ROME (AP) — A bomb exploded Saturday outside an Italian high school named after a slain anti-Mafia prosecutor, killing a teenage girl and wounding several other classmates, officials said.
The device went off a few minutes before 8 a.m. in the Adriatic port town of Brindisi in the country’s south just as students milled outside, chatting and getting ready for class at the Morvillo-Falcone vocational institute. The school is named in honor of prosecutor Giovanni Falcone and his wife, Francesca Morvillo, a judge who was also killed in a 1992 highway bombing in Sicily by the Cosa Nostra.
The victim was identified as 16-year-old Melissa Bassi, from the nearby town of Mesagne, the town’s mayor Franco Scoditti said.
One of the wounded students, a girl walking with the victim outside the school, was reported to be in critical condition after surgery. Officials said at least seven students were injured, but some news reports put the figure at 10.
Brindisi’s Perrino hospital, where the wounded were taken, declined to give out information on the wounded by phone.
Dr. Paola Ciannamea, a Perrino physician who helped treat the injured at the hospital, told reporters that one of the injured was a teenage girl who was in a grave but stable condition after surgery. She added that surgery was still being performed on others who suffered burns in the blast.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack.
Italy has been marking the 20th anniversary of the attack on the Sicilian highway that killed the prosecutor and his wife, but it was unclear if there was an organized crime link to Saturday’s explosion.
In Brindisi, local civil protection agency official Fabiano Amati said the female student died of her wounds after being taken to a hospital and at least seven other students were hospitalized. Sky TG24TV reported the victim was a 16-year-old girl.
One of the shaken students who witnessed the attack told reporters that one injured girl, her hair charred, screamed the name “Melissa, Melissa” when she realized her friend was gravely injured.
Interior Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri, in charge of domestic security, said she was “struck” by the fact that the school was named after the slain hero and his wife, but she cautioned that investigators at that point “have no elements” to blame the school attack on organized crime.
“It’s not the usual (method) for the Mafia,” she told Sky in a phone interview. The Sicilian-based Cosa Nostra usually targets specific figures, such as judges, prosecutors, turncoats or rival mobsters in attacks, and not civilian targets such as schools.
“The big problem now is to get intelligence” on the attack, said Cancellieri. She added that she had spoken by phone with Italian Premier Mario Monti, who is in the United States for the G-8 summit.
Monti’s office said that the premier, informed during the night of the blast, has ordered flags flown at half-mast for the next three days. He pledged that the government would work to crack down on crime and to “favor the maximum cohesion of all political and social forces to prevent the return in our country of subversive attacks,” a statement said.
National police chief Antonio Manganelli told Sky TG24 in a phone interview that Italy’s “best investigators” had been dispatched to Brindisi to determine who was behind the attacks. National anti-Mafia prosecutor Piero Grasso arrived and surveyed the blast scene without making comments to reporters.
Manganelli said there were “shadows” of doubt clouding the hypothesis that the school blast was caused by organized crime because the Sicilian-based Mafia usually targets precise individuals. Still, he said, neither the hypotheses of organized crime nor that of subversives have been ruled out.
Outside the school, textbooks and notebooks, their pages fluttering in the breeze, and a backpack littered the street near where the bomb exploded. At the sound of the blast, students already inside the school ran outside to see what had happened.
Officials initially said the bomb was in a trash bin outside the school, but later ANSA, reporting from Brindisi, said the device had been placed on a low wall ringing the building. The wall was damaged and charred from the blast. Sky TG24 said the device included three containers of fuel. It was unclear if the blast was triggered by a remote control or by a timer.
Public high schools in Italy hold classes on Saturday mornings.
A school official, Valeria Vitale, told Sky that most of the pupils were females. The school specializes in training for jobs in fashion and social services, she said.
The bombing follows a number of attacks against Italian officials and government or public buildings by a group of anarchists, which prompted authorities this week to assign bodyguards to 550 individuals, and deploy 16,000 law enforcement officers nationwide.
Minister Cancellieri indicated that after the school blast, authorities’ sense of possible targets had been tested.
