Tag: no-latest

VERBANIA, Italy — The Vatican on Thursday excommunicated all formal followers of a breakaway conservative faction of the Roman Catholic Church, a day after its leaders defied a personal plea from Pope Leo XIV and consecrated four new bishops without his permission.

The Vatican announced in a decree that the group, the Society of St. Pius X, was in schism with the Church. In an explanatory note about the decree, it also said the society was barred from officiating marriages and hearing confessions, and it warned the society’s followers to stop attending its Masses and participating in its events.

The Vatican’s note added that all formal followers of the society “are to be considered schismatics and excommunicated” after its leaders consecrated the bishops in a ceremony in Switzerland on Wednesday “against the will of the Holy Father and in open violation of canon law.”

The society did not immediately comment on the excommunication.

The schism is the biggest internal crisis of Leo’s young papacy, and a blow to his stated efforts to bridge divisions between Catholics who want to modernize the church, including by ordaining female priests, and conservatives, like followers of the Society of St. Pius X, who hold fast to tradition.

The Vatican’s decision heightened a decades-long standoff between the Church’s leadership and the society, which is widely known by the acronym SSPX.

The society was founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in protest against the Church’s efforts to modernize after the Second Vatican Council, held in the 1960s, including by allowing priests to hold services in vernacular languages instead of only in Latin. The society also objects to the council’s efforts to soothe tensions between Catholicism and other Christian faiths, and to take part in interreligious dialogue. And it insists on the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church even as it accuses the modern leaders of heresy.

Those tensions peaked in 1988, when the society first consecrated four bishops without the permission of Pope John Paul II, who swiftly excommunicated them and Lefebvre.

Relations thawed somewhat in 2009, under Pope Benedict XVI, who lifted the excommunications of the surviving bishops in a gesture of outreach to all Catholics still attached to celebrating the traditional Latin Mass. But one bishop had provoked outrage by denying the Holocaust.

That rapprochement ended on Wednesday, after the society defied Leo by proceeding with a consecration ceremony that the group said had brought some 17,000 worshipers to Écône, a small village in Switzerland where the society installed its first seminary in 1970.

The Vatican’s sanctions on Thursday were even harsher than those imposed in 1988 under John Paul II, when the Vatican only excommunicated its five senior prelates.

This time, the excommunication applies to all of the society’s priests and formal followers. The Vatican added that the sacraments administered by the society’s priests, including confession and matrimony, were invalid, reversing concessions that Pope Francis had made to the society in recent years.

The Vatican’s decree left open the possibility of reconciliation for those who renounced the society, saying that “the Church, as a caring mother, will welcome with sincere affection and lively solicitude all those who wish to return to full communion.”

The Rev. Ian Andrew Palko, an SSPX priest in Texas, said he did not expect the excommunication to lead to many defections. “There may be some who are uncomfortable with” excommunication, he said. But, he added, if the faithful “were worried, it would have already pushed them away.”

And the Rev. Paul Robinson, the society’s prior in Denver, said he expected communication with Rome would continue, as it did after the 1988 excommunications. “There were plenty of conversations that took place” even after the fact, he said. “So I think there will still be contact with Rome.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

JERUSALEM — It was the deadliest reported strike in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Most of the victims were children.

In almost any other conflict, these haunting truths would be seared into national memory. Yet more than 120 days since at least one U.S. missile struck an Iranian primary school, there remains no final accounting of what happened.

The Trump administration has yet to directly accept the blame or formally release findings of a Pentagon investigation into the bombing, even though the military possessed evidence almost immediately that the site of the school had been struck, a U.S. official with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss an ongoing investigation, told the Associated Press.

The AP has reconstructed the story of the attack, beginning in the schoolyard on the morning of Feb. 28, drawing from open-source information, video footage, human rights reports, and interviews with researchers and civilians inside and outside Iran to reveal previously unreported details about the bombing in Minab, including the diversity of children killed.

