Pope Francis urged South American bishops on Monday to speak “courageously” at a high-profile meeting on the Amazon, where the shortage of priests is so acute that the Vatican is considering ordaining married men and giving women official church ministries.

Francis opened the work of the three-week synod, or meeting of bishops, after indigenous leaders, missionary groups and a handful of bishops chanted and performed native dances in front of the main altar of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Led in procession by the pope, the bishops then headed to the synod hall to chart new ways for the Catholic Church to better minister to remote indigenous communities and care for the rainforest they call home.

Among the most contentious proposals on the agenda is whether married elders could be ordained priests, a potentially revolutionary change in church tradition given Roman rite Catholic priests take a vow of celibacy.

The proposal is on the table because indigenous Catholics in remote parts of the Amazon can go months without seeing a priest or receiving the sacraments, threatening the very future of the church and its centuries-old mission to spread the faith in the region.

Another proposal calls for bishops to identify new “official ministries” for women, though priestly ordination for them is off the table.

Cardinal Claudio Hummes, the retired archbishop of Sao Paulo and the lead organizer of the synod, said the priest shortage had led to an “almost total absence of the Eucharist and other sacraments essential for daily Christian life.”

“It will be necessary to define new paths for the future,” he said, calling the proposal for married priests and ministries for women one of the six “core issues” that the synod bishops must address.

“The church lives on the Eucharist, and the Eucharist is the foundation of the church,” he said, citing St. John Paul II.

Francis opened the meeting by extolling native cultures and urging bishops to respect their histories and traditions as they discern ways to better spread the faith.

History’s first Latin American pope has long held enormous respect for indigenous peoples, and denounced how they are exploited, marginalized and treated as second-class citizens and “barbarians” by governments and corporations that extract timber, gold and other natural resources from their homes.

Speaking in his native Spanish, Francis told the bishops how upset he became when he heard a snide comment about the feathered headdress worn by an indigenous man at Mass on Sunday opening the synod.

“Tell me, what is the difference between having feathers on your head and the three-cornered hat worn by some in our dicasteries?” he said to applause, referring to the three-pointed red birettas worn by cardinals.

Francis urged the bishops to use the three weeks to pray, listen, discern and speak without fear.

“Speak with courage,” he said. “Even if you are ashamed, say what you feel.”

The synod is opening with global attention newly focused on the forest fires that are devouring the Amazon, which scientists say is a crucial bulwark against global warming. It also comes at a fraught time in Francis’ six-year papacy, with conservative opposition to his ecological agenda on the rise.

Francis’ traditionalist critics, including a handful of cardinals, have called the proposals in the synod working document “heretical” and an invitation to a “pagan” religion that idolizes nature rather than God.

To that criticism, Hummes denounced Catholic “traditionalism” that is stuck in the past versus the church’s true tradition, which always looks forward.

“The church cannot remain inactive within her own closed circle, focused on herself, surrounded by protective walls and even less can she look nostalgically to the past,” he said. “The Church needs to throw open her doors, knock down the walls surrounding her and build bridges.”

In keeping with the meeting’s environmental message, the synod organizers themselves are taking measures to reduce their own carbon footprint.

Organizer Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri told the bishops there would be no plastic cups or utensils at the meeting, that synod swag such as bags and pens were biodegradable, and that the emissions spent to get more than 200 bishops and indigenous from South America to Rome — estimated at 572,809 kilograms of carbon dioxide — would be offset with the purchase of 50 hectares of new growth forest in the Amazon.

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From: MeNeedIt

As the U.S. warned allies around the world that Chinese tech giant Huawei was a security threat, the FBI was making the same point quietly to a Midwestern university.

In an email to the associate vice chancellor for research at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, an agent wanted to know if administrators believed Huawei had stolen any intellectual property from the school.

Told no, the agent responded: “I assumed those would be your answers, but I had to ask.”

It was no random query.

