"Muslim Fulani herdsmen attacked four non-Muslim villages in central Nigeria on January 10 and 11, killing 18 and burning down a church and over a dozen houses. Soldiers reportedly collaborated in the attack.

The Vatican today made the "attempted ordination" of women one of the gravest crimes under church law, putting it in the same category as clerical sex abuse of minors, heresy and schism.

Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony lambasted legislation passed Monday by Arizona lawmakers that would crack down on illegal immigrants, likening it to "German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques" that compelled people to turn each other in.

"The Arizona legislature just passed the country's most retrogressive, mean-spirited, and useless anti-immigrant law," he wrote on his blog. "The tragedy of the law is its totally flawed reasoning: that immigrants come to our country to rob, plunder, and consume public resources. That is not only false, the premise is nonsense."