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The Polish-born John Paul, indisputably the most influential pope of the 20th century, died in his apartment overlooking St. Peter's Square after suffering heart failure and septic shock during treatment for an infection, the Vatican said.
The announcement came from papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls and was distributed to journalists via e-mail.
"The Holy Father died this evening at 9:37 p.m. (11:37 a.m. PST) in his private apartment. All the procedures outlined in the apostolic Constitution 'Universi Dominici Gregis' that was written by John Paul II on Feb. 22, 1996, have been put in motion."
A Mass was scheduled for St. Peter's Square for Sunday morning.
The pope died after suffering heart and kidney failure following two hospitalizations in as many months. Just hours earlier, the Vatican said he was in "very serious" condition but had responded to members of the papal household.
The pope underwent two hospitalizations within the last month. Breathing problems forced him to undergo surgery Feb. 24 to insert a tube in his throat to aid breathing.
His health declined dramatically over the last week, worsening after he developed a high fever from a urinary tract infection. On Friday, the Vatican said the pope's breathing had turned shallow and his kidneys further deteriorated. He had received the sacrament commonly known as the last rites Thursday evening.
Through it all, the pope chose to project his gradual incapacitation as a final Christian message of redemption through suffering. For the first time since his papacy began in 1978, he was absent from Easter rituals, which began on Palm Sunday. On Easter Sunday, he appeared before thousands of pilgrims and struggled to speak, but ultimately failed.
The first non-Italian elected pope in 456 years, John Paul energized the papacy through much of his reign, traveling as evangelist and champion of religious freedom even as he imposed a rigorous moral discipline and more centralized authority on his sometimes rebellious 1-billion-member church.
In his 26-year papacy, John Paul made 104 trips outside Italy to 129 nations, going as a pastor to countries such as Brazil, where Catholics are the majority, and Japan, where they are a minority.
He preached along the equator and inside the Arctic Circle. He preached on sere Andean mountaintops and on lush tropical islands, in famous European cathedrals and in bullet-pocked African country churches. And he preached amid the wreckage of fratricidal wars in Sarajevo and Beirut.
On his travels to Poland, it was his unflinching support for the Solidarity trade union movement that helped embolden first his homeland and then half the European continent to topple communist regimes.
A witness to the Holocaust as a young man, John Paul led the Roman Catholic Church on a pilgrimage of repentance and reconciliation with Jews, culminating in the establishment of diplomatic relations with the state of Israel.
In his final years, he made a crowning pilgrimage to the Holy Land and became the first Roman Catholic leader in nearly 1,300 years to visit Greece, trying to bridge the centuries-old theological divide with Eastern Orthodoxy.
By 2003, John Paul's journeys had been scaled back, but he continued to press on. His final trip was in August 2004, returning to France to visit the miracle shrine of Lourdes. It was a poignant backdrop for the frail and ailing pontiff. Surrounded by other sufferers, many seeking miracle cures, he struggled to read his sermon and was heard to whisper to an aide in Polish, "Help me." After a drink of water, he said softly, "I must finish." And finish the speech he did.
John Paul, ever mindful of his own mortality, increasingly spoke retrospectively about his life as a priest. "After almost 60 years of priesthood," he told 12,000 cheering youths last summer in Switzerland, "it is beautiful to be able to spend yourself until the end for the cause of the reign of God."
In that cause, John Paul confronted dictators of the political left and right, coaxed U.S. presidents on foreign policy issues such as Cuba and Iraq, reached out to the elderly and reined in theologians, priests and nuns who strayed from his view of Catholic orthodoxy. He wrote more encyclicals and put more individuals on the road to sainthood than any pope in history.
He apologized to Jews, women, Orthodox Christians and others for his church's failings and sins against them throughout history. He apologized to Muslims for the Crusades, which ravaged the Holy Land from the 11th through the 13th centuries.
He acknowledged that Galileo was wrongly censured in 1633 by the Inquisition for asserting that Earth is not the center of the universe. He said Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, proposed in the 19th century, was credible.
For the impoverished masses in the nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America that he so assiduously visited, John Paul was often a revolutionary icon demanding social justice: jobs, respect for human dignity, a decent standard of living, education and healthcare.
But despite his political activism in his native Poland, John Paul discouraged his priests and bishops from aligning the church with any political ideology, particularly Marxism.
He was uneasy when Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila helped lead a popular and nonviolent revolt that toppled Ferdinand Marcos as president of the Philippines. He was adamant in demanding that Father Ernesto Cardenal leave his post as minister of culture in the then-Marxist-leaning Sandinista government in Nicaragua. He closed the door on "liberation theology" and the "popular church" that at times aligned itself with political revolution in the name of defending the poor.
Human freedom and dignity, he insisted, were grounded in deep faith and personal conversion.
In the wealthy First World, particularly in Europe and North America, John Paul was often a singer more prized for the sound of his voice than the content of his song. His uncompromising positions on issues of morality, particularly those touching on sex and gender, were a constant irritant to Catholic liberals, even as they applauded his commitment to social justice and his developing and, finally, uncompromising opposition to capital punishment.
He said no to women in the priesthood, no to married priests, no to sexual intimacy outside a traditional marriage. He saw no reason to relax church teachings on homosexuality, gay marriage, divorce, contraception, abortion and euthanasia.
And, though initially hesitant to become involved in the sexual abuse scandal that shook the church, he ultimately took a forceful position on ridding the priesthood of sexual abusers.
He appointed conservative bishops, muted the voice of national bishops' conferences around the world, reasserted centralized authority in Rome and drew a theological line in the sand separating the roles of laity and the priests.
"He'll be hailed as a great pope because of the length of his term, the extent of his travels, the depth of his knowledge," Father Andrew Greeley, an author and commentator on the church, told The Times in an interview. "On the other hand, it has to be said that he was a pope who thought you could deal with the confusion after the Second Vatican Council — the inevitable, necessary confusion of growth and change — by putting a lid on it, by clamping down, by tightening things up, by appointing rigid and not very bright bishops. This didn't work. It was the wrong strategy applied by a great man."
For the people living under communism in Eastern Europe, John Paul was a beacon, then a savior, then a hectoring figure. Time and again he reproved those who swapped Marxism for materialism, which he found as godless as communism in undermining human dignity. He had hoped Eastern Europe would pull Western Europe back to its Christian roots and was dismayed when the opposite happened.
His was a vision of a church militant — "a church in battle with evil, with the 'culture of death,' with consumerism, secularism and, in the past, communism," said Father Thomas Reese, a Vatican watcher and editor of the Jesuit magazine America.
John Paul's pronouncements could have unmistakable political and social consequences. He saw anything that impeded human dignity — including oppressive political and economic systems, as well as undisciplined personal freedom — as opposed to God's purposes and an obstacle to individual fulfillment.
"Nowadays it is sometimes held, though wrongly, that freedom is an end in itself, that each human being is free when he makes use of freedom as he wishes, and that this must be our aim in the lives of individuals and societies," he wrote in 1979. "In reality, freedom is a great gift only when we know how to use it consciously for everything that is our true good."
In the search for truth and meaning, John Paul made the repeated exhortation of Jesus — "Be not afraid!" — his own rallying cry for the faithful around the world.
But for all his weighty pronouncements, closely reasoned encyclicals and undoubted effect on church and state, he will be remembered by most for the charisma and the indelible images he left behind while in his prime: kneeling to kiss the ground on his arrival in countries around the world; clasping the corrugated hands of an aging Mother Teresa of Calcutta shortly before she died in 1997; sitting in a jail cell talking to his would-be assassin.
In the Holy Land, he was a solitary figure praying quietly before the ancient stones of Jerusalem's Western Wall.
At outdoor Masses around the world, he was an icon of faith with the charisma of a pop star. His ivory and gold vestments flapping, his silvery hair tossing in the wind, he lifted his hand in panoramic benediction over hundreds of thousands of believers.
"John Paul II! We love you!" a section of young people shouted at Denver's Mile High Stadium during World Youth Day in 1993. Not to be outdone, the next section of youths took up the refrain, but louder. On it went, each group in turn trying to outshout the others. Finally the pope, breaking into a huge grin, shouted back in accented English, "John Paul loves you!" His words set off yet another delirious round of youthful adoration.
In Mexico, they serenaded him under his window late into the night. In his native land, they sang a Polish folk song: "One hundred years, one hundred years, may you live one hundred years."
He nearly didn't live past his first brush with death in 1981, when would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Agca opened fire on him as he rode in an open jeep in St. Peter's Square. Gravely wounded in the abdomen and bleeding internally, John Paul lost consciousness shortly after arriving at Gemelli Polyclinic. His longtime trusted aide, then-Msgr. Stanislaw Dziwisz, administered the last rites. John Paul spent 55 days in the hospital, and surgeons said that had one of the bullets strayed so much as a fraction of an inch, the pope would have died in St. Peter's Square.
In 1992, surgeons removed an orange-sized tumor from his colon and said it was benign. Then came accelerating decline, exemplified by a dislocated shoulder and a broken leg from falls five months apart in the mid-1990s.
In the early years, the world watched a pope of great physical vigor and endurance — a hiker, a skier, an indefatigable traveler.
In his final years, people became accustomed to the sight of the pope stooped by age and walking with a cane. His face by then only hinted at his once vigorous countenance. His words were slurred. His hand visibly trembled from Parkinson's disease. As the disease progressed toward the end of his life, the pontiff could no longer walk, even with the cane. Papal aides bore John Paul wherever he went.
