underway for the new contract. No one knows when the turbine will be installed.
Hydroelectric dams like Kajaki are the best way for Afghanistan to generate cheap power. It has no money to pay for imported fuel. But the dams are costly to build and infrastructure is vulnerable to attack.
Last month Afghan authorities discovered more than a ton of explosives at Salma Dam, a hydro project being built by Indian engineers in Herat province in the western region of the country and expected to produce 42 MW.
Days later, Taliban fighters in Pakistan killed seven people in an attack that destroyed the biggest power station in northern Khyber Paktunkwa province.
"(The Taliban) don't want people to be educated and to have light. They want them to be jobless, to be hopeless, to fight," said Alami.
Alami is hoping that rural Afghans will be happy enough to get electricity that they will protect new power lines in their area. For him, DABS's biggest challenge is not security, but collecting the cash to maintain the projects that donors build.
Last year DABS spent $12 million on maintenance, with USAID funding maintenance for some power plants.
Donors hope that improved revenue collection will help DABS pay for more costs.
"They will have the revenue they collect and then they can use that revenue for operations and maintenance," said Raouf Zia, a spokesman for the World Bank.
That might help save the power plants from the fate of many other donor-built projects that will have to be shut down as the NATO drawdown in 2014 approaches and aid dwindles.
Afghanistan would have to spend $1 billion a year just to operate and maintain all the infrastructure and buildings that foreign donors have constructed since 2001, the World Bank study found.
This year the country's total collected revenue will be just under $2.5 billion. Only $80 million was allocated for maintenance.

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Tweeting Turkish pianist given suspended sentence for blasphemy

A world-renowned concert pianist was given a suspended jail sentence in Turkey on Monday for insulting religious values on Twitter, a case which has become a cause celebre for Turks alarmed about creeping Islamic conservatism.
Fazil Say, also a leading composer, went on trial in October for blasphemy - a crime that can carry an 18-month sentence - for a series of tweets including one citing a 1,000-year-old poem.
"The fact I've been convicted for an offence I didn't commit is less worrying for me personally than it is for freedom of expression and faith in Turkey," Say said in emailed comments.
His case has stirred up passions about the role religion should play in Turkish public life and highlighted how much has changed since Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party, which has roots in Islamist politics, swept to power a decade ago.
A judiciary once renowned for defending the secular republic against Islamist influence - notably jailing Erdogan himself for reciting a religious poem - now finds itself in hock to religious conservatives, government opponents say.
"The verdict is unacceptable, and an indicator of the AK Party's vengeful conception of the law," Ilhan Cihaner, a lawmaker from the main opposition CHP party, told Reuters.
Say retweeted a verse in April last year in which 11th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam mocks pious hypocrisy. It is in the form of questions to believers: "You say rivers of wine flow in heaven, is heaven a tavern to you? You say two houris await each believer there, is heaven a brothel to you?"
In another tweet, he poked fun at a muezzin, someone who makes the Muslim call to prayer. "The muezzin finished the evening prayers in 22 seconds ... Why are you in such hurry? A lover? A raki table?" he asked, referring to the aniseed-flavored spirit popular in Turkey.
The series of more than half a dozen tweets led prosecutors to accuse the 43-year old pianist of "explicitly insulting religious values".
An Istanbul court gave him a 10-month prison sentence but suspended it by five years on condition that he does not commit the same crime again in that period.
"Say did not repeat the words of a poet, but attacked religion and the holy values of religion, completely with his own words," said plaintiff Ali Emre Bukagili, a civil engineer and follower of a prominent Turkish creationist, who has brought a series of such cases against public figures.
DIVIDED OPINION
Say, who has performed with leading orchestras from Tokyo to Berlin, as well as the Israel Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic, denied the charge.
"Fazil Say" became a top trending topic on Twitter immediately after the ruling was announced, with comments reflecting Turks' strong but divided opinions on the role of religion in public life.
"Scandalous and disgraceful," one tweet said of the ruling. "I wouldn't be surprised if a witch hunt for non-believers starts."
Another disagreed: "Finding religious values silly is one thing, provoking people through insults another. The court ruling is not wrong."
Erdogan's AK, its initials spelling out the Turkish word for purity, was elected in 2002 with a landslide. A decade since then of unprecedented prosperity is admired among Western allies keen to portray NATO member Turkey as a beacon of political stability in a troubled region.
But Erdogan's opponents accuse him of posing a threat to the modern, secular republic founded by Kemal Ataturk on the ruins of the Ottoman empire 90 years ago.
The courts have helped silence opposition and emasculate a military which was long the self-appointed guardian of Turkish secularism. It pressured an Islamist-led government from power in 1997 but has since been forced into retreat under AK rule.
Erdogan himself served time in prison in 1998, when military influence still held sway, for reciting a poem that a court ruled was an incitement to religious hatred.
The poem Erdogan had read contained the verses: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers."

