Some information for this report was provided by AP and AFP.

Some information for this report was provided by AP and Reuters.

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"We have the duty to cooperate with civil authorities in a common fight against crime," Scicluna said.

Monsignor Charles Scicluna told a closed-door, church sponsored symposium in Vatican City that bishops can and should be removed from office if they fail to follow church guidelines.

"So there is already provision in canon law, it is a crime in canon law to show malicious or fraudulent negligence in the exercise of one's duty," Scicluna said.

Many victims' groups have long been critical of the Catholic Church and its bishops for shielding priests accused of sexually abusing children and have dismissed the symposium as a public relations ploy.

But Marie Collins, the only abuse victim taking part in the symposium, says she is pleased by what she heard.

"The bottom line for me is that children have to be protected. We can't do anything about those like myself, who were abused in the past, but by putting in proper protection for the future, we can save children in the future from being abused," Collins said.

Pope Benedict has expressed shame and sorrow over THE abuse and has called on bishops to come up with guidelines against pedophiles by May of this year.

Earlier this week, the church said it has received more than 4,000 child sex abuse allegations over the past decade.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

Greek workers have held a series of general strikes and large street protests, saying they cannot make any more sacrifices.

Video of Greek police clashing with striking workers in Athens
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Until recently, Chesnay was mostly known because of its proximity to Versailles, the dazzling 18th-century palace that was home to French "Sun King" Louis XIV.  But today, this small town west of Paris is making news because of another monument, a 7,000-square-meter Mormon temple, expected to be built here in the next few years.

From his office window, Chesnay Mayor Philippe Brillault points to an abandoned, asbestos-filled energy plant.  This is the property the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has acquired for its temple.  Further away, the spire of the Versailles palace church sparkles in the sun.

Brillault admits he was not thrilled to receive the church's request to acquire the property.  He says the Mormons have a negative image in predominately Catholic France, even if they may not deserve it.  Brillault says he granted the building permit after an investigation he commissioned found no reason to refuse it.

With 36,000 members, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in France is among the oldest and largest of Mormon churches in Europe.  Missionaries arrived from the United States in the 1850s.

But only recently have ordinary French become aware of the Mormon faith, partly through media reports about U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who spent time in France as a young Mormon missionary.  And partly because of the controversy surrounding the Chesnay temple.

Political analyst Michelle Bacharan says that unlike the United States, French history has shaped a public deeply wary of any religion invading public space.

"Mormon temples tend to be really big, you can not miss them.  You can have some architectural disagreements with that and some people in a particular town may not like it.  And only real Mormons can attend ceremonies in temples, so that can create suspicion of what is going on there," Bacharan said.

Today, France's Mormon community gathers in ordinary churches, like one in the neighboring town of Versailles.  But church spokesman Christian Euvrard says there are special services that can only take place in temples.

"A temple is a place for communion.  It is a place for spiritual retreat.  It is a place where families will come once or twice a year," Euvrard said.

For now, Mormons like 40-year-old American Darla Pape, who attends the Versailles church with her family, must travel to Britain or Germany to go to temple.

"For us, going to the temple is a wonderful experience ... so I think that for church members in France to have a temple close that they could go to more regularly, they will see many blessings in their lives from that regular attendance," Pape said.

But opposition to the temple project is growing.  An Internet petition circulated by a Chesnay group has gathered 6,000 signatures, although Mayor Brillault says most are not local residents.  The mayor's opponents criticize the project, mostly it appears, for political reasons.

Others, like Marie Drilhon, local chapter head of UNADFI, a group fighting religious extremism, view the Mormon faith with skepticism.

Drilhon says the Mormon church demands a lot from its members, both financially and spiritually.  It uses marketing methods to proselytize, which Europeans are not used to.  And she doubts the temple will benefit the local community.

But Michelle, another local resident, has no objections to a Mormon temple in Chesnay.