It was the pope's unbending will that kept him traveling, though the journeys decreased in number. In his view, his physical limitations were not only part of his ministry and duty, but bespoke redemptive suffering.
Despite failing health, he pressed on to the Holy Land, and, in May 2001, to Greece, Syria and Malta on a physically taxing pilgrimage to retrace the steps of Paul, the missionary apostle.
In Athens he stood at the Areopagus, the hill where Paul preached. In Damascus, Syria, he became the first pope to enter a mosque. He walked near the old city gate that Paul entered after his conversion to Christianity on the road to Damascus.
Traveling in a spirit of prayer, he said, "gives us a vivid sense of a God who has gone before us and leads us on."
Karol Wojtyla's journey began in Wadowice, about 25 miles southwest of Krakow in southern Poland, where he was born on May 18, 1920.
His father, also Karol, was a master tailor and a recruiting officer for the 12th Infantry Regiment of the Polish army. His mother was Emilia Kaczorowska, the convent-educated daughter of a packsaddle maker.
Young Karol grew up in simplicity, sometimes poverty, in a town shared by Catholics and Jews. The family lived in a second-floor apartment owned by a Jewish family. Nearby was St. Mary's, an eclectic 11-altar church with a bulbous black dome.
As a youth, Wojtyla swam in the Skawa River and was a devoted soccer goalie who often stopped to pray on his way home from school.
In 1929, just before he turned 9, his mother died of a heart and kidney ailment. He made his first Holy Communion the month she died. Three years later, his older brother, Edmund, a hospital intern, died of scarlet fever, contracted from a patient.
After his mother's death, Wojtyla would wake up at night to find his father on his knees, praying before the image of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.
When Wojtyla was 18, he moved to Krakow with his father to study at Jagiellonian University.
In summer 1939, Wojtyla completed military training with the Academic Legion. Two months later, on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and tanks reached Krakow five days later. The university was closed, and 184 professors were arrested and deported to a Nazi concentration camp.
Wojtyla continued his studies secretly and began underground activities, including performing in and writing plays steeped in Polish nationalism. Then, in February 1941, his father died. By the time he was 21, he had lost his entire family.
The confluence of personal tragedy, his father's Catholic piety, and the influence of a remarkable Catholic layman would put Wojtyla on the road to the priesthood.
Shortly before his father's death, Wojtyla was drawn into religious life by a lay mystic, Jan Tyranowski. As the Nazis began arresting and deporting priests, Tyranowski organized and led the Living Rosary, a clandestine group of devout young Catholics. Wojtyla became one of its group leaders.
It was Tyranowski who introduced Wojtyla to the writings of St. John of the Cross, the 16th century Spanish theologian and mystic. St. John's idea of the "dark night of the soul" held that hardship, doubt and suffering purged the soul so that it could be filled by divine knowledge.
The asceticism of St. John of the Cross profoundly influenced Wojtyla's embrace of redemptive suffering. Like St. John himself and Poland's martyred St. Stanislaw, Wojtyla saw a kind of martyrdom in his own life. He took to heart the spiritual lessons he found in the sufferings of others and his own personal losses.
"His family tragedies inevitably shaped Wojtyla's character as a man and priest. He speaks of them often in private, especially of his poignant loneliness when his father died," Tad Szulc wrote in his biography of the pope.
During the Nazi occupation, Wojtyla joined other Polish patriots in the "Rhapsodic Theater," which presented underground plays, including two that he wrote in 1940. They were performed in private homes to avoid the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. His friends thought he was destined to become a great actor.
Wojtyla at that point had no thought of the priesthood. "I was completely absorbed by a passion for literature, especially for dramatic literature and for the theater," he recalled. But, as biographer Darcy O'Brien observed, his love of the dramatic was not a passing phase, but a portal.
The war, the occupation of Poland by the Nazis and the sight of Jewish friends and neighbors forced from their homes to concentration camps moved Wojtyla to reconsider his future as an actor.
"To this day," he wrote in "Crossing the Threshold of Hope" (1995), "Auschwitz does not cease to admonish, reminding us that anti-Semitism is a great sin against humanity, that all racial hatred inevitably leads to the trampling of human dignity."
He began studying for the priesthood in a clandestine seminary in 1942 while keeping his job at a chemical plant to avoid raising Nazi suspicions. He also worked as a laborer in a rock quarry.
In 1944, the Gestapo made sweeps through the city, arresting young men, including seminarians, but Wojtyla avoided arrest. Later, a classmate was executed, and Wojtyla's name appeared on a Nazi death list.
He eluded capture and continued his studies. He was ordained a priest, but did not join a specific order, on Nov. 1, 1946.
At first, Wojtyla hoped to join the Carmelite Fathers, a religious order inspired by St. John of the Cross, whose monks go barefoot or wear sandals in keeping with Jesus' instruction not to burden themselves with possessions as they minister to others.
But his bishop sent him to Rome for graduate studies at the Pontifical Angelicum University, where Wojtyla earned a doctorate in ethics in 1948. He returned to Poland as a parish priest and began to write in earnest — poems, several books and more than 100 scholarly, reflective and philosophic articles.
Wojtyla was unalterably devoted to God. Like his mentor, Tyranowski, and St. John of the Cross, his ecstatic meditation on the mystical "other" could carry him to a contemplative shore.
Decades later, he was still treading that shore as pope. Confidants and guests invited to join him in his private chapel in the Vatican reported that he became so focused in prayer that conscious thought seemed to recede, like a wave on a sandy beach, returning only as sighs and groans.
"He experiences God very, very intensely in prayer," said Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia. "It's very simple. Very, very profound."
Wojtyla earned a doctorate in theology from Jagiellonian University in 1948. He taught moral theology at the church's seminary in Krakow in 1953, and became a professor of ethics and chairman of the philosophy department at Catholic University in Lublin in 1954.
In 1959, shortly after he was ordained auxiliary bishop of Krakow, he was named to the Polish Academy of Sciences in recognition of his work in philosophy. In 1964, he became archbishop of Krakow. In 1967, Pope Paul VI made Wojtyla, then 47, a cardinal.
Wojtyla quickly earned a reputation within the highest circles of his church as a thinker and philosopher who stood up to communism and integrated traditional teachings with modernity. He was a major participant in the Second Vatican Council — joining in debates about religious freedom, modernity and liturgical reform — which aimed to bring the church into the modern world.
As archbishop of Krakow, Wojtyla had named a commission in 1966 to look at the issue of human sexuality, based in large part on his own pastoral experience counseling young people and couples. His commission's findings, which drew on modern clinical insights while preserving a Catholic moral framework, laid the groundwork for Humanae Vitae, the controversial encyclical issued by Pope Paul VI in 1968 that banned artificial birth control.
Then in 1976, Wojtyla was invited to deliver what would be a much-hailed series of Lenten lectures on Christian humanism and God's love before the pope and ranking members of the Roman Curia.
As a Cardinal, he also participated in the August 1978 conclave to choose a successor to Pope Paul VI. He was, therefore, no stranger to his fellow cardinals, who less than two months later gathered again in the Sistine Chapel again beneath Michelangelo's fresco of "The Last Judgment" to elect a successor to John Paul I after his sudden death.
Just after dusk on Oct. 16, 1978, reportedly on the eighth ballot after a deadlock between two principal Italian candidates, the 58-year-old Wojtyla became the youngest pope in more than 120 years and the first non-Italian pope since Adrian VI of the Netherlands was elected in 1522.
Wojtyla vowed early in his papacy never to "remain a prisoner."
"I want to go to everybody ... from the nomads of the steppes to the monks and nuns in their convents. . . . I want to cross the threshold of every home." The world watched a new pope who was vigorous and an indefatigable traveler.
John Paul was a polyglot who never met a language he didn't want to speak, gamely grappling in his authoritative monotone with tongues as diverse as Urdu, Finnish and Quechua.
He captivated virtually every crowd he addressed on his visits to 129 countries. He made seven trips to the United States, the first a tour in 1979 on which he delivered 76 speeches.
He visited Los Angeles 1987, Denver in 1993 for World Youth Day observances and St. Louis in 1999, his final trip to the U.S. While in Missouri, he intervened with Gov. Mel Carnahan to save the life of a murderer condemned to death.
At the end of one of his trips abroad, a taxing 11-day visit to the Philippines and Japan in 1981, he chose a return route over the North Pole. Most of his entourage and the press accompanying him went to sleep, assuming he had done the same.
They were awakened when he intoned a blessing as the plane flew over the pole. He had worked the entire night, hand-writing his messages for the next audience and his next Sunday noontime prayer for pilgrims in St. Peter's Square.
At the Vatican, before his health began to decline, he was a workaholic of unswerving conviction and unflagging intensity.
"He is almost physically incapable of wasting a minute. Yet I have never seen him anguished or tense," papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls once noted.
The pope would invite a wide array of people to lunch, and fall without mercy on gloppy desserts fashioned by the Polish nuns who cooked for him. And he always found time for old friends from Poland, relishing their company at meals and inviting them to 7 a.m. Mass in his private chapel.
These visits were brief respites from the burden of the papacy in which admiration for the pope was not always matched by adherence to the church's teachings.
In the United States, and even in heavily Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain, the faithful hailed their pope but often ignored his teachings, particularly on issues of sexuality.