Still, many details about the blast remain elusive, as a lack of information from the Pentagon and politicization of the attack by Iran’s theocracy have complicated independent reporting efforts. That has created an accountability vacuum, leaving the families of the victims without resolution. Among the mysteries remaining are the number of munitions that hit the school and a complete list of the dead.

When asked last week about the incident, President Donald Trump said he hadn’t read the Pentagon’s report and had seen nothing to make him believe the U.S. had carried out the attack.

“I don’t know that they’re ever going to solve that problem in terms of whose fault was it, because there were missiles flying all over the place,” he said. “I don’t think it was us.”

Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment from the AP.

Video evidence, interviews and other sources yield a fuller picture

The reconstruction draws from interviews with U.S. officials, Iranian human rights workers, a resident of Minab, an international representative of the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Union, and researchers from major international rights groups.

Several people who spoke to the AP were in direct contact with the families of victims and rescuers who rushed to the scene. Most requested anonymity for fear of retribution against them and those with whom they spoke.

Parents called to pick up their kids, then bomb fell

Skies over the city of Minab, located in southeastern Iran about 16 miles from the Strait of Hormuz, were clear and bright on the morning of Saturday, Feb. 28, a school day in Iran. It was Ramadan.

Students of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school, Farsi for “Good Tree,” jostled past the colorful murals lining the schoolyard and into the building. Boys and girls filtered into separate spaces with brightly painted desks.

The school they entered was one of over 30 with the same name established to serve children from families closely tied to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard or other state institutions, said Shiva Amelirad, the international union representative who also worked as a teacher in Iran for 18 years and has been in contact with people in Minab.

Though most schools in Iran operate within guidelines proscribed by the Islamic Republic, the Shejareh Tayyebeh schools were more explicitly oriented toward reproducing and reinforcing the Guard’s worldview, she said, adding that children are civilians regardless of their family backgrounds, and “any attack targeting a school is unequivocally condemnable.”

The school lay within the same walled compound as a Guard base, according to an AP assessment of satellite imagery and open-source mapping. It was once part of that neighboring base, before it was fenced off and converted over a decade ago.

Though some of its pupils were the children of Guard officers working on the nearby base, others were local children from Minab, which is populated predominantly by people of the majority-Sunni Baluch ethnic minority who often face repression from the Iranian government, said the Balochistan Human Rights Documentation Network.

Hundreds of students are believed to have been inside the building by the time teachers and administrators received the news that bombs had begun falling on Tehran around 9:40 a.m.

Teachers and administrators thought it prudent to send the children home. They called parents on landline phones, summoning them for an early pickup, two people told the AP. A recently released report by Airwars, a London-based independent group that tracks recent conflicts, also found that parents were called to pick up their children.

At 10:15 a.m., Iran’s state media sent out an advisory, closing schools across the country.

One father, who lived a short distance away, went immediately to pick up his 10-year-old son, said a resident of Minab, who relayed the stories of several families to the AP. The AP verified details of the residents’ stories against available lists of the dead and rights groups’ chronologies of the day’s events.

The father noticed his 6- and 7-year-old relatives among the students waiting for their parents, said the resident. He asked them if they’d like a ride home and they said no, that their own father was on the way.

He left with his child and headed to the supermarket. Ten minutes later, he heard the explosions.

Multiple munitions pummeled the compound, striking at least five buildings, according to an AP analysis of satellite imagery. Hundreds of pounds of explosives collapsed the school.

A tiny arm, suspended in the rubble

The father raced back to a scene of chaos, where onlookers gathered, screaming, as men pawed through smoking rubble to dig out bodies, according to video of the aftermath circulated by Iranian state media.

Eventually, the father made out two burned figures he believes were those of his relatives, but he couldn’t be sure.

People kept coming. One man from a nearby Sunni village arrived to search for his nephew after receiving a panicked call from the boy’s mother. In the rubble, he found her dead son.

Rescuers found small backpacks and children’s drawings, colored pencils and worksheets. Gently suspended, a tiny arm lay in the wreckage.