“Anything now could be a ‘sensitive’ target,” she said, adding that the “economic crisis doesn’t help.” Austerity measures, spending cuts and new and higher taxes, all part of economist Monti’s plan to save Italy from succumbing to the debt crisis roiling Greece, have angered many citizens, and social tensions have ratcheted up.
Brindisi is a lively port town in Puglia, the region in the southeastern “heel” of the Italian boot-shaped peninsula. An organized crime syndicate known as the Sacred United Crown has been traditionally active there, but crackdowns have been widely considered by authorities to have lessened the organization’s power.
The brother of the slain anti-Mafia prosecutor , Alfredo Morvillo, a prosecutor in Sicily, told reporters in Tuscany at a ceremony to honor his slain sister and brother-in-law that the “Mafia angle is, at the moment, the most credible,” ANSA quoted him as saying
“I say that because of the place and the timing,” ANSA reported, in reference to both the name of the school and the many memorial services for the 1992 attack that were being held on Saturday.
Brindisi’s mayor, Mimmo Consales, said an anti-Mafia procession was due to pass near the school Saturday evening. But Manganelli noted that many such memorial ceremonies were scheduled to be held on Saturday throughout Italy.
ROME (AP) — Salvage experts plan to use water-filled cisterns to weigh down the above-sea side of the cruise liner capsized off the Italian coast — part of an effort to turn the massive vessel upright so that it can towed for demolition early next year. One official on Friday called the operation’s magnitude “unprecedented.”
The Costa Concordia, which was carrying some 4,200 people, struck a jagged reef the night of Jan. 13 when it veered too close to the coast of tiny Giglio island. Gashed on one side, the ship began listing badly and eventually came to rest on its side on the rocky seabed just off the Tuscan shore. The accident killed 32 people.
Titan Salvage, a company based in Pompano Beach, Florida, won the bid to remove the Concordia’s wreckage, which now lies in pristine waters.
Capt. Richard Habib, Titan Salvage’s managing director, said the goal is to “use brains, (and) not as much brawn” to remove the Concordia without having it slip into much deeper water. He said the biggest challenge in the operation is to “roll the vessel upright on a platform and to safely float” it away to a port yet to be selected by Italian officials.
“The magnitude of the job … is something unprecedented,” Habib told reporters at a news conference.
Officials from Costa Crociere, the Italian company which operated the cruise ship, Titan Salvage and the Italian marine contractor Micoperi, which specializes in underwater construction and engineering, described the strategy to remove the Concordia at the news conference Friday.
The plan involves constructing an underwater platform and attaching empty cisterns to the above-water side of the ship. Then the cisterns will be filled with water, and two cranes attached to the platform will be used to pull the ship upright. Once upright, the ship will have cisterns attached to the other side. Then all the cisterns will be emptied of water before being filled with air to help the ship rise higher in the water and free itself of the seabed. Once it’s properly afloat, it can then be towed to the seaport for demolition.
Habib said the ship would weigh some 45,000 tons without the water-filled cisterns. The goal is to have the ship upright by the start of winter and to start towing in early 2013, he said.
Experts at the news conference said some holes in the ship will have to be repaired before towing to make sure the vessel can float. The gash caused by the collision with the reef is dozens of meters (yards) long, but there also are several holes that were blasted into the wreckage so that divers could swim into submerged parts to search for bodies.
While nothing similar on such a scale has been tried before, Habib said, “we think our plan is going to work.” He declined to say if there was a “Plan B” if the strategy fails. Authorities have expressed worry that the ship, in stormy seas, might slip off its seabed perch and slip into much deeper waters, making an intact salvage virtually impossible.
The Mediterranean waters near Giglio are teeming with fish, dolphins and other sea life. So far no pollution has been reported near Giglio, where many depend on fishing and tourism for their livelihoods.
The bodies of two victims of the disaster have yet to be located. Franco Gabrielli, the government official in charge of search and salvage operations, said that finding those two corpses has become “sort of an obsession for the searchers,” and it’s possible they may be recovered during the salvage operation.
The Italian captain of the Concordia is under house arrest while prosecutors investigate him for possible manslaughter and abandoning ship while the evacuation was still underway. Prosecutors contend that the captain steered the ship dangerously close to the island in a publicity stunt, while the captain insists the reef didn’t appear on navigational charts.