"Papal labors reap bitterness. He speaks, the people applaud. It is a church joyfully celebrated, not a church that is heeded," senior Vatican analyst Domenico Del Rio observed in the 1990s.
But there were times, too, when the pope surprised even those in the West, as when he issued an apostolic letter to women in June 1995 affirming their equality in marriage and the workplace and in intellectual achievements. He called for equal pay for equal work and lamented that too often women were valued more for their looks than their intelligence, skills and sensitivity. He apologized for any role the church might have played throughout history in marginalizing women.
Yet he believed that moral theology permitted no leeway in spheres where religious belief and changing cultural imperatives clashed. Although he allowed girls to participate as altar servers, he spelled out in 1994 his opposition to the ordination of women. Four years later, he warned that theologians and others in authority who persisted in calling for women's ordination risked a "just penalty."
In October 1999, when he wrote a personal and poignant letter to the elderly speaking of his own mortality, John Paul again condemned euthanasia as "intrinsically evil" regardless of well-meaning motives.
Most famously, he repeatedly attacked abortion, even as barriers to the procedure crumbled in one traditionally Catholic nation after another.
"Abortion and euthanasia are . . . thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize," he wrote in a 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, The Gospel of Life. In his memoir "Memory and Identity," released in late March, he went to far as to compare abortion to the Holocaust.
But he also displeased some conservatives who sided with him on abortion and euthanasia. They bristled at his edict against the death penalty, his apologies for historic wrongs by the church, his willingness to embark on interfaith dialogue, even his assent to altar girls.
His vision of the church as a disciplined army combating the evils of the world left little room for internal dissent. In the pope's view, "debates and divisions within the church weaken it" in the battles against its foes, said Jesuit magazine editor Reese.
John Paul suppressed Marxist variations of liberation theology pursued by many leftist priests in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. True liberation in the Christian context, he said, was not to be found in revolutionary politics but in freedom from sin and communion with God. To be right with each other and with God, he argued, would promote "solidarity" among the people and lead to democratic freedoms.
He appointed conservative bishops and cardinals who shared his views.
"I think Rome broke the spirit of the church in Latin America by imposing many conservative bishops," said Father Thomas Rausch, a professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Many of those bishops, Rausch said, were members of Opus Dei, a conservative lay order that has its own priests and answers directly to the pope. It staunchly upholds church teachings and is unquestioning in its support of the pontiff.
In 1989, more than 400 European theologians signed the Cologne Declaration, complaining that John Paul was appointing conservative bishops without respecting the wishes of local churches; that he was denying liberal theologians the right to teach; and that he was "overstepping" his proper competence in the field of doctrinal teaching.
John Paul responded sharply, insisting that there could be no room in the church for an alternative teaching authority.
Hans Kung, a liberal Swiss theologian, became an early symbol of the pope's insistence on obedience. Kung's teachings challenged the doctrine of papal infallibility, which the Vatican had proclaimed in 1870. The Vatican responded by prohibiting Kung from teaching as a Catholic theologian.
"This pope has been a disaster for our church," Kung said later. "There's charm there, but he has a closed mind."
John Paul also firmly challenged French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who refused to acknowledge the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. Lefebvre and his traditionalist followers were marched out of the church in 1988 after Lefebvre ordained four traditionalist bishops, which the Vatican flatly called "a schismatic act."
But John Paul more often directed his discipline against the church's liberals. In 1981, wielding the full power of his office, he humbled the politically active Jesuits, the largest and most influential order of priests.
Chiding them for their spiritual "deficiencies," he abruptly imposed his own delegates to run the order from 1981 to 1983. Before he finally permitted the Jesuits to elect their own leader, he admonished them to quit "confusing the tasks proper to priests with those that are proper to lay people."
In the United States, the pope's orders forced one of the nation's most prominent liberal voices, Father Robert Drinan of Massachusetts, to relinquish his seat in Congress. Later, Father Charles Curran, then a Catholic University professor in Washington who questioned church doctrine on homosexuality and contraception, was prohibited from teaching.
Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, viewed as a liberal on issues of human sexuality, was relieved of most of his authority in 1986, a controversial move that divided American Catholics, both lay and clergy.
The pope underscored the point again in August 2003, when he signed a statement that said, "Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law."
John Paul closed loopholes in canon law to silence dissenters and reined in national bishops conferences. In 1998, for example, he declared that unless conference pronouncements were approved by a unanimous vote or had his approval, Catholics were not obliged to follow them.
Critics worried that the edict would prevent the nation's bishops from speaking out on pressing national issues as they had in 1983 and 1986 when they issued landmark pastoral letters opposing nuclear war and economic injustice.
When the American church faced the greatest crisis in its history, the sexual abuse of minors by priests and bishops, John Paul was slow in responding forcefully.
There had been warnings about an impending crisis at least as early as 1985. In 1993, when he arrived in Denver for World Youth Day, John Paul was moved to call the still-gathering storm a "scandal."
But it wasn't until January 2002 that the enormity of the situation began to unfold when a Boston judge ordered the Catholic archdiocese to publicly release internal church documents about abusive priests. The reaction resulted in efforts by state legislatures to strengthen laws against sexual abuse and criminal investigations across the United States. Since 1950, there have been 11,750 allegations of sexual abuse involving 5,148 priests and deacons.
Bishops came under fire for protecting abusive priests and, in some cases, transferring them from parish to parish and state to state, where they molested again.
As the scandal grew in magnitude, John Paul summoned American cardinals to an extraordinary closed-door meeting in Vatican City in April 2002. Days later, he declared that there was "no place in the priesthood and or religious life for those who would harm the young." He called such abuse an "appalling sin" and a civil crime.
Two months later, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, meeting in Dallas, adopted a mandatory "zero tolerance" program to weed out any priest or deacon who had ever sexually abused a minor. After the Vatican made changes to the new policy to protect the legal rights of priests, it became church law in the U.S.
The scandal forced the resignation of Bernard Law, who was the most senior and possibly the most powerful cardinal in the United States, as archbishop of Boston. John Paul replaced him with Archbishop Sean Patrick O'Malley, who agreed to pay $85 million to settle civil suits brought on behalf of more than 550 alleged victims and their parents. Law later was given a job in the Vatican. Several other bishops were also forced to resign or retire early in connection with the scandal.
John Paul also saw disappointment in other areas, particularly ecumenical relations with Eastern Orthodox churches. Throughout his papacy, he reached with conviction and determination toward Orthodoxy. As history's first Slavic pope, he was in a good position to help bring about a reconciliation between Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy, whose relations have yet to fully recover from their tumultuous 11th century schism.
The pope called the two great branches of Christianity the faith's "lungs." The church universal, he said, needed both. There are an estimated 300 million members of Eastern Orthodox churches, including the Russian and Greek Orthodox Churches.
The split was fueled in large part by Rome's historic claim of papal supremacy and infallibility, but also differences in how otherwise common creeds are expressed.
John Paul's repeated overtures reopened dialogue. In 1995, he issued a groundbreaking encyclical that said that the pope must remain supreme, but he was willing to talk about how he should exercise that authority.
In his trip to Greece in 2001, he apologized to Orthodox Christians for the "disastrous" sacking in 1204 of Constantinople, now Istanbul, which was the center of Eastern Orthodoxy.
But ancient differences were complicated by contemporary events. As religious freedom returned to formerly communist countries, Orthodox churches, which had suffered through government suppression and persecution, became fearful and resentful of what appeared to be efforts by outside churches to proselytize. The naming of a Catholic bishop for Russia was met with outrage and suspicion from the Russian Orthodox hierarchy. The Vatican argued that native Catholics in Russia needed the ministry of Catholic priests and bishops.
But the Russian Orthodox Church would have none of it, and John Paul's dream of one day visiting Russia was never to be realized.
Still, John Paul never gave up hope. As recently as June, he met in the Vatican with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the "first among equals" of Eastern Orthodox patriarchs, and said that Roman Catholics were irrevocably committed to mending the historic rupture. But he said, "The road is certainly not easy or without obstacles."
On his travels, John Paul made it a point to meet with leaders of other churches and faiths. He invited Sikhs, mullahs, rabbis, African animists, Buddhists and leaders of other belief systems to Assisi, Italy, in 1986, not to "pray together" but to "be together to pray" on behalf of world peace.
On May 29, 1982, during a visit to Britain, John Paul prayed with Anglicans in a ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral, the center of world Anglicanism — a move toward closing a rift that opened during the reign of Henry VIII four centuries earlier.
But the decision to ordain women as priests by some self-governing churches in the 77-million member worldwide Anglican Communion — including the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Church of England — set back hopes for reunion with Rome. When the Episcopal Church in 2003 ordained as bishop of New Hampshire an openly gay priest who admitted to living in a committed same sex relationship with another man, ecumenical efforts were thrown in still more doubt.
The Vatican did reach an understanding with Lutherans on the nature of grace, the issue that precipitated the Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther. Lutherans had always held that individuals were saved by God's grace alone. Catholics agreed, but had also emphasized good works. With deft language, they agreed that though one is saved by God's grace alone, good works followed and should be evident in the lives of believers.
Such accomplishments helped lay a foundation for an ecumenical reconciliation, but one that would not occur in John Paul's lifetime.
John Paul had better success on the world stage.
Not for centuries had a Roman pontiff played such a consistently prominent role in affairs of state. Historians had to go back to the 13th century to find a comparison: Pope Innocent III, who forced King Philip of France to take back his wife, and placed England under interdict when King John refused to accept the archbishop of Canterbury.