Men carried disfigured limbs and torsos to the local hospital, said the Balochistan Human Rights Documentation Network, whose staff spoke with two families of those killed. The AP has not been able to verify how many munitions specifically hit the school, but the attack had left flesh so mutilated that many body parts were unrecognizable.

By the end of the day, doctors at the hospital estimated they had at least 108 bodies, but cautioned that it was likely an undercount, said the resident of Minab.

By the next day, state media was saying around 150 had been killed. Soon, it was reporting a death toll of 168.

“They called the kids martyrs”

Three days after the bombing, state TV showed thousands of Iranians packing a Minab roundabout, where the crowds faced a podium and a large portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late founder of the Islamic Republic.

The gathering might have been mistaken for a demonstration, if it were not a funeral. All the parents of victims, regardless of ethnicity or religion, had to participate, said the Minab resident. Most women in the crowd wore the black chador garment customary to the Islamic Republic, even though it’s not typically worn by Baluch people at funerals.

Parents were told they’d be permitted to take their children’s bodies back to their villages and conduct their own observances, said the resident. In the end, though, many decided to bury their children together.

In footage captured by drone cameras and circulated by state media, workers broke ground on an earthen lot, creating a grid of tiny, identical, unmarked graves.

“The state media advocated a narrative based on IRGC interest,” said Amelirad. “You can tell because they called the kids martyrs.”

The story grows harder to tell

Strikes continued to ravage Iran, targeting more sites in the opening days than the start of recent U.S. or Israeli military campaigns, including in Gaza, an Airwars analysis found.

Racing to document the ongoing bombardment, journalists and rights groups struggled to verify details from Minab. They had no access to the target site. Government restrictions in Iran prevented most foreign journalists from entering the country. The opening day of the war, Iran shut down the internet, making it nearly impossible to hear from ordinary civilians.

As the war progressed and the Strait of Hormuz became a major battlefield, the situation in the province grew more tense, said the resident. All branches of the military were deployed heavily in the area. Families of the victims feared retribution for speaking out. People were reportedly being detained for trying to communicate with foreign media.

That left Iran’s government in control of the messaging around the strike.

Iran’s soccer team wore golden “#168” pins on their jackets upon their arrival at the FIFA World Cup.

The Iranian team negotiating for a pause to the war with the U.S. named itself “Minab 168.”

The children were depicted as animated Lego figures in viral videos made by pro-Iran groups trolling the U.S.

“In the aftermath of the attack, Iranian authorities … exploited the suffering of victims’ families and surviving children for propaganda purposes,” wrote Amnesty International in a March report investigating the deaths.

Through it all, there remained no public list of the names of the dead.

The Pentagon finds clues in archive

Locked out of Iran, researchers focused on the question of responsibility.

Iran blamed the U.S. Trump cast doubt on American culpability and pointed the finger at Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said only that the Pentagon was investigating.

Internally, the U.S. military knew more than it initially let on. The clues were buried in their archives.

When the news first surfaced, the U.S. military knew they had conducted strikes in the vicinity — though it took the military time to verify the Iranian claims that a school was struck and begin a formal investigation, said a U.S. official with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing inquiry.

It appears that while the building housing the school was identified as such by one analyst as early as seven years ago, that discovery was not sufficiently made known across different intelligence and military staffs and agencies, the U.S. official said.

Ultimately, the building was not known among target developers as a school, revealing potential systematic shortfalls in the target analysis and review process, they said.

One former Pentagon official, similarly speaking on condition of anonymity, said the bombing came as a natural result of changes made by the Trump administration to reduce staff to mitigate civilian harm and Hegseth’s emphasis on lethality.

When Hegseth took charge, he slashed the size of an office called the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, created at the direction of Congress in late 2022. That stopped the office’s work on updating “no-strike lists,” which are lists of protected sites such as hospitals, schools, churches, and mosques, that the Pentagon keeps, said Wes Bryant, who began working at the office in 2024 as the branch chief of Civil Harm Assessments.

When he was working at the Pentagon, it was well known that the list was out-of-date, he said.