The FBI has been reaching out to colleges and universities across the country as it tries to stem what American authorities portray as the wholesale theft of technology and trade secrets by researchers tapped by China. The breadth and intensity of the campaign emerges in emails The Associated Press obtained through records requests to public universities in 50 states. The emails underscore the extent of U.S. concerns that universities, as recruiters of foreign talent and incubators of cutting-edge research, are particularly vulnerable targets.

Agents have lectured at seminars, briefed administrators in campus meetings and distributed pamphlets with cautionary tales of trade secret theft. In the past 18 months, they’ve requested the emails of two University of Washington researchers, asked Oklahoma State University if it has scientists in specific areas and sought updates about “possible misuse” of research funds by a University of Colorado Boulder professor, the messages show.

The emails show administrators mostly embracing FBI warnings, requesting briefings for themselves and others. But they also reveal some struggling to balance legitimate national security concerns against their own eagerness to avoid stifling research or tarnishing legitimate scientists. The Justice Department says it appreciates that push-pull and wants only to help universities separate the relatively few researchers engaged in theft from the majority who are not.

Senior FBI officials told AP they’re not encouraging schools to monitor researchers by nationality but instead to take steps to protect research and to watch for suspicious behavior. They consider the briefings vital because they say universities, accustomed to fostering international and collaborative environments, haven’t historically been as attentive to security as they should be.

“When we go to the universities, what we’re trying to do is highlight the risk to them without discouraging them from welcoming the researchers and students from a country like China,” John Demers, the Justice Department’s top national security official, said in an interview.

The effort comes amid a deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and China and as a trade war launched by President Donald Trump contributes to stock market turbulence and fears of a global economic slowdown. American officials have long accused China of stealing trade secrets from U.S. corporations to develop their economy, allegations Beijing denies.

“Existentially, we look at China as our greatest threat from an intelligence perspective, and they succeeded significantly in the last decade from stealing our best and brightest technology,” said William Evanina, the U.S. government’s chief counterintelligence official.

The FBI’s effort coincides with restrictions put in place by other federal agencies, including the Pentagon and Energy Department, that fund university research grants. The National Institutes of Health has sent dozens of letters in the past year warning schools of researchers it believes may have concealed grants received from China, or improperly shared confidential research information.

The threat, officials say, is more than theoretical.

In the past two months alone, a University of Kansas researcher was charged with collecting federal grant money while working full time for a Chinese university; a Chinese government employee was arrested in a visa fraud scheme that the Justice Department says was aimed at recruiting U.S. research talent; and a university professor in Texas was accused in a trade secret case involving circuit board technology.

The most consequential case this year centered not on a university but on Huawei, charged in January with stealing corporate trade secrets and evading sanctions. The company denies wrongdoing. Several universities including the University of Illinois, which received the FBI email last February, have since begun severing ties with Huawei.

The University of Minnesota did the same, with an administrator reassuring the FBI in an email last May that issues raised by a best practices letter an agent forwarded “have certainly been topics of conversation (and occasionally even action) in our halls for a while now.”

But the Justice Department’s track record hasn’t been perfect, leading to pushback from some that the concerns are overstated.

Federal prosecutors in 2017 dropped charges against a Temple University professor who’d been accused of sharing designs for a pocket heater with China. The professor, Xiaoxing Xi, is suing the FBI. “It was totally wrong,” he said, “so I can only speak from my experience that whatever they put out there is not necessarily true.”

Richard Wood, the then-interim provost at the University of New Mexico, conveyed ambivalence in an email to colleagues last year. He wrote that he took seriously the national security concerns the FBI identified in briefings, but also remained “deeply committed to traditional academic norms regarding the free exchange of scientific knowledge wherever appropriate — a tradition that has been the basis of international scientific progress for several centuries.

“There are real tensions between these two realities, and no simple solutions,” he wrote. “I do not think we would be wise to create new ‘policy’ on terrain this complex and fraught with internal trade-offs between legitimate concerns and values without some real dialogue on the matter.”

A University of Colorado associate vice chancellor equivocated in January on how to handle an agent’s request for a meeting, emailing colleagues that the request to discuss university research felt “probing” and like “more of a fishing expedition” than past occasions. Another administrator replied that the FBI presumably wanted to discuss intellectual property theft, calling it “bright on their radar.”