From the beginning of his papacy, when he mediated a boundary dispute between Argentina and Chile, John Paul was determined to engage the church in the world of high-stakes politics.
The church played a key role in the "people power" revolt that toppled the 20-year rule of Ferdinand E. Marcos as president of the Philippines in 1986. That was in large part because of exhortations and excoriations in public speeches by the archbishop of Manila, Cardinal Jaime Sin. Some in the Vatican first tried to silence him, but John Paul ultimately refused to rein in the cardinal, particularly after millions of Filipinos took to the streets in support of Corazon Aquino, who would become president.
He dispatched Vatican diplomats to United Nations conferences in Cairo to join Islamic states in opposing a legal abortion and contraception for women in developing countries.
Despite American uneasiness, John Paul traveled to Cuba in January 1998 in a trip that loosened Fidel Castro's iron grip on religious freedom even as the pontiff decried the "oppressive" U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.
He was outspoken in his opposition to the U.S. plan to lead an invasion of Iraq in 2003, calling the policy "illegal and unjust." He dispatched a personal envoy to make his case directly with President Bush, but the war began two weeks later on March 20.
His greatest triumph, however, was the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. Although John Paul insisted that he was no more than an instrument of God's will and that "the tree was already rotten — I just gave it a good shake and the rotten apples fell," history seemed likely to assign him more influence.
He was too modest. Polish nationalism had always been interwoven with the Catholic faith, and John Paul's public and behind-the-scenes support of Lech Walesa, leader of the banned trade union movement known as Solidarity, shook the communist regime and gave popular discontent a powerful voice.
"If there's one single person who can be credited with change in Central and Eastern Europe, it's the pope," said former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
In an interview, Albright said that the massive crowds that greeted John Paul in 1979 on his first papal visit to Poland broke the isolation of individuals that was key to sustaining communist rule. For the first time, she said, people realized "how many of each other there were."
In face-to-face encounters with communist leaders of Poland during visits home in 1979, 1983 and 1987, the pope upheld the right of Poles to form independent unions and demanded that the government live up to its agreements with Solidarity.
More than once he used the term "solidarity" in encyclicals and other statements to express an ideal for human relationships. For many, his frequent use of the word was a not-so-subtle endorsement of the developing opposition movement in Poland.
Walesa, the shipyard electrician who later became president of a democratic Poland, would say on a visit to Rome after the fall of the Berlin Wall that without John Paul, there would have been no Solidarity. And many believe that without Solidarity, communism would not have disintegrated.
But John Paul would come to feel betrayed as the post-communist Poland quickly adopted Western materialistic ways. "Man cannot relinquish himself or the place in the visible world that belongs to him; he cannot become the slave of things," he declared.
Few but his closest friends could have guessed that the former Karol Wojtyla would also set in motion events that would upend nearly 2,000 years of enmity between Catholics and Jews.
There had long been a saying among Polish Jews: "Poles drink anti-Semitism with their mother's milk." But, as a boy, Wojtyla went to school with Jews, some of whom would become lifelong friends. Boyhood friends recalled that their young Catholic friend would slip into the synagogue in Wadowice to listen to the cantor.
As a new pope, Wojtyla was the first to visit the Great Synagogue of Rome, where he addressed the congregants as "elder brothers in the faith." He was the first to visit a former Nazi death camp, the first to institute an annual Holocaust remembrance day at the Vatican.
It was under his leadership that the catechism — the basic teachings Roman Catholics are expected to know before they are confirmed — was rewritten to eliminate any suggestion of anti-Semitism.
In 1994, in an event that combined international diplomacy with a profound theological message, John Paul established formal relations with Israel.
Politically, it was a belated acknowledgment of the reality of the Jewish state, established in 1949. But theologically, it put a final seal on the renunciation of the historic contention — never seriously questioned until after World War II — that all Jews were forever doomed to wander without a homeland because of their supposed role in the crucifixion of Jesus.
"He will be remembered as the pope who changed the attitude of the church toward the Jews in a fundamental way after the Holocaust," said Yossi Beilin, who as Israel's deputy foreign minister led the behind-the-scenes negotiations.
From John Paul's perspective, Jesus was the son of God, but as a man he was also "a son of Israel." Judaism and Christianity, he said, were connected by a common heritage.
"The encounter between Catholics and Jews is not a meeting of two ancient religions, each going its own way," John Paul told representatives of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith in 1984. "A mysterious spiritual link m brings us close together, in Abraham and through Abraham, in God, who chose Israel and brought forth the church from Israel."
Significant tensions still arose between the church and Jews, as in 1982, when he greeted Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for the first time, and in 1987, when he received Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who had been accused of complicity in Nazi-era war crimes. When John Paul came to Los Angeles several months later, three prominent rabbis boycotted an interfaith ceremony because of the Waldheim visit to the Vatican.
There were other concerns, such as the sensitive issue of Carmelite nuns who in 1984 opened a convent bordering the Nazis' Auschwitz death camp in Poland.
At Auschwitz in 1979, he had called the camp "the Golgotha of the modern world." But the allusion to the hill on which Jesus was crucified appalled many Jewish groups who saw the remarks as an attempt to Christianize Auschwitz, where about 1.5 million of the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust were killed.
Catholics were shocked by the vehement protests of Jewish groups around the world. The convent was vacated in 1998 on John Paul's orders.
Another furor erupted when John Paul placed Edith Stein, a Jew who became a Carmelite nun and died at Auschwitz, on the road to sainthood. The Nazis killed her because she was a Jew, not a Catholic nun. But as far as John Paul was concerned, she was a Christian martyr and, even more, a thinker whose conversion to mystical Catholicism was a milestone in the legitimization of Catholicism as a respectable intellectual movement in central Europe.
Many Jews were also disappointed in March 1998 when the Vatican, after a decade of preparation, issued a statement of repentance for the "errors" of Roman Catholics who failed to help Jews during the Nazi slaughter.
Titled "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," the statement unequivocally condemned anti-Semitism and past Christian persecution and violence against Jews. But it also defended Pius XII, the pope during the rise of fascism in Europe and during World War II, who some have accused of remaining silent during the Holocaust.
Faced with worldwide protests, the Vatican delayed plans to beatify Pius XII, a step on the road to sainthood. But in a move that many found no less galling, John Paul beatified Pius IX, who was pope from 1846 to 1878. Pius IX is remembered by Catholics for proclaiming the doctrine of papal infallibility, but he is remembered by Jews for having confined their ancestors to a walled ghetto in Rome, stripping them of property and calling them "dogs." He also adopted a 6-year-old boy whom papal guards had abducted from his Italian Jewish parents and raised him to be a priest.
Despite the tensions, Jewish leaders from Los Angeles to Israel said that John Paul had done more to mend relations between the two faiths than all his predecessors.
Writing in the fall 2000 issue of Reform Judaism magazine, Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino said, "It is nothing less than heroic for any faith group to examine its darker side. How often in history, if ever, have the leaders of any faith publicly confessed its believers' transgressions and urged them to engage in agonizing reappraisal of its words and deeds toward the people of another faith?"
Although he had become visibly weakened by age and disease, John Paul made what may have been the most momentous journey of a papacy filled with immense events — a journey to the Holy Land in March 2000 that followed a historic trip a month earlier to Egypt and Mount Sinai. It was a journey of faith and reconciliation to a land where great faiths and religious passions intersect.
He went to Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. He stood on a spot overlooking the Sea of Galilee where tradition holds that Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount.
He prayed alone for 25 minutes in Jerusalem at the traditional site of the Last Supper, where Jesus is believed to have broken bread with his disciples before the crucifixion. Then John Paul, in a liturgical reenactment of the Last Supper, became the first priest since 1583 to say Mass at the holy site.
The visit — and a subsequent trip to Greece, Syria and Malta to retrace the steps of the Apostle Paul — was the culmination of a dream from the day his papacy began. The pope had been determined to walk where the apostles had walked in the birthplaces of beliefs that had shaped the world as they had shaped Karol Wojtyla.
It would be the capstone of a lifelong spiritual journey, one that would bring him from the banks of the River Skawa near Wadowice, to the land of the River Jordan.
"To go in a spirit of prayer from one place to another, from one city to another, helps us not only to live our life as a journey," John Paul wrote after his trip to Jerusalem. It "also gives us a vivid sense of a God who has gone before us and leads us on, who himself set out on man's path, a God who does not look down on us from on high, but who became our traveling companion."


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As it turns out, no news was bad news for Percy Harvin.
With Harvin getting a second opinion on Tuesday regarding the treatment options for the slight tear in his hip labrum and no one saying anything about the content of the second opinion, the signs pointed to surgery.
Tonight, Harvin eliminated the mystery by sharing the bad news on Twitter: "when everything is goin good sometimes life throw u a curve ball… sorry to half to report that my injury will require surgery…"
It's unclear when the surgery will happen, and how much time Harvin will miss.
"Nobody was more anxious and excited about [this] season then [me] ….but I will be back strong as ever..i appreciate all the love and prayers 12th man," Harvin said.
Harvin got the second opinion because team doctors suggested that he receive treatment and play. Dr. Bryan Kelly obviously recommended that the labrum be repaired with surgery.
