BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s government and the two major opposition parties said Sunday they would jointly nominate former East German human rights activist Joachim Gauck to be the country’s next president. The 72-year-old Gauck is a former Lutheran priest who opposed East Germany’s then-communist regime and became head of a federal agency dealing with the painful past of the Communists’ ubiquitous domestic intelligence service after Germany’s reunification in 1990. Chancellor Angela Merkel said at a hastily called news conference that... Read more

NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, The Associated Press has learned. Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students’ names and noted in police intelligence files how many times... Read more

DUBLIN (AP) — The Vatican’s new American envoy to Ireland says Pope Benedict XVI has been “relentless and consistent” in seeking to oust child abusers from the priesthood worldwide. Archbishop Charles Brown spoke Sunday at his first public Mass following his arrival in Ireland, a traditionally Catholic land rattled by nearly two decades of pedophile-priest scandals. The 52-year-old Brown, a Manhattan native, has never been a Vatican diplomat before. He spent a decade working alongside today’s pope inside the Congregation... Read more

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Protesters demanding the departure of Senegal’s aging president on Sunday seized control of a three-block stretch in the heart of the capital, erecting barricades and lobbing rocks at police as demonstrations intensified just days before a contentious presidential poll. It marks the fifth day of violent protests ahead of the country’s crucial vote, and on Sunday the state-owned news service confirmed the death of a young man in a suburb of the capital where the demonstrations... Read more

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Protesters demanding the departure of Senegal’s aging president on Sunday seized control of a three-block stretch in the heart of the capital, erecting barricades and lobbing rocks at police just days before a contentious presidential poll. It marks the fifth day of violent protests ahead of the country’s crucial vote. President Abdoulaye Wade, 85, is insisting on running again, despite the deepening unrest and calls from both France and the United States to hand power to... Read more

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Sounding hoarse and looking tired, Pope Benedict XVI is leading 22 new “princes” of the church at Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica a day after installing them as cardinals. Many of the men who sat before the pope Sunday in white robes will likely vote in secret conclave for Benedict’s successor after his death. Benedict, who turns 85 in April, read a long homily in a hoarse voice and appeared weary on the third day of... Read more

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — After all the testimonials from relatives and friends, the songs from legends and pop stars, the preaching and even laughter, the raw emotion of Whitney Houston’s funeral came down to just one moment: The sound of her own voice. As the strains of her biggest record, “I Will Always Love You,” filled the New Hope Baptist Church at the end of the nearly four-hour service Saturday and her silver-and-gold casket was lifted in the air, the... Read more

HAVANA (AP) — When a young parish priest named Jaime Ortega stepped out of a Cuban detention camp in the spring of 1967, at the height of the Communist revolution’s attempt to stamp out religion, his father handed him a one-way ticket to Spain and urged his son not to look back. But Ortega refused to go. Forty-five years later and now a cardinal, Ortega heads the island’s Roman Catholic church, which has returned from the wilderness to become the... Read more

BEIJING (AP) — An overseas group says a Tibetan monk has died after setting himself on fire at a monastery in western China’s Sichuan province. The London-based International Campaign for Tibet said on Monday that 18-year-old Nangdrol self-immolated on Sunday after shouting slogans in favor of Tibetan independence and exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama. His death brings to at least 21 the number of Tibetans who have set themselves on fire over the past year to protest Chinese government... Read more

KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) — Jamaica authorities say two men suspected of trying to rob churchgoers have now died after being beaten by outraged neighbors. Police said in a statement Saturday that 26-year-old construction worker Ryan Mullings has died at a hospital where he was taken after being held in jail. A police constable says Mullings and four others tried to rob a group of people as they returned from church on Jan. 29, when they themselves were attacked by neighbors.... Read more