FBI officials say they’ve received consistently positive feedback from universities, and the emails do show many administrators requesting briefings, campus visits, or expressing eagerness for cooperation. A Washington State University administrator connected an FBI agent with his counterpart at the University of Idaho. The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill requested a briefing last February with an administrator, saying “we would like to understand more about the role of the FBI and how we can partner together.” A University of Nebraska official invited an agent to make a presentation as part of broader campus training.

Kevin Gamache, chief research security officer for the Texas A&M University system, told AP he values his FBI interactions and that the communication goes both ways. The FBI shares threat information and administrators educate law enforcement about the realities of university research.

“There’s no magic pill,” Gamache said. “It’s a dialogue that has to be ongoing.”

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas vice president for research and economic development welcomed the assistance in a city she called the “birthplace of atomic testing. “We have a world-class radiochemistry faculty, our College of Engineering has significant numbers of faculty and students from China, and we have several other issues of concern to me as VPR. In all of these cases, the FBI is always available to help,” the administrator, Mary Croughan, emailed agents.

The AP submitted public records requests for correspondence between the FBI and research officials at more than 50 schools.

More than two dozen produced records, including seminar itineraries and an FBI pamphlet warning that China does “not play by the same rules of academic integrity” as American institutions observe. The document, titled “China: The Risk to Academia,” says Beijing is using “non-traditional collectors” like post-doctoral researchers to collect intelligence and that programs intended to promote international collaboration are being exploited.

Some outreach is more general, like an agent’s offer to brief New Mexico State University on “how the FBI can best serve and protect.”

But other emails show agents seeking tips or following leads.

“If you have concerns about any faculty or graduate researchers, students, outside vendors … pretty much anything we previously discussed — just reminding you that I am here to help,” one wrote to Iowa State.

In May, an agent sent the University of Washington a public records request for emails of two researchers, seeking references to Chinese-government talent recruitment programs the U.S. views with suspicion. A university spokesman said the school hasn’t investigated either professor.

Last year, an agent warning of a “trend of international hostile collection efforts at US universities” asked Oklahoma State University if it had researchers in encryption research or quantum computing.

The University of Colorado received an FBI request about an “internal investigation” into a professor’s “possible misuse” of NIH funding. The school said it found no misconduct involving the professor, who has resigned.

Other emails show schools responding internally to government concerns.

At Mississippi State, an administrator concerned about Iranian cyberattacks on colleges and government reports on foreign influence suggested to colleagues the school scrutinize graduate school applicants’ demographics. “Have to be careful so U.S. law is not violated re discrimination but where does one draw the line when protecting against known foreign states that are cyber criminals?” he wrote.

Though espionage concerns aren’t new — federal prosecutors charged five Chinese military hackers in 2014 — FBI officials report an uptick in targeting of universities and more U.S. attention as a result. The FBI says it’s seen some progress from universities, with one official saying schools are more reliably pressing researchers about outside funding sources.

Demers, the Justice Department official, said the focus reflects how espionage efforts are “as pervasive, as well-resourced, as ever today.

“It’s a serious problem today on college campuses.”

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From: MeNeedIt

Greek authorities were transferring around 570 migrants from an overcrowded camp on the island of Lesbos on Sunday, officials said.

A regularly scheduled ferry left Lesbos carrying the migrants, who used to live in the migrant camp of Moria.

Authorities say this is part of the plan to reduce overcrowding at the camp, where about 13,000 people live in a space designed for 3,000.

Migrants, most of them Afghans, have protested, sometimes violently, over the prevailing conditions, demanding their transfer out of Moria and a quick response to their asylum demands.

Authorities say the 570 are among what they term “vulnerable categories” — families, single women with children and unaccompanied minors.

The ferry will arrive at Piraeus, the main port in Athens, on Monday morning. The migrants will be moved to a camp near the northern city of Thessaloniki.

Separately, Greek authorities said a Syrian toddler drowned at a beach in southern Greece after the boy wandered away from his parents and exited a migrant camp.