In March, the Seahawks sent a first-round pick, a seventh-round pick, and a 2013 third-round pick to the Vikings for Harvin. They also gave him a six-year, $67 million contract with a $12 million signing bonus to be paid in full by the end of the year.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Carbon & Hyde crafts fine contemporary jewellery with a cutting edge. The brand is based in LA and creates all of its beautiful pieces in California using diamonds and 14ct gold. The aesthetic is refined and sophisticated and each of the pieces is perfect as a statement in its own right 'or you can layer and stack the designs for an even bolder effect. Expect cutting edge shapes and challenging constructions from this brand, always with an ultra luxurious and decadent edge. The rings range from Carbon & Hyde includes cage style rings, evil eye mini rings and diamond halo ring designs.


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Herschel Supply Co. Trade Carry-On Luggage - Ash Rose
The Trade Carry-On hard shell luggage silhouette offers a functional internal mesh divider that will keep you organized. Pictured is the Herschel Supply Co. Herschel Supply Co. Trade Carry-On Luggage in Ash Rose.
- Molded polycarbonate exterior
- Split design with zippered mesh storage and adjustable garment straps
- Two-way exposed zipper with pebbled leather pulls
- Retractable trolley handle and neoprene padded utility handles
- Multi-directional muted wheels
- Attached Travel Sentry Approved TSA combination lock
- Embossed rubber classic label
- Dimensions: 21"H x 14"W x 9"D, 32L
- Style no: 10336-01589-OS
All orders ship within 48 hours. Domestic shipping is United States Postal Service or UPS Ground. International shipping is either United States Postal Service, UPS, or DHL Express Worldwide at our discretion. Customers will be emailed tracking information as soon as there order has been shipped. The following may be used as a timeline for shipping. Please note this is a timeline and shipping times may vary based on location. We do not guarantee these shipping times as a third party handles delivery variances are out of our control. Any return shipping fees associated with packages deemed as 'Undeliverable' will be the customer's responsibility.
Domestic USPS Priority Mail 3 – 5 Days
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International Buyers: Depending on your location you may be held responsible for customs and duties on your order. These fees are your responsibility and Feature has no control over them. If you have questions about customs and duties fees please contact your local customs office. Packages that are returned due to duties unpaid will be refunded upon receipt. Shipping fees will not be refunded.
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A's outfield in motion after Yoenis Cespedes signs
With the pending arrival of Cuban star Yoenis Cespedes, Coco Crisp might be moved from his beloved center-field spot: The A's are kicking around the idea of putting Crisp, a standout defensive player, in left.
Crisp said in a phone interview Tuesday that while he's excited that the A's have agreed to terms with Cespedes, he believes he's Oakland's best option in center.
"I'm going to make all the plays," Crisp said. "If someone feels there's someone better than me, it's hard for me to believe. Unless he's a demigod come down from the heavens, no one is going to outshine me in center field."
Crisp said that until the A's assemble all their outfielders - seven on the 40-man roster at last count, plus two infielders, Brandon Allen and Chris Carter, who play in the outfield - they won't really know what they have. Cespedes, Josh Reddick, Seth Smith, Jonny Gomes and Collin Cowgill are all new to the team.
"We'll just have to see, there are so many things that go into it," Crisp said. "It's a matter of getting everyone on the field, and then it's up to the team, and I'll be wherever they want me to be. But obviously where I want to play is center - that's one of the reasons I came back to Oakland instead of going to Tampa Bay. My goal is to play center field in the big leagues, and this year and next year, that will be in Oakland."
Or will it? With so many outfielders, the A's easily could trade some surplus. A proven contributor such as Crisp, who tied for the league lead in steals last season, might be valuable to a contender at midseason.
"You never know what might happen," Crisp said, adding, "When it comes to trades, I am dumb, for lack of a better word. I've tried to predict things, and without fail, I'm not right."
Crisp has played plenty in left, 216 career games, shifting there for Grady Sizemore in Cleveland. He remained in center in Boston when Jacoby Ellsbury came up, despite speculation that Crisp would be moved. Instead, he was traded to Kansas City during the offseason.
Either scenario might happen in Oakland, and Crisp will roll with it.
"You can't put the carriage before the horse," he said. "I'll just go out and do my thing. And I'm excited to play alongside Cespedes - no matter what side that may be."
Crisp might find himself welcoming another new teammate soon, a man he knows well. The A's are likely to sign former Boston star Manny Ramirez just before or soon after the start of spring training.
Ramirez wouldn't add to the A's outfielder total. He'd come aboard as a designated hitter after serving a 50-game suspension for violating baseball's drug policy. Crisp, though, has played next to Ramirez, and he's had Ramirez, playing left, cut off one of his throws from center field.
Crisp said, "I slid up against the Monster, going from center to left, and came up throwing, and the first person I saw was big old Manny, waving his arms. As I was throwing, I thought, 'Oh my God, it's Manny!' Afterward, I was like, 'Manny, look, you can't do that again.' "
Though Ramirez's reputation has soured in recent years because of performance-enhancing drug use and accusations that he has quit on his teams, Crisp is a fan.
"I like him," Crisp said. "He's a great teammate, he's cool, he works hard, he's just eccentric. He's different. All of the great players are quirky in one way or another. Manny is an awesome person, nothing but pleasant and fun, but the negative stuff always captures people's attention more than the positive things. I think the positive outweighs the negative, and I love the quirky guys. They're entertaining. No filter - that's exciting."
Susan Slusser is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. firstname.lastname@example.com. Twitter: @susanslusser


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I've spent the last few months studying the fastest growing market in the history of capitalism -- the App Revolution. The App Revolution, in which we're moving from a PC/browser-based networking world to a smartphone/app-based networking world, has an installed base of a couple hundred million people right now and will hit a billion people using smartphones in the next three to five years.
I realized that I needed a map of which companies are doing what. So I broke down the app ecosystem into eight different categories and started analyzing every single stock that's got big exposure to the App Revolution right now. And then I assigned each stock a rating on a scale of 1 to 10, just like my old mentor Jim Cramer used to demand I do before I'd go for my annual 1 on 1 pow-wow in which we'd go through every single position in my hedge fund portfolio and kick out the weakest ones.
The resulting 56 page report is now called "Cody Willard's 50 Stocks for the App Revolution" and it has helped me understand how we should be positioning the part of our Revolution Investing model portfolio that we've allocated to the this incredible market place. I'm offering the report to the public for $79 at http://AppRevolutionStocks.comor as an eBook for your Kindle or iPhone at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/31192. Or you can sign up for my weekly Revolution Investing newsletterand I'll send you one section of the report per week and then the whole report when complete your one month trial.
More than 100 million people will buy their first app-enabled smart phone this year. More than a quarter billion people bought an app-enabled smart phone in 2010. There will be more app-enabled smart phones sold than PCs in 2011. There will be more than one billion app-enabled smart phone users on the planet within the next three years. And by the year 2020, more than one billion people will buy an app-enabled smart phone every year and more than one-third of the world's population –more than two billion people — will be using apps on their smart phones. (All these estimates come from Gartner, RBC Capital Markets and Willard Media Ventures).
That's a market I want to play in.
In the report, I give you some of my trademarked cut-throat Revolution Investing analysis including some history of the company, how it's trying to position itself for the app revolution and how much I like or dislike the investment prospects for that company.
And for those of you who really just want a short hand rating system, don't worry. I put a Revolution Investing rating from 1 to 10 on each stock.
I. App platforms/software: (8 stocks)
II. App gadget vendors: (7 stocks)
III. App component suppliers: (12 stocks)
IV. App network infrastructure: (6 stocks)
V. App Infrastructure Component Suppliers: (3 stocks)
VI. App equipment contractors: (5 stocks)
VII. App network providers: (6 stocks)
VIII. App retailers: (3 stocks)
Get 'em while they're hot, dear readers. Here's what one subscriber wrote me last week:
You can tell people that I bought AAPL, FFIV, and GOOG back several years ago when you recommended them in your newsletter. Also, that GOOG Call option and recently scaling into RVBD have been very profitable for me. Your newsletters have been the best investment I've made!
Forget the conflicted and confusing reports from Goldman, Citi, Morgan, JPM, BofA, or the junk you get at Schwab, e*Trade and Ameritrade. Time to get real and get prepared. Order today at http://AppRevolutionStocks.comto see the full analysis and the ratings for Amazon, Ciena, Qualcomm, F5, Riverbed, Broadcom, AMD and 43 others, some of which you've probably never even heard of, and I'll personally email you the report.


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Devon Carpenter, harpist, is a professional harp player providing music for destination weddings in Rome and throughout Italy and the Mediterranean. The elegant music of the harp is the perfect addition to your wedding ceremony, reception, or party.
Fully customized wedding packages are $900 (USD) + travel (see below), and include:
Prelude music as your guests arrive
Music for family, wedding party, and bridal processionals
Any mid-ceremony music needed
Recessional music as the couple and wedding party exits
Postlude music as guests exit
Your choice of music to be played
All music performed on my BlevinSong harp
Unlimited phone / email / FaceTime / Skype consultation
Travel requirements:
Roundtrip airfare (gateway is based upon travel dates)
Hotel accommodations from arrival to departure
Transport between airport, hotel, and wedding venue
Oversize/weight baggage allowance for the harp & any import duties collected
Available options:
Reception music (same day as ceremony)
Background music for other wedding events (different day than the ceremony)
Other musicians (violin, cello, flute, steel drums, etc.)
Please contact me for availability!
Travel considerations:
Please book flights to arrive no later than 24 hours prior to the beginning of the ceremony to allow for airline or weather delays. Departure flight must depart no earlier than 12 hours after I finish playing. We will be in touch to discuss the availability of specific arrival and departure days and times based on my schedule.