Michelle says she has visited Salt Lake City in Utah, the headquarters of the Latter-day Saints, and she knows about the religion.

Church spokesman Euvrard says the Chesnay temple will allow other French to discover his faith.

"For us, it is a great opportunity to explain who we are, to introduce ourselves and to say 'yes,' we have been here for a long time, we are here and we are very present in society," Euvrard said.  

Euvrard says the temple project includes gardens that will be open to the public.  With time and greater awareness, he believes, French fears about the Mormons will disappear.

Lake Vostok has not been exposed to light or air in more than 15 million years and scientists believe it could contain life forms that existed before the Ice Age.

Evidence of a giant lake beneath the Antarctic ice has been gathering since the 1970s.  

Suspicions were first aroused after a team of Russians drilled deep into the ice to get a climate-record core sample. According to Montana State University microbiologist John Priscu, a veteran Antarctic researcher, the Russian scientists were puzzled by what their ice cores revealed.

“As they got deeper, though, they hit this funny ice, a different kind of ice that no longer had layers," Priscu says. "It didn’t have climate-record layering in the bottom. So they stopped drilling to find out what the heck they were getting into.”

What they were getting into was the vicinity of Lake Vostok, more precisely, the region at the bottom of the ice sheet above the lake. By 1996, scientists had gathered enough data on the structure of the ice sheet and the terrain beneath it to publish an article in Nature describing the hidden lake at Vostok.

_{An artist's cross-section of Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake in Antarctica. Liquid water is thought to take thousands of years to pass through the lake, which is the size of North America's Lake Ontario. (Nicolle Rager-Fuller/NSF)}

Russia quickly launched a project to drill through the four kilometers of ice and gain access to the lake. That drilling and core sampling continued every year since.

Priscu sampled some of that 400,000 year-old ice core, which, he says, contained colonies of cold-adapted micro-organisms much like those found growing near deep-ocean vents.

“Other ones, based on our DNA data, suggested that [the bacteria] would get their energy from minerals in the water. These organisms actually can mine the minerals in the rocks and then apparently they are producing new carbon to feed organisms that reduce carbon.”

Drilling into Lake Vostok without contaminating it is a complex job. Priscu says the Russians have taken extreme care to avoid introducing surface bacteria or pollutants into the lake’s virgin waters.

“They will put no probes into the lake or any hardware.  What they will do when they penetrate the lake they will back pressure their bore hole and they will let the lake water come up into the bore hole. They will not let any of their borehole fluid go into the lake. So when they penetrate only lake water will come up.”

According to plan, water will rise up through the bore hole and be left to freeze over the Antarctic winter so the scientists can go back next year and analyze it. But that is water just from the lake’s surface.

While the Russians are apparently the first to tap it, teams from the United States and England already have established projects to drill into the ancient Antarctic ice.

Priscu expects that within a decade an international team will explore Lake Vostok’s deepest regions.

“I also predict that once we really start figuring these systems out, we’ll find that they play an important role in biodiversity on our planet, a role in terms of carbon sinks and sources, which is important for the atmosphere.”

Priscu expects today’s discoveries in the Antarctic will inspire a new generation of scientists to unlock the secrets of this vast and still largely unexplored world.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

It appears Kremlin strategists had hoped Russia’s mid-winter holiday would break the momentum of the country's political protest movement. But the coldest temperatures of the season did not deter thousands of protesters from taking to the streets over the weekend.

Arctic cold held Moscow in its icy grip, but tens of thousands of people left their warm apartments to demonstrate against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Braving the same sub-zero temperatures that have killed hundreds across Eastern Europe, protesters like Georgi, a lawyer, took to the Moscow streets.

He says that he and his friends realized they had to stop complaining in the privacy of their kitchens and show in public that they want political freedom and the rule of law for Russia.

Despite the brutal cold, there was humor. Anton Glotov came dressed as a tank, to show that the opposition also has tanks. He says the government may not change, but Russians are feeling freer to meet, express their opinion and even start smiling, “like in America.”