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EU says member states failing to crack down on human trafficking

BRUSSELS | Mon Apr 15, 2013 1:40pm EDT

(Reuters) - Thousands of people are falling victim to human traffickers every year in the European Union but most member states have failed to implement tougher new laws agreed by the bloc to address the problem, the European Commission said on Monday.
The new laws, agreed in 2011, impose higher penalties on offenders, make it easier to prosecute across borders within the bloc and give better protection to victims.
Only six countries in the 27-member bloc have implemented the new legislation so far, the Commission said.
Trafficking victims are typically women and they are predominantly forced into sexual slavery, but also hard labor and criminal activity. Some have their organs removed.
Information released by the EU executive on Monday showed the number of identified trafficking victims increased by 18 percent between 2008 and 2010 to about 10,000, although that number likely represents a fraction of all victims.
"What we know is probably only the tip of the iceberg," said Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU commissioner for home affairs.
"I am very disappointed to see that, despite these alarming trends, only a few countries have implemented the anti-trafficking legislation and I urge those who have not yet done so to respect their obligations."
Most of the victims identified were citizens of Romania and Bulgaria, the two poorest members of the bloc. Neither country has implemented the new laws.
EU governments which do not implement common rules can face legal action and fines.
An estimated nearly 21 million people worldwide are victims of human trafficking, according to 2012 statistics from the International Labor Organization.

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New app finds upcoming yoga classes wherever you are

By Natasha Baker

TORONTO | Mon Apr 15, 2013 5:14pm EDT

(Reuters) - From hatha to vinyasa and everything in between, a new app helps yoga lovers find upcoming classes nearby.
Om finders, an iPhone app, detects a user's location and shows yoga classes happening at studios around them, including time and directions.
"The vision was to get more people on planet earth doing yoga," said Nancy Richardson, vice president of digital and brand strategy at Vancouver-based yoga apparel company Lululemon.
Classes can be found at nearly 7,000 studios in 63 countries worldwide and can be filtered by time and type, including hatha, power flow, vinyasa and hot yoga.
"It offers lots of different options to try different classes, types of yoga, and experience different teachers," Richardson said.
Yogis can also keep up with the schedules of their favorite instructors. The app has over 30,000 instructor profiles, which include a schedule of their upcoming classes.
According to Rachel Acheson, vice president of brand and community at Lululemon, the turnover for yoga is high. Although there are approximately 20 million people practicing yoga, about 20 percent drop out every year.
"The new people to yoga every year is substantial," said Acheson. "Finding your teacher is one of the biggest things that drives commitment to the practice."
Users can invite friends to join in on class by sending a text, tweet, email or Facebook message through the app, and keep track of the classes they're headed to.
The app launched Thursday and by Saturday had been downloaded over 18,000 times. It secured the top spot in the Health and Fitness category on Apple's App Store in Canada, and the third spot in the category in the U.S.
It is the first digital experience that the company has developed in-house, and is part of Lululemon's push towards creating hyper-local experiences for consumers.
"That connection with our guests and studio partners is happening on a local level," Richardson said. "Our digital strategy is people-first. Our goal is to build authentic relationships with communities."
Although users can add a class to their schedule, which syncs with the calendar app, it is not yet possible to book or pay for a class within the app.
"We're waiting to see what guests want, and we're not confident they're going to want to book," Richardson responded, adding that the company is actively monitoring feedback.
The company will continue to monitor demand for other platforms, but the company's customers are predominantly iPhone users, according to Richardson.
A similar app called Mindbody Yoga is available for iPhone, created by Mindbody, the company that supplies the data about classes, studios and instructors used in Om Finder.
It allows users to book and pay for classes if the studio supports that capability. It does not, however, provide the social features found in Om Finder, or information about in-store classes.
Another app called GoRecess, available on the web, allows users in the United States to find and book fitness classes in their cities, including yoga, strength-training, dance martial arts and boot camp classes.

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