After years of speculation, new allegations of sexual abuse involving Pope Benedict XVI's former diocese have surfaced. 

On ABC News, VERENA SCHMITT-ROSCHMANN writes...

Pope Benedict XVI's former diocese is facing new allegations of physical and sexual abuse on a daily basis, the head of its new sex-abuse task force said Friday. "It is like a tsunami," Elke Huemmeler, who leads the diocese's newly founded abuse prevention task force, told The Associated Press.

Huemmeler estimates there are about 120 cases on the record to date, around 100 of them at the nearby Ettal monastery boarding school, run by Benedictine monks. She stresses, however, her role is not to deal with the old cases, but help set up the prevention program.

Read the rest on ABC News.

Also on ABC News, Nick Watt writes...

Pope Benedict XVI is facing a crisis. The sexual abuse scandal that first rocked the U.S. Catholic Church in 2002 is now spreading to Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Germany and elsewhere. Alleged victims are coming forward almost daily, claiming abuse. Since January, 300 Germans have told authorities they were abused in Catholic choirs and schools. "Until this moment, all the abuse scandals were happening far away," Marco Politi, a Vatican analyst, told ABC News. "Now it came to Europe, also in the diocese of Pope Benedict."

Read more on ABC News.

On CNet, Steven Musil writes...

Google is expected to announce on Monday that it will withdraw from China on April 10, according to a report in a Beijing-based newspaper that cited an unidentified sales associate who works with the company. "I have received information saying that Google will leave China on April 10, but this information has not at present been confirmed by Google," the China Business News said.

Read the reast on CNet.

Horror in Mexico as brutal attacks leave many dead. At least 2 Americans gunned down!

From The LA Times, Tracy Wilkinson writes...

At least 13 people were killed Saturday, some of them beheaded, around the popular beach resort of Acapulco, just as foreign visitors have begun arriving for spring break. Elsewhere in the Guerrero state where Acapulco is located, 11 other people, including soldiers and suspected traffickers, were killed, authorities said.

The dead in Acapulco included five police officers, authorities said, who were ambushed while on patrol on the city's outskirts about 2 a.m.

Over the next four hours, the bullet-riddled bodies of eight men were discovered in three locations, police said. Four had been beheaded, in the style typical of drug traffickers who have been at war with one another and with government forces for three years.

Read the rest of this story on the LA Times website. 

Two Americans killed. Obama "Outraged."

On Yahoo, Julian Cardona writes...

Gunmen in the drug war-plagued Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez killed two Americans and a Mexican linked to the local U.S. consulate, an attack U.S. President Barack Obama said "outraged" him. An American woman working at the consulate in Ciudad Juarez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas, and her U.S. husband were fatally shot by suspected drug gang hitmen in broad daylight on Saturday as they left a consulate social event, U.S. and Mexican officials told Reuters. A Mexican man married to another consulate employee was killed around the same time in another part of the city after he and his wife left the same event, a U.S. official said. The U.S. official, who asked not to be identified, said it was not clear if the victims had been specifically targeted, and the motive for the attacks was unknown.

Read the rest on Yahoo.

What about spring break? State Department issues travel warning.

On ABCNews.com, LEE FERRAN writes...

With thousands of American teenagers and college students revving up for spring break, the government and some universities have a message for those looking to venture south of the border: Be careful. As drug-related violence in Mexico surges, most recently with the brutal murder of a U.S. consulate employee and her husband this weekend, government officials are trying to dissuade travel to some of the country's most dangerous areas. "Recent violent attacks have prompted the U.S. Embassy to urge U.S. citizens to delay unnecessary travel to parts of Durango, Coahuila and Chihuahua states and advise U.S. citizens residing or traveling in those areas to exercise extreme caution," the State Department's Travel Warning said.

Read the rest on ABC News website. 

Would you feel safe going to Mexico?

Complete updates as you scroll down this post --- Paulin-Ramirez Released

First reported this morning --- Jamie Paulin-Ramirez arrested in Ireland for alleged terrorist plot.

On My Way News,  IVAN MORENO writes that Jamie Paulin-Ramirez's mother says she 'lost her mind'

Before her daughter disappeared last fall, Christine Mott recalls that the 31-year-old who had been held in connection with an alleged assassination plot announced she had converted to Islam and told her family they'd go to hell if they didn't as well. Jamie Paulin-Ramirez also began talking about Jihad with her Muslim stepfather and spent most of her time online as she withdrew from her family, Mott said. "We were enemies," Christine Mott said. "We couldn't even speak to each other." Last year, on Sept. 11, Paulin-Ramirez left Leadville, Colo., an old silver mining town west of Denver that was Colorado's second-largest city during its heyday. She took her 6-year-old son with her, her mother said.

Read more of this on My Way News.

Update 1: Jamie Paulin-Ramirez held in connection with terror plot, may know 'JihadJane'

On The Washington Post, Carrie Johnson writes...

Federal officials confirmed Saturday that a second suburban American woman has been apprehended in connection with a plot to kill a Swedish artist who angered the Muslim world with a derogatory drawing of the prophet Muhammad.

But authorities cautioned that Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a blond-haired mother, may have been motivated by love for an Algerian Muslim man rather than terrorist urges when she traveled to Ireland for a rendezvous in September.

Paulin-Ramirez, 31, of suburban Denver, was taken into custody by Irish police last week on the same day that U.S. prosecutors unsealed a criminal indictment against another fair-haired American woman, who allegedly used the Internet handle "JihadJane" to recruit people to further the plot.

Read the rest of this on The Washington Post website. 