The Ministry of Citizen Protection, which oversees Greek police, says that the boy was 2 years old. The boy drowned Sunday afternoon after leaving the camp in the city of Andravida in the western Peloponnese region. An inquiry has been launched by Greek officials.

Germany’s top security official, meanwhile, said European Union nations need to work better together on the issue of migration or they risk facing a new flood of asylum-seekers that could rival that of 2015.

Following a trip last week to Turkey and Greece, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told the Bild newspaper on Sunday that “we need to do more to help our European partners with the controls on the EU’s external borders.”

He said “if we don’t do that, we will experience a surge of refugees like 2015, perhaps even bigger.”

Germany alone took in 890,000 migrants in 2015.

The comments come ahead of meetings Tuesday with EU interior ministers on the issue.

Seehofer also tells the Welt newspaper that Europe needs to do more to help Turkey in dealing with millions of Syrian refugees.

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From: MeNeedIt

A 16-year-old climate activist who garnered international attention when she scolded world leaders at the United Nations is visiting American Indian reservations in the Dakotas to talk about oil pipelines.

Greta Thunberg is appearing at panel discussions on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota at 5 p.m. Sunday and on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota on Tuesday.

The Lakota People’s Law Project says Thunberg is concerned about the proposed path of the Keystone XL pipeline through South Dakota, as well as plans to double oil flowing through the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota.

Thunberg traveled to the United States in August on a sailboat to promote her climate change campaign.

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From: MeNeedIt

Researchers have been trying to learn more about a plant that has invaded lakes across Georgia and the Southeast, contributing to the deaths of eagles and other birds.

The hydrilla has helped to cause the deaths of American bald eagles and thousands of other water birds over the past 25 years, scientists say.

The plant isn’t killing the birds directly, but is providing a home for a new kind of cyanobacteria that produces a lethal toxin, The Athens Banner-Herald reported.

Scientists have been studying the issue after bald eagle carcasses were being found at a man-made lake in Arkansas. An increasing number of afflicted birds then began showing up in Arkansas, Georgia, and other states across the South.

There were reports of injuries — the loss of motor control in eagles and in a water bird called the coot. Their symptoms included wings that twitch but don’t flap, and difficultly maintaining balance.

Necropsies found that the affected eagles and coots showed peculiar lesions that made their brains look like sponges, the Athens newspaper reported.

Wildlife scientists had a name — Avian Vacuolar Myelinopathy, or AVM — but lacked crucial details on what was causing it.

The problem has been especially acute at Thurmond Lake, a man-made reservoir on the Savannah River between Georgia and South Carolina, the newspaper reported.

University of Georgia professor Susan Wilde saw patterns. The lakes where eagles were dying of AVM are man-made, and they had been heavily invaded by hydrilla. The coots were eating the hydrilla, and the eagles found easy prey in the disabled coots.

Wilde’s hypothesis: The coots could be ingesting some neurotoxin associated with the plants, then passing on the toxin when the eagles ate them. Wilde also found that a previously unknown kind of cyanobacteria was growing on the underside of the spreading hydrilla leaves. That could be producing lethal toxins.

In 2014, nearly two decades after the neurological disease first showed up, Wilde and her colleagues had a name for the cyanobacteria: Aetokthonos Hydrillicola, or eagle-killer. They’d also isolated the toxin it produces.

On Thurmond Lake, more than 105 AVM eagle deaths have been confirmed so far, and scientists believe the death toll is higher since many animal carcasses are never found.

Lake managers are trying strategies to beat back the plant invader and its toxic companion. They’ve had some success stocking Thurmond and other lakes with a kind of sterile grass-eating carp to gnaw away at the hydrilla, combined with sowing native water plants. Lake managers are also using chemical killers on the plants, though that carries its own set of environmental risks.

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From: MeNeedIt

Jordan’s government said Sunday it has reached a pay deal with the teachers union to end a one-month strike, the country’s longest public sector strike that disrupted schooling for more than 1.5 million students.