ROME (AP) — Italian Premier Mario Monti pledged on Monday to make €4.2 billion ($5.5 billion) in cuts in state spending over the next six months in a bid to avoid raising sales taxes and tapped a leading private-sector turnaround expert for the job of determining just what gets slashed.
Monti told journalists after a five-hour-long Cabinet meeting on the nation’s financial crisis that he hopes to avoid hiking the national sales tax from 21 to 23 percent in October by eliminating wasteful spending, implementing better purchasing policies, and possibly putting unused government properties up for sale.
Avoiding a hike in the VAT sales tax isn’t completely guaranteed, Monti warned, saying “for now we can say that we hope to have, from the reduction of spending, sufficient benefits” to avoid the increase.
He gave the unenviable task of deciding what gets cut in which ministry to Enrico Bondi, the Italian turnaround expert with a reputation for hard-nosed spending cuts who helped restructure the Parmalat dairy empire after its collapse in fraudulent bankruptcy last decade.
“I am grateful to Bondi for his having accepted this heavy task,” said Monti. “We have pinpointed in him the person most respected in Italy for his resolute work on restructuring and cost-cutting.”
Bondi for his part promised to “get straight to work” in mapping out where cuts can be made.
Italian news reports have said Monti has already felt resistance from several ministries, including the foreign affairs and defense ministries.
Just what will be ripe for slashing is expected to be announced by May 31.
Monti, an economist, was appointed in November to lead a government of technocrats to help save Italy from financial disaster. He replaced Premier Silvio Berlusconi, who resigned amid market pressures as Italy looked increasingly likely to be the eurozone’s next big debt crisis victim.
Berlusconi, in a bid to win back market confidence, had pledged in his final months to have Italy balance its budget by 2013. But with Italy mired in recession, and widespread tax evasion taking a continued toll on state coffers, the target date was recently rolled back from 2013 to 2015.
At the news conference, the current premier took a swipe at Berlusconi for having abolished property taxes on primary residences in keeping with a 2008 campaign promise. With local governments starved for property tax money, Monti has revived the property tax, reinstating it at even higher rates.
The property tax “shouldn’t have been abolished,” Monti said, adding that Italy now “needs to make up for lost time, not in years, but in months.”
Monti brushed off political criticism that his government was relying too much on new or higher taxes to reduce Italy’s debt. He blamed stubbornly chronic tax evasion for being one big reason new taxes were needed. He also fingered as a culprit what he called the “hidden tax of corruption in pulbic contracts and hiring.”
Prosecutors in several cities are leading corruption probes of how taxpayer-funded political party funding as well as of public contracts.
Monti has promised to get Italy’s economy growing again, but so far his government has been widely criticized by industrialists and union leaders for failing to revive growth.
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI, carrying a tall, lit candle, ushered in Christianity’s most joyous celebration with an Easter vigil service Saturday night, but voiced fears that mankind is groping in darkness, unable to distinguish good from evil.
Easter for Christians commemorates Christ’s triumph over death with his resurrection following his crucifixion.
“Life is stronger than death. Good is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate. Truth is stronger than lies,” Benedict, wearing white robes in a symbol of new life, told the faithful in a packed St. Peter’s Basilica.
Still, Benedict worried in his homily: “The darkness that poses a real threat to mankind, after all, is the fact that he can see and investigate tangible material things, but cannot see where the world is going or whence it comes, where our own life is going, what is good and what is evil.”
“The darkness enshrouding God and obscuring values is the real threat to our existence and to the world in general,” the pope said.
“If God and moral values, the difference between good and evil, remain in darkness, then all other ‘lights,’ that put such incredible technical feats within our reach, are not only progress but also dangers that put us and the world at risk,” Benedict added.
The service began dramatically. Except for the twinkle of camera flashes, the basilica was almost pitch-black as the thousands of faithful in pews awaited Benedict’s arrival through the rear entrance. After aides lit the candle, Benedict climbed aboard a raised platform that was wheeled up the long main aisle to the central altar. The wheeled device is used to save wear and tear on the pontiff, who turns 85 on April 16.