In lieu of checking the harp as baggage, you may purchase a seat for it to travel with me in the cabin of the aircraft.
Ground transport vehicle must have a large enough cargo area to accommodate the harp in its flight case.
It is preferable, but not required, that my hotel accommodations are at the same hotel or resort where the wedding is taking place.
I submit all necessary visa and import documents; you are responsible for any visa fees and may be required to provide an invitation letter or other supporting documentation. If import duties will be owed on the harp, those will be discussed in advance. If fees are refunded upon taking the harp out of the country, those funds will be promptly reimbursed to you.
Travel costs may be split between couples hosting their weddings in the same area around the same dates.
© 2004-2019, The Classic Harpist | 1-574-344-9401 | email@example.com


text: WFP is streaming critically needed food assistance to the more than 2 million displaced persons now fleeing renewed fighting in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. WFP is leading the United Nations and humanitarian agencies in a new and innovative approach to bringing food, shelter and relief aid to IDPs by establishing humanitarian hubs in safe areas and host communities. EBU running VNR at 13:15gmt


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How to prevent radicalisation of young people?
In September 2015, Tamimount Essaide, Director of the Maison de Quartier St Antoine (MQSA) in Brussels, met Saliha Ben Ali, a mother whose 19-year-old son died in Syria after joining ISIL. Mrs Ben Ali is the founder of Society Against Violent Extremism. Together with MQSA and Women Without Borders they launched the Mother's School as a tool to understand and combat the problem of young people embracing extremism. 'We receive calls from mothers concerned about the future of their children, and mothers can be the first to notice sadness or isolation in a child, so they can play a role as regards early warning and safeguarding their children' explained Tamimount. During a 15-week period at the Mother's School, the participants get a better understanding of their children's environment, learn how to carry out intelligent prevention and strengthen the emotional ties between parents and children'.
This initiative exemplifies an idea shared by all conference speakers: the first battleground to overcome youth marginalisation and prevent violent radicalisation is the local area.
A firm defender of the local approach is Bart Somers, the mayor of the city of Mechelen in Belgium and the winner of the World Mayor Prize 2016. He started by addressing two inconvenient truths: 'first, nearly 4 200 young Europeans have joined ISIL and if the number of violent radicalised young people joining ISIL keeps going up it will be impossible for security services to monitor them. Secondly, de-radicalisation is very difficult, as it needs a lot of time and money and success is not guaranteed'. That's why he advocates the prevention and overcoming of marginalisation.
'We don't need more police or special laws. The first thing to do is have an inclusive policy at the local level, you need to create security in your city, don't allow neighbourhoods to be without services, with criminals as role models' stated the mayor of Mechelen. He also pointed out that even if we claim to live in a multicultural society, 'in many cities people don't live with each other but next to each other, in archipelagos of monocultural societies'. He stressed the importance of having mixed schools, sports clubs, and youth clubs. In Mechelen, there's a football club with young players from different cultural backgrounds. However, besides playing football, they do homework together and if they receive bad marks at school they can't play the following week. There's also a boxing club, founded by an ex-drugs dealer, that aims to help the city's most vulnerable young people. They learn how to box on the condition that they keep a good record at school and if they are caught fighting once on the street they are kicked out of the club.
For Caterina Chinnici, Co-Chair of the European Parliament Intergroup on Children's Rights 'the combat against marginalisation and discrimination should be the first priority at European level. Prevention and reintegration has to be done through education'. This is not a new approach, as she remembers how her father Rocco Chinnici, a judge who was assassinated in 1983 by the mafia, 'was an innovator in criminal law, as he was the first magistrate to meet and work with young people, as a tool to prevent radicalisation'.
Adélaide Vanhove, from the International Juvenile Justice Observatory, warned: 'Prison is the worst place for young people with problems, because there's a risk that they will become radicalised and get recruited while in jail'. She remarked that 'little consideration has been given to the fact that some of the suspected or alleged terrorists could be children or underage juveniles. There are no policies tailored to children in the field of counter- terrorism in most EU Member States'. Vanhove believes that 'repressive measures are no longer sufficient; they may even have the opposite effect'. She urged the adoption of a new strategy based on prevention. This is the reason why the Observatory launched the project 'The prevention of juvenile radicalisation: Promotion of the use of alternatives to detention through judicial training' (2016-2018). Its aim is to share good practice between judges, prosecutors, court officers, lawyers, mediators and policymakers. They will create a manual and an e-learning training course to help judiciary workers tackle the issue of radicalisation in detention and study alternatives to detention, including community and family-based approaches to de-radicalisation.
In countering radicalisation, volunteers also have a role to play. As the director of the European Volunteer Centre (CEV) Gabriella Civico put it, 'negative stereotypes fuel hate-filled action and volunteering has the power to break stereotypes and promote understanding and tolerance of differences, thus preventing extremism'. She stressed the fact that volunteering builds community and resilience, and that it occupies the space where strategies for prevention can be implemented. However, Civico was also critical of traditional civil society, which 'is not addressing radicalisation and countering extremist ideology, due to lack of the necessary expertise and fear of a backlash from society, which could see it as being soft on crime, and therefore a risk of losing their funding'.
Tamimount has not received specific funding for the Mother's School, but they are already preparing the next course for September. Mrs Essaidi stressed that radicalised young people had joined terrorist groups because 'they felt heard'. She acknowledged that de-radicalisation is as difficult as getting someone out of a sect. She beams as she recalls the case of a 15-year-old who joined a terrorist group in Syria, but thanks to her group's work in family reconstruction, the teenager was able to return to his home in Belgium and disengage from violent extremism. As Mrs Essaidi concludes 'the mother here played a crucial role, but so did the local authorities, who gave him a second chance. He's now in his first year of studying medicine.'
Dátum uverejnenia: ut., 09/05/2017 - 10:29
Súvisiace odkazy
Info for young people in the western balkans


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Academic Technology Services
Equipment Loans
We maintain an equipment lending inventory, managed out of the Media Services office, that may be utilized for academic and administrative (including short-term use for academic projects) purposes and/or for use while traveling on University business.
The lending items include: laptops, projectors, still and video cameras, document cameras, audio recording and playback devices, microphones, DVD players (including region free models), iPads and more.
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Weather and building conditions impact our ability to deliver equipment. If we are unable to meet your needs or accommodate your reservation, we will let you know as soon as possible and work with you as best we can to find an alternative solution.


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The George W. Bush gag reel keeps on rolling.
Even after leaving office and quietly retiring to Texas, the former President's knack for the public gaffes is making headlines once more -- this time for apparently wiping his hand on fellow ex-commander in chief Bill Clinton's shirt during a trip to Haiti.
The moment, captured on camera, would be hilarious if not for the circumstances: Bush seems to wipe his paw on Clinton after shaking the hand of a Haitian made homeless by the devastating earthquake that rocked the island nation.
How did the commenting class react?
- At Thinkprogress.org, Amanda Terkel notes that the move is consistent with Bush's "well-known aversion to germs — and a tendency to use other people's clothing to clean himself off. He infamously used a woman's shirt to wipe off his glasses and reportedly had an aide give him 'a big dollop of hand sanitizer' after shaking hands with Barack Obama."
- NPR's Frank James doesn't blame W. "If that's what he did, it's also understandable. The presidents visited a camp where people displaced by the earthquake are living in tents and staying clean isn't easy," he writes. "And as an inveterate glad hander himself, it was the kind of move that Clinton would've no doubt understood."
- Alex Pareene, writing on Gawker, takes a swipe at Bush's apparent wipe. "Sure, he may be uncomfortable with the impoverished, but we should just be proud of former President Bush for making is through this whole visit to Haiti without one of his trademark hilarious verbal goof-ups, like 'we don't torture.'"
- It's hard to tell if The Guardian's Richard Adams is being sarcastic or sincere when he writes that a "likely version of events would show the personality differences between the two presidents." "Bush is seen tapping Clinton on the shoulder twice and then plucking at his sleeve," he observes. "Clinton is notoriously unpunctual and an enthusiastic glad-hander, whereas Bush is known for keeping to a tight schedule. So it's just as likely that Bush was encouraging Clinton to hurry up."
- The Zeitgeisty Report agrees that the gesture shows a difference -- between "the GOP and the Dems." "Look at ole' Clinton go, gettin' in there, reaching out…man he wouldn't care if that crowd was covered in fungus, he'd still shake their hands and then eat a whole bucket of KFC afterwards, without even sanitizing first!"


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Expect welcoming smiles and warm-hearted local hospitality from the moment you arrive to OHANA® Waikiki East by Outrigger®. The hotel's convenient location at the corner of Kuhio and Kaiulani Avenues is near the world-famous shores of Waikiki Beach and fashionable Kalakaua Avenue so you won't be far from the day-to-night excitement of Hawaii's most vibrant urban .
Book best rates and seasonal deals with confidence knowing that you're near top attractions of the Waikiki Beach experience.
OHANA® Waikiki East by Outrigger®
150 Kaiulani Avenue
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Miners Alley announces season without founder Rick Bernstein
(Video by El Armstrong)
Miners Alley Playhouse has announced its ninth season in downtown Golden, which is as notable for the writers it will bring to the stage as for the one name missing from the list – founder Rick Bernstein.
Bernstein is taking the 2011-12 season off as both director and actor to focus his efforts on shoring up the financial stability of the company that started as Morrison Theatre Company in 1989.