A Russian visitor from South America, Danila Terentevich, said she is not shocked by Russia’s cold, but by its corruption. He says he tells friends in Argentina, “You want to see real corruption, go to Russia."

But beyond the ice carnival mood, protesters like computer programmer Taras Mazhar, attending with his father, sisters and girlfriend, warns Mr. Putin to listen and liberalize or face radicalization. “We come here to give a chance to our government not to lead us to revolution," he said.

Mazhar and others are driven by the thought the March 4 presidential vote could put Mr. Putin on the path to ruling Russia for more than another decade.

Twenty-four-year-old Evdokiya Labazova was handing out stickers for a website to prepare observers for presidential elections, one month away. She says clear fraud in the December parliamentary elections pushed her to be a poll watcher for the presidential election.

Levada Polling Center political researcher Natalia Zorkaya says the large turn out of well-educated people proves there is a growing awareness of the need for political reform.  She says Russians in their 20s are in a fighting mood.

She says that young successful Muscovites have switched from wanting to emigrate, to wanting to fight corruption and bring democracy to Russia.

From a city park in the dead of winter, the message to Mr. Putin is, liberalize now, or face a hot spring.

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Monday's article follows a mass rally on Saturday where tens of thousands of people took to the streets behind banners reading "Russia Without Putin." Others turned out in support of the government. Polls show that Putin is likely to win the March 4 presidential election.

Russians have staged mass protests since December's parliamentary elections, claiming fraud in favor of Putin's United Russia party. They also accuse President Dmitry Medvedev and Putin of "hijacking" the March presidential vote after Medvedev agreed not to run and allow Putin to return to the presidency.

Since then, Putin and President Medvedev have promised to allow more political parties and to reinstate direct elections of regional governors.

Putin served two presidential terms from 2000 to 2008 before becoming prime minister. Moscow has since extended the presidential term to six years. If he regains the presidency, the 59-year-old leader could remain in power until 2024.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

Greece has been negotiating for weeks with international financial institutions to cut $131 billion of its debt, but has been unable to complete an agreement. At the same time, the Greek government has encountered resistance at home to demands by the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund that it cut the wages of Greek workers, before securing the new bailout, the country's second in two years.

Watch related video of Papademos after emegency meeting
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Merkel said the public lenders' demands "are on the table. Something needs to happen quickly."

Greece's creditors say the wage cuts are necessary to make it more competitive with its trading partners. But Greek unions and employers have resisted the cuts, with the unions calling for a 24-hour strike on Tuesday to show their opposition. One union leader, Stathis Anestis, said European leaders have no right to undermine labor agreements.

"Collective bargaining agreements in the private sector is a European right, and Europe is obligated to respect it, something that has been done up to now," said Anestis. "That is what social agreements are based on. It is the first time there is intervention - rather it is the first time a demand is made for intervention - to annul collective wage agreements, to annul social dialogue, to annul agreements among social partners."

Caretaker Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos has been attempting to get the country's socialist, conservative and far-right political parties to agree to support the new austerity measures. International lenders have demanded the broad agreement among Greece's fractious parties, saying they are fearful that after a national Greek election in the coming months, lawmakers would renege on government spending cuts.

Political leaders had planned further negotiations Monday, but postponed the talks until Tuesday.

Greece's precarious financial state was underscored by a new EU report. The EU said that Greece, among the 17 countries using the common euro currency, has the highest governmental debt level compared to its economic output, and that its ratio is worsening.

The EU said the Greek debt level was at 159 percent of its gross domestic product in the July-to-September period last year, up more than 4 percentage points from the previous three months.  By contrast, the debt ratio for Germany, Europe's strongest economy, was just under 82 percent of its national economy in the third quarter last year, and 10 other eurozone countries recorded even lower figures.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

Tuesday, February 7 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the world's best-loved writers - Charles Dickens. And although his novels depicting the harsh reality of life in 19th century England are from another age, Dickens remains a celebrated figure throughout Britain. Cities across the country are celebrating his life, including the place where he was born.

