Vatican City: Mother Teresa moves step closer to sainthood

Mother Teresa moved a step closer to beatification Tuesday, when a Vatican committee approved a reported miracle attributed to the late Roman Catholic nun, church officials said.

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints committee that handles the process leading to sainthood approved reports that an Indian woman in her 30s was cured of a stomach tumor due to the intercession of Mother Teresa, officials said.

Pope John Paul II must still give formal approval, a step not expected before December. After this, a date would be set for her beatification.

After beatification, the last formal step before sainthood, a second miracle must occur before someone can be declared a saint.

Spain: Country fourth to join Miss World boycott

Spain has joined an international boycott of the Miss World pageant to show solidarity with a Nigerian woman sentenced to death for adultery.

The Miss Espana competition issued a statement Tuesday saying it was heeding an appeal by the Spanish Parliament. The European Parliament women’s rights committee also has called for a boycott of the pageant, scheduled to be held late next month in Nigeria.

The Miss World pageant has come under pressure over the case of Amina Lawal, who was sentenced to death by stoning. The sentence is scheduled to be carried out in 2004 after she weans a baby born out of wedlock.

Spain joins France, Belgium and Switzerland in staying away from the pageant.

Senegal: Prosecution pledged in ferry disaster

Senegal abandoned the recovery of victims from the MS Joola Tuesday, with only 80 of at least 970 dead identified saying its next step might be to sink the doomed ferry together with its dead to the Atlantic Ocean floor.

Senegal’s government suffered its first backlash Tuesday for Africa’s deadliest ferry disaster ever, with Cabinet ministers for the armed forces and transport resigning.

In Dakar, President Abdoulaye Wade promised criminal prosecution for what he called negligence in the last voyage of the state-run ferry built for 600, and holding more than 1,000 when it capsized.

“There will be prosecutions, of course,” Wade told CNN. “Under our law, if a person by negligence provokes an accident or the death of a person, he has to be tried.”

Only 64 of the 1,034 confirmed aboard are known to have survived. The death toll might be even higher; ticketing agents said that children under 5 would have gone unticketed and thus apparently uncounted in the toll of dead.

Sicily: 26 Mafia members get life sentences

A Palermo court convicted 28 Mafiosi on Tuesday in a spate of 1980s killings, and sentenced all but two of them to life in prison.

Several of those convicted are already serving life terms for other convictions, among them Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the “boss of bosses” who was nabbed in 1993 after two decades on the run.

Fugitive Bernardo Provenzano was tried in absentia. Considered Riina’s successor as the head of Cosa Nostra, he has eluded capture for nearly 40 years.

They and the others were convicted of involvement in about 20 murders during the 1980s, when Mafia clans battled one another for control of the Cosa Nostra, the ANSA news agency said.

Six people were acquitted, and two people who testified for the prosecution received lesser sentences.

Argentina: President eases banking restrictions

President Eduardo Duhalde eased a 10-month-old partial banking freeze on Tuesday, allowing consumers access to their savings.

Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna said the government will immediately begin allowing cash withdrawals, in the local currency, up to 7,000 pesos or almost $1,900.

The government wants to get more money in the hands of the people to prop up the economy; consumer spending makes up 80 percent of the economy.

Duhalde took over as caretaker president last January during a deep economic crisis that began with a partial banking freeze that locked billions of dollars in the banks as of Dec. 1, 2001. Angry depositors have protested almost daily outside banks.