Update 2: Irish police free 4 in alleged artist murder plot, including Jamie Paulin-Ramirez.

Hosted at Google News, The AP writes...

Four people, including an American woman, arrested over an alleged plot to assassinate Swedish artist Lars Vilks have been freed without charge, but three others remain in custody, Irish police said Saturday. Seven people — three Algerians, a Libyan, a Palestinian and a Croatian and the American woman, who is married to one of the Algerians — were arrested Tuesday in Ireland hours before U.S. authorities unveiled a terror indictment against a 46-year-old Philadelphia woman, Colleen LaRose. In Leadville, Colorado, a woman identified the American woman who was released as her daughter, 31-year-old Jamie Paulin-Ramirez. Christine Mott said she had been informed of Paulin-Ramirez's arrest by the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies.

Read the rest of this story on Google News. 

Update 3: Jamie Paulin-Ramirez was brainwashing her 6-year-old son.

Fox News reports...

He was being turned into a baby bomber. The 6-year-old son of a Colorado nursing student who ran off to Europe to join a terrorist murder cell was brainwashed into a hate-filled Islamic fundamentalist zombie, his family said Saturday, The New York Post reported. "He said that Christians will burn in hellfire," the child's grandmother, Christine Mott, told The Post. "That's what they are teaching this baby." The boy's mom, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 31, converted to Islam over the last year. Her family said she struck up an Internet friendship with another Colorado radical, Najibullah Zazi, an Al Qaeda associate who pleaded guilty last month in a plot to set off bombs in the New York subway system. Her conversion was so complete, Paulin-Ramirez changed her son's name from Christian to the Islamic name Walid after enrolling him in a fire-breathing Muslim school in Ireland.

Read the rest of this article on Fox News.

Update 4: Paulin-Ramirez's mother says her daughter is a terrorist.

Richard Owen in Rome writes for the Times Online...

Sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are proof that that "the Devil is at work inside the Vatican", according to the Holy See's chief exorcist. Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican's chief exorcist for 25 years and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon".

Read more on The Times Online. 

Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday the Palestinians deserve a "viable" independent state with contiguous territory, seeking to reassure them of U.S. support after Israel announced plans to expand a Jewish neighborhood in disputed east Jerusalem.

Read more on MSNBC.com

If Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn had his way, any journalist calling Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez a dictator would find himself behind bars. "Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it" said Penn, winner of two Best Actor Academy Awards. "And this is mainstream media, who should - truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies."

Read more on Fox News.

Updates below...

Tensions were high in Nigeria's central Plateau State Monday after Muslim herdsmen raided Christian villages near the restive city of Jos, hacking to death at least 200 people. The massacre is the latest outbreak of violence between rival ethnic groups in Plateau State, where the indigenous Christians are struggling with northern Muslims, who immigrated to the area decades ago, over control of land and resources.

Read more at Monstors and Critics.

Update: AFP: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Monday on Nigeria to find and punish those responsible for the killings of more than 500 Christians in a wave of sectarian slaughter. "We continue to urge all parties to exercise restraint," Clinton told reporters, adding the Nigerian government "should make sure the perpetrators are brought to justice."

North Korea's army said Monday it is ready to "blow up" South Korea and the U.S., hours after the allies kicked off annual military drills that Pyongyang has slammed as a rehearsal for attack. South Korea and the U.S. — which normally dismiss such threats as rhetoric — began 11 days of drills across South Korea on Monday morning to rehearse how the U.S. would deploy in time of emergency on the Korean peninsula.

Read more on Fox News.

The American-born spokesman for al-Qaida has been arrested by Pakistani intelligence officers in the southern city of Karachi, as video emerged of him urging U.S. Muslims to attack their own country. The arrest of Adam Gadahn represents a major victory in the battle against al-Qaida and is a sign that Pakistan, criticized in the past for being an untrustworthy ally, is cooperating more fully with Washington.

Read more on Yahoo.

Update: An American member of Al Qaeda was picked up in a raid in Pakistan's southern city of Karachi, Pakistani officials said Monday, but reversed earlier assertions that the detained man was the terror network's U.S.-born spokesman. Read more on

A passenger on the cruise ship hit by massive waves Wednesday in the Mediterranean tells the Associated Press today it was a "terrifying" ordeal. The news outlet quotes Claude Cremex, 73, of Marseille, France as saying he was in his cabin resting because of the rough seas when the three-story-high walls of water crashed into the 1,790-passenger Louis Majesty. The wave killed two and injured fourteen people.

Read more on USA Today.

Update: Investigators were en route Thursday, and dead and injured were being evacuated, a day after 26-foot waves crashed into a cruise ship and killed two people off northeast Spain, officials said. Read More on CNN.

A powerful 6.4-magnitude earthquake rocked Taiwan Thursday, terrifying residents, disrupting communications and triggering at least one large fire. Sixty-four people were injured. The quake was centered in the same mountainous region of rural Kaohsiung county that endured the brunt of the damage from Typhoon Morakot, a devastating storm that killed about 700 people last August.

Read more on USA Today.

Are these earthquakes somehow all connected? Science Fair asked the same question.

The Earth is angry.

Or at least it seems that way, with three significant earthquakes in the past week: A 7.0 magnitude quake near Japan last Friday, the huge 8.8 quake near Chile on Saturday, and a 6.4 near Taiwan earlier today. And, of course, there was the devastating 7.0 quake in January in Haiti that killed more than 200,000 people.

So, is there any connection among all the quakes? "No, not that we can see," says Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo. "We've had quite a few quakes in the past two months, but not more than average."

Read more on USA Today's Science Fair Blog.