The search for more answers from Minab

In the last weeks, researchers have made some progress. Airwars, the conflict research group, spent months combing through open-source information to verify the identity of victims. The group determined the names and identities of 157 of the dead, including 123 children, all 13 or younger, and 34 adults. Among the adults are 26 school staff members (one of whom was pregnant) and five parents — each of whom lost at least one child.

The group puts the death toll between 157 and 168 and says between 95 and 111 people were injured.

It’s unclear when the formal results of the military’s Minab investigation will be published. Much of the investigative work has been completed, but the U.S. military’s Central Command, which commissioned the investigation, is currently reviewing the findings.

Hegseth said last week the report would be divulged “when the appropriate time is right.”

Findings from similar past investigations have been more timely. When a Hellfire missile killed 10 civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 29, 2021, the Defense Department claimed responsibility and gave details on its operations in less than a month.

Some members of Congress still push for transparency.

In a recent interview, Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota and a member of the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said Congress has not gotten enough information on the bombing and expected a full report.

The issue “has not gone away,” he said.

NEW YORK — A couple known for scaling tall buildings climbed to the top of the needle of the Empire State Building on Wednesday and unfurled a large black banner that flapped in the breeze, about 1,450 feet above the city.

The couple, Angela Nikolau, 33, and Ivan Beerkus, 32, were taken into custody after the stunt, according to a law enforcement official. Nikolau, according to a police document, was charged with burglary — defined in New York state as unlawfully entering a building with the intent to commit a crime. It was not immediately clear whether Beerkus was also charged.

Late Wednesday morning, Nikolau posted a video on her Instagram account that showed a vertiginous view from a narrow platform and that was captioned “Currently at the Empire State Building.”

The message on the banner read: “When the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace.”

As they stood atop the skyscraper, Beerkus proposed to Nikolau, the law enforcement official said. A photo Nikolau posted to Instagram shows Beerkus getting down on one knee.

The law enforcement official gave Nikolau’s first name as Angelina and Beerkus’ surname as Kuznetsov, which appears to be his birth surname.

The couple were the subjects of a 2024 documentary, “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” about their romance and quest for thrills and fame. In 2022, they climbed Merdeka 118 in Malaysia, which is more than 2,000 feet tall.

The Empire State Building’s needle, which houses communications equipment and a very tall antenna, rises about 200 feet above the top floor of the building.

It is a surface that is not frequently scaled. In 1994, the French climber Alain Robert did so, according to the Guinness World Records website.

New York City’s skyscrapers and monuments, however, have long been magnets for climbers.

Their attempts have ranged from the modest to the truly harrowing.

In 1918, Harry Gardiner, nicknamed “the Human Fly,” climbed the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn; it is all of 80 feet high.

Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.

In 2008, after three people — one of whom was Robert — climbed the New York Times Building in a matter of weeks, the Times removed some of the horizontal rods that climbers had used to scale it.

In 2014, a teenager from New Jersey climbed to the spire of the Freedom Tower, which was built on the site of the twin towers.

Jason Barr, an economics professor at Rutgers University who has studied skyscrapers, said that the initial plans for the Empire State Building did not include a spire or antenna, but after the construction of the Chrysler Building, with its distinctive crown, the building was redesigned to include a mooring mast that would stretch into the sky.

“These spires are designed partly for aesthetic reasons but also partly for advertising reasons, like, ‘Look at the top of my building’,” Barr said.

In recent years, artists and exhibitionists have called their unsecured and usually illegal ascents “rooftopping,” documenting the climbs on social media. Aside from structures in New York and Malaysia, Nikolau and Beerkus, have ascended buildings and constructions sites in China and Europe, sometimes with legal repercussions.

But there have been sanctioned climbs of skyscrapers, too. In 2023, actor Jared Leto scaled 18 floors of the Empire State Building, from the 86th floor to the 104th floor, with permission, to promote a world tour for his band Thirty Seconds to Mars.

He performed one of the band’s songs from the 104th floor, an unofficial landing off limits to the public.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.