ANKARA (Reuters) –
Turkey recalled its ambassador to Sweden on Thursday and canceled an upcoming summit between the countries after the Swedish parliament branded the World War One killing of Armenians by Ottoman forces genocide.

The move comes only a week after Ankara called home its ambassador to the United States because a U.S. congressional committee approved a similar resolution.

European Union member Sweden has been one of the strongest supporters of Ankara’s bid to join the bloc, while the United States is generally considered a strong western ally of the NATO-member Turkey.

The issue of the Armenian massacres is deeply sensitive in Turkey, which accepts that many Christian Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks but vehemently denies that up to 1.5 million died and that it amounted to genocide — a term employed by many Western historians and some foreign parliaments.

“We strongly condemn this resolution, which is made for political calculations,” Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said in a statement, referring to the Swedish parliament vote.

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Pope Benedict XVI’s triumphant return to his Bavarian hometown of Marktl am Inn four years ago – his first since becoming pontiff – was made all the more poignant by the presence of his older brother, Georg Ratzinger. Five decades after they’d entered seminary together, the new pontiff and retired church choir director stepped with the same soft gait and wavy white hair into the town’s tiny riverside chapel. Praying silently, side by side, they might just as well have been an aging pair of humble village priests.

But that tender image has been shattered by recent allegations that young singers in the famed “Regensburger Domspatzen” choir, which the elder Ratzinger directed from 1964-1994, suffered sexual abuse and beatings at the hands of priests dating back to the 1950s. Though the retired Ratzinger, 86, denies any knowledge of sexual abuse during his time with the choir, he has admitted to slapping several singers and has apologized for not having intervened to limit the more cruel beatings that have been alleged by others. (See pictures of the Pope in the Holy Land.)

“At the beginning, I would often slap people on the face but actually I always had a bad conscience about it,” he told the Bavarian newspaper Passauer Neue Presse on Tuesday. Ratzinger said he would have intervened had he known about the “scale” of the violence. “The boys would tell me what happened at the school and I knew that the rector there was violent and would beat the boys hard and that he would do it for no reason,” he said. “I was glad in 1980 when corporal punishment was banned.”

Others, however, claim Ratzinger must have known more at the time. Franz Wittenbrink, a former singer who lived at the Regensburg boarding school connected with the choir from 1958-1967, tells TIME it was “unimaginable” that Ratzinger hadn’t heard about cases of sexual abuse during his time as director. Wittenbrink alleges there was “a widespread system of sadistic punishments and sexual lust” at the school and in the choir. He claims he was physically abused by young men still in training to become priests at the school, who would routinely smack him on the bottom with their hands or sticks. “This amounted to sexual humiliation,” he tells TIME. “I was scared and I was shocked.” (Read: “More Headaches for the Vatican: Priests and Child Porn.”)

The reverberations from the scandal have been felt back at the Vatican, where the Holy See spokesman was compelled to respond directly to the abuse allegations – a task that would typically be handled by someone on the diocesan level. The spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Tuesday that German church authorities acted “promptly and decisively” to investigate the allegations after they emerged. Neither Lombardi nor the Pope himself, however, has commented on Ratzinger’s admissions about slapping young people or failing to address wider suspicions of violence. The head of the German Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, who made a public apology last week, is slated to meet with the Pope on Friday to discuss the widening scandal further.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) –
Two years ago, a poisonous brew of bad economics, lax regulation, and egregious behavior boiled over, scalding the financial system and pitching the United States into its steepest downturn since the Great Depression.

The antidotes to the crisis, concocted by many of the players who stirred the original toxic brew, have pulled the U.S. economy back from the brink.

But those remedies won’t prevent future crises, Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics, writes in “Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy” (Norton, $27.95).

In contrast to the regulations that emerged from the Great Depression, which promoted growth and stability, the response to this crisis has led to a less-competitive financial system dominated by banks that are too big to fail, he writes.

Stiglitz, former chief economist at The World Bank and now a professor at Columbia University in New York, focuses on banks’ failure to assess and manage risk, especially when risk is disguised by complex financial instruments. Such “modern alchemy” transformed risky sub-prime mortgages into A-rated products dubbed safe enough to be held by pension funds, he says.

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LONDON (Reuters) –
U.S. soldiers will take over security from British troops in the Musa Qala area of southern Afghanistan as Washington builds up its force as part of a new counter-insurgency strategy, Britain said Thursday.

The British government said the move was a first step in a “rebalancing” of forces in the southern province of Helmand to ensure NATO forces are fully effective in countering Taliban insurgents and protecting civilians.

Helmand is the scene of some of the fiercest fighting between U.S. and NATO forces and a resurgent Taliban.

About 500 British troops based in the Musa Qala district, in the northeast of the province, will move in the coming weeks to central Helmand, the most heavily populated part of the province where most British troops are already based.

There will be no change to Britain’s overall force of around 9,500 troops in Afghanistan.

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WEST BRANCH, Mich. – Shortly after entering Congress in 1993, Rep. Bart Stupak withstood President Bill Clinton’s charm offensive and voted against free-trade legislation — an early display of the independent streak that has put him at odds with fellow Democrats many times since.

He’s now the unofficial leader of a small but powerful bloc threatening to derail another Democratic president’s cherished initiative: health care overhaul.

A dozen socially conservative Democrats say they won’t support the legislation without a prohibition on paying for abortions with federal money. Stupak wrote a provision to their liking for a House bill approved last November, but the Senate replaced it with wording he considers unacceptable.

With the House closely divided, opposition from his faction could doom the measure and cripple Barack Obama’s presidency. Stupak is under intense pressure not to let that happen. Some Democrats in his northern Michigan district are so angry that he’s facing a rare — and long-shot — primary challenge.

Anti-abortion allies such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops want Stupak, a devout Roman Catholic, to dig in.

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