The deal came after the strike threatened a deepening political crisis when the government last week began legal steps against the unions after they rejected meager pay hikes they said were “bread crumbs” and the government said it could not afford to give more.

The pay deal that raises allowances from 35% to 60% to teachers from next year comes after weeks of deadlock with the government intransigent over meeting an original 50% pay rise demanded by the unions it said would strain the heavily indebted country’s finances.

Officials said King Abdullah had ordered the government to reach the hefty wage deal which tests the ability of Prime Minister Omar al Razzaz to stay on track in implementing tough fiscal reforms backed by the International Monetary Fund aimed at reducing a record $40 billion public debt.

The government fears new pay demands by other public sector employees, including doctors, and pension increases for retired soldiers would wreck efforts to restore fiscal prudence needed for a sustained economic recovery.

Dozens of activists from the powerful teachers union, whose members succeeded in forcing the government to agree to substantial pay hikes after a four-week standoff, celebrated in front of their headquarters in Amman.

“The teachers got their demands,” said Nasser Al Nawasrah, deputy head of the Jordanian Teachers Syndicate. He called on his organization’s 100,000 members to immediately resume teaching pupils in around 4,000 public schools that had been affected by the strike.

Many parents had kept their children at home out of solidarity with the striking teachers.

In many of the country’s rural areas and smaller cities, traditional heartlands of support for the monarchy, the strike also became a protest against successive governments’ failure to deliver on promises of economic growth.

Growing disenchantment among ordinary Jordanians over tough IMF austerity measures and high taxes spilled into large street protests in the summer of 2018 that railed against corruption and mismanagement of public funds.

Officials say Jordan can no longer afford to sustain a public sector in which salaries eat up much of the central government’s $13 billion budget in a country with some of the world’s highest government spending relative to its economy.

The debt is due, at least in part, to the adoption by successive governments of an expansionist fiscal policy marked by job creation in the public sector.
 

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From: MeNeedIt

Extra layers of security, intense on-screen action and a frightening incident inside a New York theater combined to create an unsettling experience for some moviegoers who went to see “Joker” on its opening weekend.

A young man who was loudly cheering and applauding on-screen murders sent some people heading toward exits in a crowded theater in Manhattan’s Times Square on Friday night. Other patrons yelled at the man, who spit on them as they left early, said Nathanael Hood, who was in the theater.

“I was scared. I’m sure a lot of other people were,” Hood said in an interview conducted by private messages.

Social media users posted photos of police, security sweeps and safety notices at theaters in California and Florida. And in Tennessee, a drive-in theater banned moviegoers from wearing costumes to a screening of the R-rated “Joker,” which scored an October box-office record with $13.3 million in earnings.

The Warner Bros. film, directed by Todd Phillips, presents the backstory of the man who becomes Batman’s classic foe. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, it probes the journey of a disturbed man with a penetrating laugh into a killer.

While Phillips has said he hopes the film inspires discussions about guns, violence and the treatment of people with mental illness, some feared the movie could inspire violence, particularly after a mass shooting killed 12 at a Colorado theater during a screening of another Batman movie in 2012.

Hood, who attended an afternoon viewing of “Joker” at AMC Empire 25 in Times Square, said a disruption began in the seats when the action on the screen grew intense.

“About halfway through when Joker started killing people and monologuing about how society is evil he started clapping really loudly and incessantly for a good minute. People started yelling for him to shut up, but he kept clapping and cheering like mad,” Hood said.

The man started clapping and cheering again “really loudly” during a climatic gunfight, he said, and got “belligerent” when people told him to quit.

“Finally security came and got him. He was still being interrogated outside the theater when we came out,” said Hood. Plenty of police were around the theater, he said.

Another moviegoer, Etai Benson, said the loud man was sitting beside him at the start of the movie and poured what appeared to be a full bottle of alcohol into a drink. The man’s behavior “combined with the carnage happening onscreen got people nervous,” he said.

“This was most likely a harmless drunk guy, but all the nervousness built around the film made what happened (Friday) night really unsettling,” Benson said in an interview conducted by private messages.