Benedict, who has made protection of the environment a theme of his papacy, made a reference to urban pollution in his homily. “Today we can illuminate our cities so brightly that the stars in the sky are no longer visible,” he said. “Is this not an image of the problems caused by our version of enlightenment?”
“With regard to material things, our knowledge and our technical accomplishments are legion, but what reaches beyond, the things of God and the question of good, we can no longer identify,” Benedict added, saying that faith was the “true enlightenment.”
During the vigil ceremony, Benedict welcomed eight adult converts to the church, pouring water over their bowed heads in baptism.
On Sunday morning, Benedict will lead Easter Mass in St. Peter’s Square, then deliver a speech from the central balcony of the basilica, at the end of stamina-testing Holy Week appearances.
ROME (AP) — Jerzy Kluger, a Polish-born Jew who was a lifetime friend and childhood playmate of the late Pope John Paul II and who lost much of his family to Nazi death camps, has died in a Rome clinic, his widow said Monday. He was 90.
Irene Kluger told The Associated Press that her husband died on Dec. 31 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for three years and was buried Monday. The couple lived in Rome for decades, but at John Paul’s urging, Kluger, a World War II veteran, occasionally returned to visit Wadowice, the southern Polish town where the two spent their boyhoods, his widow said.
Kluger, a year younger than John Paul, who died in 2005, was one of the last living childhood friends of the late pontiff. He was 5 when he met Karol Wojtyla, who would become a priest two decades later in his predominantly Catholic homeland, and eventually Krakow’s cardinal, before being elected as history’s only Polish-born pontiff in 1978.
The two — Kluger known by his nickname Jurek and the future pope known as Lolek — played soccer, shared school benches and lived in houses across a square in Wadowice. Kluger also recalled daring swims with the young Wojtyla in the Skawa River during the warmer months. In winter, the two also hiked for hours to the top of the local mountain to ski.
Upon John Paul’s death, Kluger said the pope always had a passion for social justice.
“Even when he was a young boy, he would already show great concern for social equality, especially for the Jews,” Kluger told the AP. “This was very important to him from a very early age.”
John Paul’s landmark efforts to improve Vatican-Jewish relations, including a historic visit to Rome’s main synagogue, were a legacy of his 26-year papacy.
The pope and Kluger kept in touch across time and distance, and Kluger occasionally visited the Vatican so they could dine together, meetings that apparently helped shape John Paul’s thinking on Jewish issues.
George Weigel, a biographer of John Paul, wrote in “Witness to Hope” that Kluger was a “sounding board” for John Paul in his thinking about the history of relations between Jews and Catholics and relations with Israel.
Early in his papacy John Paul asked his friend to start informal discussions with Israeli diplomats in Rome as the Vatican began to consider establishing full diplomatic ties with the Jewish state, according to Weigel.
Kluger’s efforts did not lead to an immediate establishment of diplomatic ties, which occurred only in 1993, but may have helped change the thinking of skeptical Israeli officials, Weigel wrote.
Elan Steinberg, vice president of the organization American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, said Kluger’s passing was both a moment of individual sorrow as well as of “symbolic remembrance for the link with Pope John Paul under whom a revolution in the advancement of Catholic-Jewish relations was realized.”
“Their childhood friendship was seared by their shared experience of coming under the Nazi yoke in Poland,” Steinberg said in an emailed statement. “There can be no question that John Paul’s warmth and gestures to the Jewish people were shaped by his personal witness of Nazi horrors.”
Irene Kluger said her husband lost his mother, sister and virtually the rest of his entire family, except for his father, a lawyer, when his relatives perished in German death camps in Poland in World War II.
Jerzy Kluger was among the Polish troops led by Poland’s celebrated World War II general, Wladyslaw Anders, during the battle against the Nazis at Monte Cassino, south of Rome, in 1944, she said.
Anders’ troops fought as the Second Polish Corps of the British Eighth Army. Poles had risen up at home against the German occupiers and also fought alongside the British and other Allies in the struggle to defeat Hitler’s regime.
“He never, never thought that the Germans would do what they did in Poland,” Irene Kluger said of her husband.
