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Cattle and chickens no longer are visible from aerial shots of the property, Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran said, but it appears a vegetable garden has sprung up. In November 2012, the Texas Attorney General's Office filed search and seizure paperwork in 51st District Court in Schleicher County, seeking to take over the 1,600-acre YFZ Ranch owned by the FLDS members. The attorney general alleged in a 91-page filing in November that ranch residents "engaged in, and/or acquired the property with the intent to commit, felony offenses upon the property and within the buildings and improvements of this property." The felonies alluded to in the filing include the child sex assault offenses that sent several of the sect members to prison in the past four years, harboring FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs when he was a federal fugitive, and money laundering. Beyond regular patrols of the area, the Sheriff's Office only has dealt with the ranch's residents when they assist the attorney general in serving civil process, Doran said. Doran described Nielsen, who was booked into the Schleicher County Jail after his conviction until his transport to prison, as a compliant inmate.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis lamented that investment losses by banks trigger more alarm in the economic crisis than the struggle of people to feed their families, as he led a huge rally Saturday to invigorate the church's moral conscience, hours after he held talks at the Vatican about the economic crisis with Germany's leader. Some 200,000 people, from Europe, Asia and the pope's native South America, filled St. Peter's Square and nearby streets to join Francis in hours of prayer, music and speeches aimed at encouraging Catholics to strengthen their faith and making morality play a greater role in everyday life. Francis, who is Argentine, has picked up on campaigns by the two previous popes, the Polish John Paul II and German Benedict XVI, to reinvigorate what the Catholic church sees as flagging religious enthusiasm on a continent with Christian roots, including dwindling number of churchgoers in much of Western Europe, and a decline in morality. Merkel's Christian Democrat party depends heavily on support from Protestant and Catholic voters in Germany, and the 45-minute chat and photo opportunity in the Apostolic Palace could be a welcome campaign boost for a leader largely identified by Europe's economically suffering citizens as a champion of debt reduction, including painful austerity across much of the continent. Merkel, asked by reporters about the pope's scathing criticism of the global financial system, said they had spoken about regulation of financial markets. According to a Vatican statement, Francis and Merkel also discussed safeguarding human rights, the persecutions faced by Christians and religious freedom.

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — The Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester is paying $2,000 to settle a lawsuit accusing a priest of making inappropriate comments to a 14-year-old boy during confession. Diocese spokesman Kevin Donovan said the settlement is not an admission of guilt and described the payment as "a means to an end, so the community can move on."

[...] after a heated argument when he was a senior in high school, he said, they asked him to leave their Renton house. [...] 26 and a senior at Antioch University Seattle, he is among 44 gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students and allies from across the state who will share $200,000 in scholarships from the Greater Seattle Business Association, the largest LGBT chamber of commerce in the nation, with membership ranging from restaurants to Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft and Boeing. At another scholarship dinner on Wednesday, May 22, the Seattle-based Pride Foundation will grant $400,000 in financial assistance to 89 students from the five-state region. Because they serve the same population, the organizations combined their application process 20 years ago to make it easier for students like Cords to apply. Over the last 23 years, they have awarded nearly $5 million to students of all ages and in all disciplines of study, at institutions from trade school to Harvard University. The scholarships reflect the reality that untold numbers of young people who come out to their families are rejected. By the time he was a freshman at Liberty High School in Issaquah, he was being bullied regularly by a group of boys who would throw him against the locker, toss garbage at him or spit on him, he said. [...] she said, he helped her understand that her son's homosexuality wasn't something that could be fixed. In his senior year, after a particularly nasty argument, his father told him to leave the house and he moved in with friends. Two years ago, he began taking courses at Cascadia Community College and in January enrolled at Antioch, where he expects to graduate this winter with a degree in human development and learning.

Edward Bryan, who represented the leader of the group, told The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer (bit.ly/14B2mq5) that he intends to write a letter of protest to prison officials. In response, prison system spokesman Chris Burke cited prison rules that high-school equivalency classes are a first step toward returning to society. Exceptions to participation in the program are limited to inmates who have emotional, mental or physical impediments or who face deportation. The defendants, all members of the same Amish sect, were convicted of hate crimes in 2011 attacks meant to shame fellow Amish they believed were straying from the strict religious interpretations espoused by the sect's leader.

