Vatican City

Frail pope struggles through Holy Thursday

A frail Pope John Paul II struggled through Holy Thursday ceremonies in St. Peter’s Basilica, twice ceding his place at the ornate main altar to other clerics.

It was the second time in less than a week that John Paul has let someone take his place in a major Holy Week ceremony.

The pontiff, who will be 82 years old in May and suffers from symptoms of Parkinson’s, had a tough schedule Thursday, a Mass in the morning and another one in late afternoon.

Twice he was wheeled down the long main aisle of St. Peter’s, standing on his special cart. And twice, someone else took his place at the altar.

The pope is scheduled to perform a Good Friday service today at the Colosseum, a vigil service Saturday night and an Easter Mass Sunday in St. Peter’s Square.

Poland

Archbishop resigns amid sex allegations

A Polish archbishop accused of making homosexual advances toward seminarians and young priests announced his resignation Thursday in a bid to end a scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church in Pope John Paul II’s homeland.

Archbishop Juliusz Paetz, 67, has repeatedly denied the allegations, which erupted in the Polish media late last month.

Polish media have reported in recent weeks that rumors of Paetz’s alleged advances had circulated among priests in Poznan for at least the last three years.

In Rome, the Vatican confirmed that John Paul had accepted the resignation of Paetz, who served as a top aide to the Polish-born pope from 1978 to 1982.

The Paetz case differs from sex scandals that recently hit the Catholic Church in the United States in that the charges in Poland were raised by priests rather than parishioners.

Florida

Miami has nation’s highest rate of AIDS

South Florida AIDS service providers, already stung by decreases in funding and donations, are facing higher caseloads as the Miami metropolitan area finds itself in the position of having the highest rate of the disease in the nation.

A recent report by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta shows the Miami AIDS rate around 60 per 100,000 people as of last June.

Nationally, overall rates of new AIDS cases have decreased.

The Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach metropolitan areas also placed in the top five of U.S. cities with the highest rates of AIDS per 100,000 people  in third and fifth place respectively. Rounding out the top five in the report are New York, second; and Baltimore and San Juan, Puerto Rico, tied for fifth.

Washington

Study links TV, violence

Teen-agers and young adults who watch as little as an hour of television a day are more likely to get into fights, commit assaults or engage in other types of violence later in life, according to a provocative new study.

The study tracked the impact of television on violence among more than 700 young people over 17 years. Previous studies have found an association between television violence and aggression, but this is the longest study to track the consequences of TV viewing of any kind and the first to indicate that adults are affected as surely as children, the researchers said. If the study had examined violent programming alone, the link would have been stronger, they said.

“The correlation between violent media and aggression is larger than the effect that wearing a condom has on decreasing the risk of HIV,” said Brad Bushman, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University at Ames who wrote a commentary accompanying the study in today’s issue of the journal Science.

Paris

Gunman who killed 8 jumps to his death

The man who killed eight officials at a city council meeting jumped to his death Thursday from a fifth-floor police station window, shocking an already reeling nation and angering those who wanted to see him face trial.

“Our system did not function,” said President Jacques Chirac, a conservative who’s campaigning for re-election in voting next month.

The president’s remarks thrust the early Wednesday drama at Nanterre city hall into the heart of France’s presidential campaign.

Questions were already being raised about how Richard Durn, who was deeply disturbed, was able to obtain semiautomatic pistols and keep them even though his license had expired.

Nineteen others were wounded in the rampage.