This is Portsmouth, about 100 kilometers south of London. It's a city with a proud past, one of the main homes of the British Navy.

Tourists come here to see the historic port. But though the cultural heritage is rich, the city is not.

Many people here are on welfare. The navy does not employ as many as it once did. The city's last remaining shipbuilder, providing a livelihood to 1,500 families, is under threat of closure.

But Portsmouth does have one thing it can never lose.

It's where one of Britain's most famous novelists, Charles Dickens, was born on February 7, 1812.

Portsmouth wants to make the most of its famous son.

The final touches are being put on a special exhibit at the city library. The star attraction - the original manuscript of Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens' third novel.

City council member Lee Hunt:

"We're going to get millions more people visiting our city, spending their money here," said Hunt. "Of course, those millions more people are going to arouse a curiosity of local children. Some, only some, who can't read and we hope that this whole celebration encourages them to pick up a Dickens novel and start reading."

Portsmouth may have been the city of Dickens' birth, but it was London where he spent much of his later childhood and adult life. It's locations in this city that spring to mind when you picture scenes or images in his novels. London's poor houses may have gone, but warehouses and old style arcades like these ones here in St. Katherine's dock in the east of the city center will be familiar to readers.

There are many locations central to Dickens' life and novels within just a few minutes' walk of this famous tourist spot.

Christopher West leads Dickens tours around these neighborhoods,  taking visitors, for example, to the site of the old Marshalsea Prison on the other side of the river, where Dickens' father was jailed for not paying his debts.

West says Dickens still fascinates his audience.

“He was championing the problems of not enough health care, not enough police, problems in school, problems in parliament, problems in the law, banking in particular," said West. "While we still have these problems - very relevant today.”

Here's West's favorite passage - it's from Great Expectations...

"In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice," quotes West.

Powerful stuff now, as it would have been then. And will be, he says, in another 200 years.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

In the end it came down to a few phrases that Russia wanted changed or added, but that the Arab and Western sponsors of the text refused to alter or insert, saying they had made enough concessions already.

Ambassador Susan Rice said the United States was “disgusted” that Russia and China had once again blocked council action on Syria, particularly as the draft resolution had no references to sanctions, an arms embargo or military intervention. She also chided Russia for continuing to sell weapons to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

“For months this Council has been held hostage by a couple of members.  These members stand behind empty arguments and individual interests while delaying and seeking to strip bare any text that would pressure Assad to change his actions.  This intransigence is even more shameful when you consider that at least one of these members continues to deliver weapons to Assad," she said.

The British ambassador, Mark Lyall Grant, said he was “appalled” at the double veto, saying there was nothing in the text that should have triggered it. “The reality is that Russia and China have today taken a choice: to turn their backs on the Arab world and to support tyranny rather than the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people.  They have failed in their responsibility as permanent members of the Security Council," he said.

He told reporters later that he was particularly surprised by China’s vote against the resolution, as they had not expressed any particular concerns about the text during negotiations.

France’s  Ambassador, Gérard Araud, was equally indignant, criticizing Russia and China for obstructing council action and saying history would judge harshly those who did not support the Arab League plan and aligned themselves with a regime that massacred its own people.

But Russia’s Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters that consensus was possible, Moscow just wanted a few more days to negotiate and they were pushed to use their veto because other council members insisted on holding the vote Saturday without giving their proposals due consideration. “We were trying to suggest that we continue our discussions in order to reach consensus, so we were prepared for an extra mile, it was our colleagues who did not accept it," he said.

Churkin acknowledged that “tragic events” are happening in Syria, but said the Security Council is not the only “diplomatic tool on this planet” and he noted that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the foreign intelligence chief are going to Damascus on Tuesday to meet with President Assad.