In the meantime, his company will be offering the comedy of Noel Coward and Michael Frayn, as well as the music of Maria Callas (via Terrence McNally) and Kurt Weil (with Bertolt Brecht), and more.
The 2011-12 season at a glance:
Jan. 6-Feb. 12, 2012: "Present Laughter"
Feb. 24-April 1, 2012: "Master Class"
April 13-May 20, 2012: "The Two of Us"
June 1-July 8, 2012: "Sweet Storm"
Sept. 7-Oct. 21, 2012: "The Threepenny Opera"
Nov. 9-Dec. 23, 2012: "Greetings!"
1224 Washington Ave., Golden, 303-935-3044 or www.minersalley.com
MAP still "The Night of the Iguana" (Now through Oct. 23) and "A Rocky Mountain Holiday" (Nov. 11-Dec. 22) before that new slate kicks in.
An expanded look at the 2011-12 season:
(descriptions provided by theater)
"Present Laughter"
Jan. 6-Feb. 12, 2012
By Noel Coward
Directed by Richard H. Pegg
Garry Essendine, a popular and pampered actor, is busily making preparations for an extended overseas tour with devoted secretary Monica. His plans are complicated first by Daphne, a beautiful stage struck ingénue as well as a fatuously ardent aspiring playwright Roland Maule, who insist on his attentions. When his wife, his agents and his numerous admirers arrive, Garry is hard pressed to escape. Typical of Coward's sparkling dialogue and alluring wit, Garry finesses the mounting and potentially embarrassing social faux pas, fleeing the chaos, reunited with his wife Liz.
"Master Class"
Feb. 24th-April 1, 2012
By Terrance McNally
Directed by Robert Kramer
At its core is the diva Maria Callas, a glamorous, commanding, larger-than-life, caustic, and surprisingly drop-dead funny pedagogue holding a voice master class. Alternately dismayed and impressed by the students who parade before her, she retreats into recollections about the glories of her own life and career. Included in her musings are her younger years as an ugly duckling, her fierce hatred of her rivals, the unforgiving press that savaged her early performances, her triumphs at La Scala, and her affair with Aristotle Onassis. "Master Class" shows that while the actress may have left the stage, she will never give up her audience.
"The Two of Us"
April 13-May 20, 2012
By Michael Frayn
Directed by Richard H. Pegg
A touching anthology compilation of four vignette comedies, exploring the complexities of love and marriage in the modern world and are at the same time, both funny and poignant, whilst also quirkily odd. Like Frayn's most popular work, "Noises Off," it highlights his dazzling ability for comic timing and farcical situations.
"Sweet Storm"
June 1-July 8, 2012
By Scott Hudson
Directed by Robert Kramer
In 1960s Florida, Bo Harrison sweeps his lovely bride, Ruthie, up into the tree house he's built as a surprise for their wedding night, unaware that the fury of an infamous storm is rolling in from the gulf. Ruthie, recently paralyzed from the waist down, tentatively finds her way in their "honeymoon suite in the sky"—and in the mystery, wonder and promise of her role as a newlywed. The human heart's wild longing for union in conflict with its abiding need for self-preservation fuels the sweet storm between lover and beloved in this intimate love story that challenges our perceptions of marriage, faith, and love.
"The Threepenny Opera"
Sept. 7-Oct. 21, 2012
By Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Directed by El Armstrong
A biting satire of the post-war rise of capitalism, wrapped up in Weill's jazzy score and the tale of Macheath (Mack the Knife), a debonair crime lord on the verge of turning his illegal empire into a legitimate business. When Macheath marries Polly Peachum, her father, Jonathan Peachum, is greatly angered. Jonathan Peachum controls the beggars of London, and he strives to get Macheath hanged. However the chief of police, Tiger Brown, is an old friend of Macheath. Nevertheless, Peachum exerts considerable political influence, and eventually Macheath is arrested and imprisoned, escapes, then imprisoned once more. At the point of execution, in an unrestrained parody of a happy ending, a hard-riding messenger from the Queen dramatically arrives at the last minute, and Macheath is pardoned, elevated to the aristocracy and given the title of Baron.
Nov. 9-Dec. 23, 2012
By Tom Dudzick
Directed by Rita Broderick
It's Christmas Eve at the Gorski family home in Pittsburgh, son Andy brings home his Jewish atheist fiancé to meet his very Catholic parents on Christmas Eve. With the inevitable family explosion comes an out-of-left-field miracle that propels the family into a wild exploration of love, religion, personal truth and the nature of earthly reality. Dudzick is also author of "Over the Tavern."


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Hipparchus, also spelled Hipparchos, (born, Nicaea, Bithynia [now Iznik, Turkey]—died after 127 bc, Rhodes?), Greek astronomer and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the advancement of astronomy as a mathematical science and to the foundations of trigonometry. Although he is commonly ranked among the greatest scientists of antiquity, very little is known about his life, and only one of his many writings is still in existence. Knowledge of the rest of his work relies on second-hand reports, especially in the great astronomical compendium the Almagest, written by Ptolemy in the 2nd century ad.
Lover of truth
As a young man in Bithynia, Hipparchus compiled records of local weather patterns throughout the year. Such weather calendars (parapēgmata), which synchronized the onset of winds, rains, and storms with the astronomical seasons and the risings and settings of the constellations, were produced by many Greek astronomers from at least as early as the 4th century bc.
Most of Hipparchus's adult life, however, seems to have been spent carrying out a program of astronomical observation and research on the island of Rhodes. Ptolemy cites more than 20 observations made there by Hipparchus on specific dates from 147 to 127, as well as three earlier observations from 162 to 158 that may be attributed to him. These must have been only a tiny fraction of Hipparchus's recorded observations. In fact, his astronomical writings were numerous enough that he published an annotated list of them.
Hipparchus also wrote critical commentaries on some of his predecessors and contemporaries. In Tōn Aratou kai Eudoxou Phainomenōn exēgēseōs biblia tria ("Commentary on the Phaenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus"), his only surviving book, he ruthlessly exposed errors in Phaenomena, a popular poem written by Aratus and based on a now-lost treatise of Eudoxus of Cnidus that named and described the constellations. Apparently his commentary Against the Geography of Eratosthenes was similarly unforgiving of loose and inconsistent reasoning. Ptolemy characterized him as a "lover of truth" (philalēthēs)—a trait that was more amiably manifested in Hipparchus's readiness to revise his own beliefs in the light of new evidence. He communicated with observers at Alexandria in Egypt, who provided him with some times of equinoxes, and probably also with astronomers at Babylon.
Solar and lunar theory
Hipparchus's most important astronomical work concerned the orbits of the Sun and Moon, a determination of their sizes and distances from the Earth, and the study of eclipses. Like most of his predecessors—Aristarchus of Samos was an exception—Hipparchus assumed a spherical, stationary Earth at the centre of the universe (the geocentric cosmology). From this perspective, the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (all of the solar system bodies visible to the naked eye), as well as the stars (whose realm was known as the celestial sphere), revolved around the Earth each day.
Every year the Sun traces out a circular path in a west-to-east direction relative to the stars (this is in addition to the apparent daily east-to-west rotation of the celestial sphere around the Earth). Hipparchus had good reasons for believing that the Sun's path, known as the ecliptic, is a great circle, i.e., that the plane of the ecliptic passes through the Earth's centre. The two points at which the ecliptic and the equatorial plane intersect, known as the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and the two points of the ecliptic farthest north and south from the equatorial plane, known as the summer and winter solstices, divide the ecliptic into four equal parts. However, the Sun's passage through each section of the ecliptic, or season, is not symmetrical. Hipparchus attempted to explain how the Sun could travel with uniform speed along a regular circular path and yet produce seasons of unequal length.
Hipparchus knew of two possible explanations for the Sun's apparent motion, the eccenter and the epicyclic models (see Ptolemaic system). These models, which assumed that the apparent irregular motion was produced by compounding two or more uniform circular motions, were probably familiar to Greek astronomers well before Hipparchus. His contribution was to discover a method of using the observed dates of two equinoxes and a solstice to calculate the size and direction of the displacement of the Sun's orbit. With Hipparchus's mathematical model one could calculate not only the Sun's orbital location on any date, but also its position as seen from the Earth. The history of celestial mechanics until Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was mostly an elaboration of Hipparchus's model.
Hipparchus also tried to measure as precisely as possible the length of the tropical year—the period for the Sun to complete one passage through the ecliptic. He made observations of consecutive equinoxes and solstices, but the results were inconclusive: he could not distinguish between possible observational errors and variations in the tropical year. However, by comparing his own observations of solstices with observations made in the 5th and 3rd centuries bc, Hipparchus succeeded in obtaining an estimate of the tropical year that was only 6 minutes too long.
He was then in a position to calculate equinox and solstice dates for any year. Applying this information to recorded observations from about 150 years before his time, Hipparchus made the unexpected discovery that certain stars near the ecliptic had moved about 2° relative to the equinoxes. He contemplated various explanations—for example, that these stars were actually very slowly moving planets—before he settled on the essentially correct theory that all the stars made a gradual eastward revolution relative to the equinoxes. Since Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) established his heliocentric model of the universe, the stars have provided a fixed frame of reference, relative to which the plane of the equator slowly shifts—a phenomenon referred to as the precession of the equinoxes. (See animation.)