A spokesman for the Kansas-based AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., which operates AMC Theatres, did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

The FBI told local police agencies to monitor potentially threatening online posts related to the film.
Photos posted on social media showed officers and a police dog outside a theater where “Joker” was being shown in Orlando, Florida, and a police SUV was parked on the sidewalk outside a cinema in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, during a screening.

In Bristol, Tennessee, the owner of the Twin City Drive-In Theater, Danny Warden, posted a warning on Facebook that anyone wearing a costume or mask to see “Joker” wouldn’t be allowed in, and anyone who smuggled in an outfit would be asked to leave. 

Warden told WJHL-TV that the decision was “common sense” after the film sparked concerns about its violent content. 

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From: MeNeedIt

Hundreds of climate activists barricaded themselves into a Paris shopping center Saturday as security forces tried to remove them, ahead of a planned series of protests around the world by the Extinction Rebellion movement.

Campaigners faced off against police and some inconvenienced shoppers as they occupied part of the Italie 2 mall in southeast Paris.

They unfurled banners with slogans like “Burn capitalism not petrol” above restaurants and the window displays fashion boutiques.

The protest comes ahead of planned disruption to 60 cities around the world from Monday in a fortnight of civil disobedience from Extinction Rebellion (XR), which is warning of an environmental “apocalypse.”

As the center tried to close in the evening, security forces ordered the protesters to leave the area, activists told AFP.

According to images broadcast on social networks, police then tried to enter the building, while protesters blocked entrances with tables and chairs.

“I am with XR to say stop this crazy system before it destroys everything,” one young woman told AFP, giving only her first name Lucie.

Other campaign groups also joined in with the Paris shopping center demonstration, including some members of the “yellow vest” anti-government protest group.

Non-violent protests are chiefly planned by XR from Monday in Europe, North America and Australia, but events are also set to take place in India, Buenos Aires, Cape Town and Wellington.

Another protest was held in Berlin Saturday, with campaigners setting up camp near the parliament building.

“To governments of the world: we declared a climate and ecological emergency. You did not do enough. To everybody else: rebel,” XR said on its website ahead of its International Rebellion wave of activism.

“You can’t count on us or Greta to do this for you,” it said, referring to teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. “Look inside yourself and rebel.”

Extinction Rebellion was established last year in Britain by academics and has become one of the world’s fastest-growing environmental movements.

Campaigners want the government to declare a climate and ecological emergency, reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2025, halt biodiversity loss and be led by new “citizens’ assemblies on climate and ecological justice.”
 

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From: MeNeedIt

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is back at his Vermont home after being treated for a heart attack in Las Vegas.

The plane carrying the 78-year-old senator arrived in Vermont just before 6 p.m. Saturday, one day after he was released from a hospital.

As he left the airport he told reporters “I’m feeling great, thank you.” 

He was then driven home in a motorcade where he was greeted by family at the front door.

Sanders was attending a campaign event Tuesday when he experienced chest discomfort and was taken to a hospital. 

Sanders’ campaign released a statement from his doctors that said two stents were inserted to open up a blocked artery in his heart. 

The doctors said the rest of his stay was “uneventful with good expected progress.” 

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From: MeNeedIt

Hawaiian shirt day, doughnuts, shared sheet cake: There are a lot of ways to try to raise morale in the office. But Maxim Moskalkov visited some very special workspaces where workers know the best morale boost comes on four legs. 
 

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From: MeNeedIt

The town of Minden, West Virginia looks like many small American towns, yet it is unique in that it is one of the most toxic places in the United States. Here, between 1970s and mid-1980s, the Shaffer Equipment Company used harmful chemicals to build electrical equipment. Those chemicals have been banned since 1979, but traces still remain. Daria Dieguts went there to find out more and filed this report narrated by Anna Rice. 
 

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From: MeNeedIt

Mike Stura runs a 230 acre farm about an hour from New York City in the state of New Jersey. He isn’t really a farmer by trade, but he is a rescuer by choice and gives ailing animals a second chance. Anna Nelson visited Stura at Skylands Sanctuary, Anna Rice narrates the story. 
 

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From: MeNeedIt