Syria’s envoy, Bashar al-Ja’afari, continued to blame the violence in his country on armed groups and terrorist gangs that he said are supported by foreign sources and media campaigns in hostile countries.

In a statement, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman said the U.N. chief “deeply regretted” the failure of the council to act. He said it undermines the role of the United Nations and the international community in this period when the Syrian authorities must hear a unified voice calling for an immediate end to its violence against the Syrian people.

Meanwhile, the death toll continued to mount in the Syrian town of Homs, where activists say the military bombarded the city overnight, killing more than 200 people in one of the bloodiest days since the crackdown began last March.

Kremlin political strategists say Russia’s new spirit of independent political thinking is limited to intellectuals in Moscow. But on the western edge of Siberia, almost 2,000 kilometers east of Moscow, more and more Russians are speaking their minds on elections and on democracy.

Stability

Here in the Ural Mountains, Pavel Smolin takes tourists on dog-sled rides through the woods. But even in Russia’s heartland, one hears mixed feelings about Vladimir Putin’s 12-year rule of Russia. On one hand, Smolin values Russia’s new stability.

But Smolin, 58, says Russia’s pensions are so small, he cannot afford to retire next year.

Nearby, the regional capital of Yekaterinburg was the only big city in which Prime Minister Putin’s ruling United Russia Party lost in December’s parliamentary elections.

Trust

Georgi Persky represents Fair Russia, the opposition party that won here in December. He says Russia’s new independent political thinking is not limited to Moscow.

He sees a big attitude shift.  Large numbers of people have stopped trusting the ruling party and its leader, Putin.

Even though the opposition won here, there have been three protests.  People are angry about what they call big fraud across Russia. Independent city council member Leonid Volkov says there will be a fourth protest.

He says the opposition won in Yekaterinburg because elections were fair. He charges that in much of the country the ruling party won through fraud.

But Volkov and others stress they want reform, not revolution.

Yekaterinburg’s "Church on the Blood" was built on the spot where a Bolshevik firing squad shot to death Czar Nicholas II and his family in 1918.  Here, playing on this deep fear of traumatic change, a state company posted pro-Putin billboards with the slogan, “For A Stable Tomorrow.”

Stability and continuity are key words used by Putin in his campaign to win Russia’s presidential election on March 4, according to regional vice governor Anatoli Gredin.

He says other candidates call for nationalizations or big changes.

Putin's slogans

Stability was the slogan of a pro-government rally held Saturday in front of the city's railroad station.

One speaker said factory workers wanted stability and Vladimir Putin.

Reporters who covered the rally said many participants were lukewarm in their support for Putin, but were bused into the city and given a chance to visit a shopping mall as well as attend the rally.

Volkov, the opposition city council member, says that the goal was to create images for national television.

He says the Kremlin hopes voters watching state television before the election will think Putin has strong working-class support in the nation’s industrial heartland, in the faraway Ural Mountains.

That statement by Anders Fogh Rasmussen came after U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said American forces' combat role will end next year, more than a year before the transition is supposed to be complete.

Panetta's statement surprised many observers.

He said he hopes U.S. troops in Afghanistan, by far the largest and strongest component of the NATO-led force, will be able to move into a training and support role during the second half of next year.  NATO's plan is to hand full security responsibility to the Afghans at the end of 2014, and while some changes had been expected during a gradual transition, many were surprised at the U.S. defense secretary's remarks.

Since Panetta spoke on Wednesday, American and NATO officials have been trying to explain the new prominence of 2013, at least in U.S. plans.  At the conclusion of the defense ministers' meeting, Secretary-General Rasmussen was clear that coalition troops will be involved in at least some combat during the transition period.

“Even after transition has begun across the whole of the country, we will continue to support Afghans to make it happen," he said. "That means training.  It means assistance.  And, where necessary, it also means fighting alongside our Afghan partners."