Hipparchus also analyzed the more complicated motion of the Moon in order to construct a theory of eclipses. In addition to varying in apparent speed, the Moon diverges north and south of the ecliptic, and the periodicities of these phenomena are different. Hipparchus adopted values for the Moon's periodicities that were known to contemporary Babylonian astronomers, and he confirmed their accuracy by comparing recorded observations of lunar eclipses separated by intervals of several centuries. It remained, however, for Ptolemy (ad 127–145) to finish fashioning a fully predictive lunar model.
In On Sizes and Distances (now lost), Hipparchus reportedly measured the Moon's orbit in relation to the size of the Earth. He had two methods of doing this. One method used an observation of a solar eclipse that had been total near the Hellespont (now called the Dardanelles) but only partial at Alexandria. Hipparchus assumed that the difference could be attributed entirely to the Moon's observable parallax against the stars, which amounts to supposing that the Sun, like the stars, is indefinitely far away. (Parallax is the apparent displacement of an object when viewed from different vantage points). Hipparchus thus calculated that the mean distance of the Moon from the Earth is 77 times the Earth's radius. In the second method he hypothesized that the distance from the centre of the Earth to the Sun is 490 times the Earth's radius—perhaps chosen because that is the shortest distance consistent with a parallax that is too small for detection by the unaided eye. Using the visually identical sizes of the solar and lunar discs, and observations of the Earth's shadow during lunar eclipses, Hipparchus found a relationship between the lunar and solar distances that enabled him to calculate that the Moon's mean distance from the Earth is approximately 63 times the Earth's radius. (The true value is about 60 times.)
Other scientific work
The eccenter and epicyclic models sufficed to describe the motion of a body that has a single periodic variation in apparent speed, which so far as Hipparchus knew was the case with the Sun and Moon. According to Ptolemy, Hipparchus was aware that the movements of the planets were too complex to be accounted for by the same simple models, but he did not attempt to devise a satisfactory planetary theory.
According to Pliny the Elder (ad 23–79), Hipparchus created a star catalog that assigned names to each star along with his measurements of their positions. However, the direct evidence for this catalog is very poor and does not reveal either the number of stars that it contained or how the positions were expressed—whether in terms of a coordinate system or by location within various constellations. In the Almagest Ptolemy presents a catalog of 1,022 stars grouped by constellations, with apparent magnitudes (measure of brightness) and coordinates in degrees measured along the ecliptic and perpendicular to it. Although Ptolemy stated that his catalog was based on personal observations, some historians argue that it was derived in large part from Hipparchus's catalog, with a simple adjustment for the intervening precessional motion. This remains one of the most controversial topics in the study of ancient astronomy.
Hipparchus lived just before the rise of Greco-Roman astrology, but he surely knew about the Near Eastern traditions of astral divination that were already spreading in the classical world. In later astrological texts he is occasionally cited as an authority, most credibly as a source for astrological correspondences between constellations and geographical regions.
Hipparchus's principal interest in geography, as quoted from Against the Geography of Eratosthenes by the Greek geographer Strabo (c. 64 bc–ad 23), was the accurate determination of terrestrial locations. Ancient authors preserved only a few tantalizing allusions to Hipparchus's other scientific work. For instance, On Bodies Carried Down by Their Weight speculated on the principles of weight and motion, and a work on optics adhered to Euclid's theory from the Optics that vision is produced by an emanation of rays from the eyes. Hipparchus's calculation of the exact number (103,049) of possible logical statements constructible from 10 basic assertions according to certain rules of Stoic logic is a rare surviving instance of Greek interest in combinatoric mathematics. Hipparchus's most significant contribution to mathematics may have been to develop—if not actually invent—a trigonometry based on a table of the lengths of chords in a circle of unit radius tabulated as a function of the angle subtended at the centre. Such a table would, for the first time, allow a systematic solution of general trigonometric problems, and clearly Hipparchus used it extensively for his astronomical calculations. Like so much of Hipparchus's work, his chord table has not survived.
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
astronomical map: The constellations and other sky divisions…from a now-lost catalog of Hipparchus compiled in 129
bce. A critical analysis of the Hipparchian fragments still extant, including his commentary on the Phaenomenaof Aratus, indicates that (1) the catalog of Hipparchus did not include more than 850 stars and (2) Ptolemy most likely obtained new coordinates for…
BithyniaBithynia, ancient district in northwestern Anatolia, adjoining the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus, and the Black Sea, thus occupying an important and precarious position between East and West. Late in the 2nd millennium bc, Bithynia was occupied by warlike tribes of Thracian origin who harried Greek…
TurkeyTurkey, country that occupies a unique geographic position, lying partly in Asia and partly in Europe. Throughout its history it has acted as both a barrier and a bridge between the two continents. Turkey is situated at the crossroads of the Balkans, Caucasus, Middle East, and eastern…
SunSun, star around which Earth and the other components of the solar system revolve. It is the dominant body of the system, constituting more than 99 percent of its entire mass. The Sun is the source of an enormous amount of energy, a portion of which provides Earth with the light and heat necessary…
AstronomyAstronomy, science that encompasses the study of all extraterrestrial objects and phenomena. Until the invention of the telescope and the discovery of the laws of motion and gravity in the 17th century, astronomy was primarily concerned with noting and predicting the positions of the Sun, Moon, and…
More About Hipparchus19 references found in Britannica articles
contribution to
- In physical science: Ancient Middle Eastern and Greek astronomy
- In astronomy: Applying geometry
- In astronomy: The motion of the planets
- astronomical observatory
- constellation lore
- lunar observations
- lunisolar cycle
- mathematical computation
- parallax


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College Football 2013: 5 Things We Learned in Week 4
There were not a lot of marquee games on the slate this week (No. 5 Stanford's 42-28 win over No. 23 Arizona State was the only game between ranked teams). Still, there was some exciting action and some injury news that could impact the rest of the season. Here are some of the top stories from Week 4.
Florida Loses QB Jeff Driskel For the Season
While no one would confuse the recent Florida Gators offense with the Fun-n-Gun versions from the mid-90s, quarterback Jeff Driskel has certainly made some big plays in big situations to help move Florida back to SEC respectability. So his loss to a season-ending broken leg in this week's game could have a big impact on the SEC East race. Junior Tyler Murphy, who had never thrown a college pass until today, finished the game 8/14 for 134 yards and a touchdown and also rushed for 84 yards and another score. While he played well enough to get the win over Tennessee, Murphy will have a steep learning curve with big games against No. 6 LSU and No. 9 Georgia in the next six weeks.
Where Has the Dana Holgorsen Magic Gone?
It wasn't that long ago that Dana Holgorsen was, with the possible exception of Chip Kelly, the hottest name in coaching on the offensive side of the ball. So the downfall of West Virginia football has come as a huge surprise this season. While it's understandable that the offense might slow down a bit without players like Brandon Weeden, Justin Blackmon, Geno Smith and Tavon Austin around, the Mountaineers' offense hit a new low Saturday, seemingly going in reverse in a 37-0 loss to Maryland. The Mountaineers managed just 175 yards of total offense and six first downs while turning the ball over six times. All this after starting the season by needing to come from behind to beat William and Mary and then managing just seven points in a loss to Oklahoma. And things appear poised to get a lot worse before they get better as the Mountaineers' next three games are against No. 11 Oklahoma State, at No. 20 Baylor and against No. 25 Texas Tech.
Michigan Survives Again
No. 15 Michigan is undefeated, but their play the last two weeks has to make you wonder how long that can last. Just a week after needing a last-minute stop to prevent the biggest home upset in school history (yes, bigger even than the Appalachian State loss) by Akron, the Wolverines played another sloppy, mistake-prone game and escaped with a 24-21 win over Connecticut. Since knocking off Notre Dame three weeks ago, the Wolverines have turned the ball over eight times. In that span, quarterback Devin Gardner has completed less than 53 percent of his passes for just 359 yards, two touchdowns and five interceptions. Michigan is still obviously good enough to survive these close games and could still be the favorites in the Big Ten Legends division. But if they can't correct their mistakes soon, sooner or later one is going to catch up with them.
Nebraska Fans Will Forgive, But May Not Forget
Earlier in the week, Nebraska head coach Bo Pelini made headlines for all the wrong reasons after a two-year old recording of his profanity-laden tirade about Nebraska fans and local media members became public. While reactions varied, most Cornhusker fans expressed disappointment but continued to support the coach. When the team was introduced on Saturday, there was a smattering of boos but many more cheers for Pelini. However, that reaction could be short-lived. After giving up 38 unanswered points in another embarrassing loss in Week 3, the heat on Pelini was already starting to rise. And while Nebraska looked solid in a 59-20 win over South Dakota State this week, Nebraska fans' willingness to forgive may be tested if the Huskers' big game struggles continue.
Baylor's Offense is Really, Really Good
While they may not be in the spotlight as much with Robert Griffin III off to the NFL, don't sleep on Baylor this year. The Bears are the first team since 1930 to start a season by scoring 60 or more points in three consecutive games. The Baylor offense is putting up insane numbers this year, setting school records for offense with 781 total yards in each of the last two weeks and leading the nation in both total offense and scoring. Yes, it has been against weak competition (Wofford, Buffalo and Louisiana-Monroe) but scoring at the rate Baylor is would be impressive by any measure. The Bears have a favorable schedule and should be 7-0 before going into a key three-game stretch in November against No. 14 Oklahoma, No. 25 Texas Tech and No. 11 Oklahoma State.