Over the next two years, that scenario would be repeated hundreds of times as Cunningham and other African-American high school students — mainly from Central and Male — waged a battle of sit-ins, squat-ins and stand-ins against restaurants, movie houses and other businesses that wouldn't serve them because of their race. [...] the law that required businesses to serve people of all colors and religions was amended to protect people from discrimination based on sex, disability and sexual orientation. White people shopped and saw the latest movies on Fourth Street while African Americans bought their clothes and saw second-run movies in a business district along Walnut Street — now Muhammad Ali Boulevard — between Sixth and 13th streets. [...] the public accommodation law was the cornerstone because of the symbolism of blacks shopping and eating alongside whites and because it was the first time that private businesses in the South were forced to give up their racist practices, said Benjamin Shobe, 92, who defended the arrested teens as an NAACP lawyer. There were sit-ins at Kansas drug stores as early as 1958, and in 1960 four college students at North Carolina A&T started the nation's most famous sit-in when they went into a Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth and ordered coffee. [...] Shobe and other NAACP leaders learned that one benefit of high school students being arrested was that the teens were often released to their parents without having to post bail. Every day after school, the youths would meet at the YMCA on West Chestnut Street or at the nearby Quinn Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church to strategize before marching to their target. According to a Courier-Journal story, a "merchant policeman" at one Louisville restaurant repeatedly kicked one protester. [...] at the old Hasenour's restaurant on Barret and at Kupie's Restaurant on Fifth Street, workers routinely doused protesters with dirty dishwater, Cunningham and Summers said. Because of the way Kupie's treated the protesters, Summers said he never ate there — even after it changed hands. Cunningham and Shobe said the public accommodation law eventually passed in part because Louisville's leaders didn't want a reputation like Birmingham, Ala., received when public safety commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor used harsh tactics to put down protests. City officials have been working with The Cordish Co. to change the dress codes, and Cordish has agreed to give training on race relations to employees and to try and bring in a wider range of musical acts to be more inclusive, Miller-Cooper said.

BAGHDAD (AP) — A string of attacks killed at least 16 people in Iraq on Saturday, while gunmen abducted eight policemen guarding a post on the country's main highway to Jordan and Syria, the latest in a wave of violence to grip the country. The shootings and bombings follow three days of attacks that killed 130 people in both Shiite and Sunni areas in scenes reminiscent of retaliatory attacks between the two groups that pushed the country to the brink of civil war in 2006-2007. [...] in the western Sunni province of Anbar, gunmen kidnapped eight policemen who were guarding a post on the main highway linking Iraq to both Jordan and Syria, according to two police officials. Earlier in the day, security forces and gunmen clashed in the area after police tried to arrest a Sunni tribal sheik suspected of being behind the killing of three army intelligence soldiers stopped by gunmen near a protest site in the city of Ramadi last month.

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AP) — Nigeria's military declared a 24-hour curfew Saturday on neighborhoods in a northeastern city that's the spiritual home of an Islamic extremist network as soldiers continued the government's emergency campaign in the region, with authorities saying they killed 10 suspected insurgents. Musa said it was part of the military's push since President Goodluck Jonathan issued an emergency decree Tuesday allowing soldiers to arrest people at will and take over buildings suspected to house extremists in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states. Soldiers arrested some 65 suspected extremists who were "attempting to infiltrate Maiduguri" after military strikes on camps in a nearby forest reserve, military spokesman Brig. The group's leader died in police custody in an apparent summary execution, fueling dissent that broke into the open in 2010 with the targeted killings of government officials, security agents and religious leaders who spoke out against the sect. Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is sacrilege" in the Hausa language of Nigeria's predominantly Muslim north, has said it wants to establish an Islamic state in Nigeria and wants the government to release all of its imprisoned followers.

Advocates for Tibet say hundreds of thousands have been killed by violence and famine under more than a half-century of Chinese rule. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom says religious-liberty conditions in Tibet are at their worst in the past decade, with imprisonments and increased government oversight of monasteries. The U.S. State Department cites "severe repression" including "extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrests" and abuses. Like the Dalai Lama, Norbu's own father was recognized as a high-ranking Buddhist incarnation by religious authorities and later fled Tibet amid Chinese repression. Kunga Norbu recalled that the brothers disagreed on the best approach to China, with the Dalai Lama willing to accept Chinese sovereignty if it would honor local Tibetan autonomy and human rights. After his death in 2008, Kunga Norbu's brother, Jigme, led similar walks until he was struck and killed by a vehicle during one such event in Florida in 2011. Sollee, who toured Tibet in 2007 on a State Department-organized concert tour, said that while he had only limited direct interactions with the people, he felt a kinship with them.