The NATO chief said the U.S. desire to complete its transition from combat to training and support next year does not amount to disengagement from combat.

“Let me stress that I have not heard of any American plan to disengage from combat. You will of course see a gradual change of the role of our forces from combat to support.  You might say that the focus will shift from combat to support.  But combat operations will still be needed during that period of transition,” said Rasmussen.

NATO is also grappling with France's decision to withdraw its combat troops next year.  With no French combat forces and the United States' desire to accelerate its transition to a support role, Afghanistan's fledgling military and police forces will likely have to take on more responsibility more quickly than had been expected.

But despite the French and American announcements, Secretary-General Rasmussen says the scope and pace of the transition will still depend on actual security conditions in Afghanistan as the months go by.

NATO's top leaders are expected to have more to say about the Afghanistan transition plan at their summit in Chicago in May.

Shift in Attitudes in Yekaterinburg, Russia:

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Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao welcomed Chancellor Merkel to Beijing's Great Hall of the People Thursday. Some of the issues expected to top the agenda include Iran and the Eurozone debt crisis.

Earlier in the day, Merkel told reporters she has already had what she described as “long” discussions with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao about Iran.

She acknowledged that China does not support calls for new sanctions against Iran, but she urged China to,“use its influence” to emphasize to Iran that the world should not have another nuclear power.

The European Union imposed an oil embargo on Iran last week. China is the biggest buyer of Iranian oil, but has scaled back its purchases in the past two months as the two sides reportedly haggle over the terms of the 2012 contract.

Zhang Lihua, a European studies professor at Tsinghua University, says China opposes what it sees as interference by other countries in Iran's internal affairs.

Merkel says she believes the German leader will try to find out China's latest views on Iran, but that Beijing will not change its position "just because of the E.U.”

The Eurozone crisis is another pressing issue. In a speech delivered at a government think tank, the German leader said China can make contributions to help solve high debt problems in Europe, but she gave no specifics.

Tsinghua's Zhang says she does not understand how Europeans can expect China to be their financial savior.

Merkel says many of the Eurozone countries are developed countries, and China is only a developing country. Why should a developing country go to save a developed area? she adds.

At the same time, Europe is China's largest export market, and Zhang says Beijing is aware that a European debt crisis could endanger Chinese exports there. She says she does not expect China to engage in any “massive or large-scale intervention” in Europe, but will continue to buy up what she described as an “appropriate amount” of European debt in line with its own national situation.

On Friday, Merkel meets with President Hu Jintao and travels to Guangzhou, a southern commercial city, to attend a Sino-German business forum.

NATO’s top leaders had agreed to hand-over full security control to Afghan forces in 2014. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said ending the alliance's combat role even earlier should be no surprise.

“We expect the last provinces to be handed over to the Afghan security forces by mid-2013. From that time Afghan security forces are in the lead all over Afghanistan, and from that time the role of our troops will gradually change from combat to support,” he said.

But he added that any moves by individual allies must be coordinated with the NATO command in Kabul.

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Some analysts are concerned about advancing NATO’s already-ambitious timeframe, including Security and Defense Agenda Director Giles Merritt in Brussels.

“It is a high risk strategy in the first place, and I think there is a general feeling that we keep that risk within bounds by remaining solidaire [in solidarity] with each other,” said Merritt.

During the two-day meeting in Brussels, NATO defense ministers will hear a report from their commander in Afghanistan, U.S. Marine Corps General John Allen. They will be listening particularly for indications of whether the French and American 2013 plans are practical.

They will also want to know about a secret U.S. military report leaked to the British media this week that says the Taliban is stronger that Western officials have acknowledged. If true, it will present even more challenges for the Afghan security forces and their international partners in 2013 and beyond.

Watch NATO Secretary General Rasmussen discuss coalition's Afghanistan timeline

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Some information for this report was provided by AFP.