Kluger was there when John Paul’s successor, the German-born Benedict XVI, visited Wadowice in 2006, a day before he visited Auschwitz. Said Kluger of Benedict’s stop in the death camp: “It’s good that the pope will go there. The visit to Auschwitz is a question of responsibility.”
Up to 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz.
Besides his Irish-born wife, Kluger is survived by a daughter.
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Vanessa Gera and Monika Scislowska contributed to this report from Warsaw.
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI named a married former Episcopal bishop Sunday to head the first U.S. organizational structure for disaffected Anglicans and Episcopalians who want to join the Roman Catholic Church.
The Rev. Jeffrey Neil Steenson, a father of three and Catholic convert, will lead the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, the equivalent of a diocese, that will be based in Houston, Texas, but will operate nationally.
The Vatican created the first such ordinariate in Britain last year. Other ordinariates are being considered in Australia and Canada.
Steenson stepped down in 2007 as the Episcopal Bishop of Rio Grande, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after the Episcopal Church elected the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. Steenson had said he was “deeply troubled” about the direction of the U.S. denomination and he described the Catholic Church as the “true home of Anglicanism.”
The Episcopal Church is the U.S. Anglican body in the United States.
Benedict in 2009 issued an unprecedented invitation for Anglicans to become Catholic in groups or as parishes, at a time when traditional Anglicans in several countries were increasingly upset by the ordination of women and gay bishops. Formerly, Anglican converts to Catholicism were accepted on a case-by-case basis.
The pope’s decision created tensions with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the spiritual leader of the world Anglican Communion, who like his predecessors had been in talks with Vatican officials to bring Anglicans and Catholics closer together.
The 77-million-member Anglican fellowship has its roots in the Church of England, which split from the Holy See in 1534 when English King Henry VIII was refused a marriage annulment.
At the time of the pope’s announcement, Anglicans were already fracturing over Robinson’s election and other issues. Williams had little advance notice of the Vatican announcement. Still, after meeting privately with the pope soon after, the archbishop of Canterbury said he was convinced that there was no “dawn raid” on his church by the Holy See.
Under the pope’s plan, Anglicans who become Catholic will be allowed to keep some of their heritage in liturgy and other areas. Married Anglican priests who convert can stay married and be ordained in the Catholic Church, an exception to the Vatican’s celibacy rule. Married Anglican bishops, however, cannot retain that position, and will serve the Catholic Church as priests.
More than 100 Anglican clergy have applied to become Catholic priests in the U.S. ordinariate. Church officials said more than 1,400 individuals are seeking to join. The U.S. Episcopal Church has just under 2 million members. Many Anglo-Catholics in the United States had never been part of the Episcopal Church.
Steenson, 59, who has a doctorate from the University of Oxford, has been married since 1974 and has three adult children. His wife also converted to Catholicism. He was ordained as a Catholic priest in 2009 in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and helped create the education and training program for Anglican priests seeking to join the Catholic Church.
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AP Religion Writer Rachel Zoll contributed from New York.
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U.S. ordinariate: http://www.usordinariate.org/
Pope Benedict XVI, holding a tall, lit, white candle, enters a hushed and darkened St. Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican Saturday, April 7, 2012, to begin the Vatican's Easter vigil service. Except for the twinkle of camera flashes, the basilica was almost pitch-black as the thousands of faithful in pews awaited Benedict's arrival through the rear entrance Saturday night. Christians on Easter joyously mark their belief that Christ rose from the dead after his crucifixion. Praying at the start of the service, Benedict said Easter brings hope to the faithful. On Sunday morning, he will lead Easter Mass in St. Peter's Square. (AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito)(Credit: AP) 
FILE - In this Thursday, March 23, 2000 file photo, Pope John Paul II greets World War II death camp survivor, and boyhood friend, Jerzy Kluger, during a visit to the Yad Vashem Memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem. Jerzy Kluger, a Polish-born Jew who was a lifetime friend and childhood playmate of the late Pope John Paul II, has died in a clinic near Rome. Kluger's wife, Irene, told The Associated Press that her husband, who was 90, had died on Dec. 31 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease for three years and was buried Monday, Jan. 2, 2012. (AP Photo/Isaac Harari/GPO/ File)(Credit: AP) 