US school puts itself up for sale on eBay

Langhorne (Pennsylvania): Forget magazine drives and candy sales. A cash-strapped high school near Philadelphia hopes to raise money by auctioning itself on eBay.

 The starting bid of just under $600,000 for Learning Center in Langhorne, Pa., is designed to offset steep budget cuts. A tongue-in-cheek listing describes the alternative school for at-risk teens as "pre-owned" and "slightly used."

The winner won't own the facility, which is part of the Neshaminy School District. But he or she will get a plethora of goodies, including a naming opportunity, a free large pizza, a personalized school coffee mug and the chance to deliver a speech at graduation

Learning Center Principal JoAnn Holland says she hopes the auction idea will draw the attention of a wealthy benefactor. Bidding ends Wednesday.

"I know it's crazy," Holland said in a statement. "But with the good The Learning Center does, it's crazier not to do it."

The idea came from recent graduate Casey Young, who knows a bit about unusual auctions: His dad, a writer, tried to sell their family on eBay in 2003. The ad was eventually yanked because the company prohibits selling human beings, but the stunt received a lot of publicity.

"We did it as a lark," father Steve Young told The Associated Press on Monday. "Casey seems to have turned this into something that will result in something positive."

Pope fires Slovak bishop in rare show of authority

Vatican City: Pope Benedict XVI fired a 52-year-old Slovak bishop for apparently mismanaging his diocese in a rare show of papal power over bishops that could have implications for US sex abuse cases.

Usually when bishops run into trouble - either for alleged moral lapses or management problems - they are persuaded by the Vatican to resign. But Benedict has become increasingly willing to forcibly remove bishops who refuse to step down, sacking three others in the past year alone.

His willingness to do so raises questions about whether he would take the same measures against bishops who covered up for sexually abusive priests. So far he has In the most notable case to date, Benedict fired Bishop William Morris of Toowoomba, Australia, last year after he called for the church to consider ordaining women and married men. 

He also removed a Congolese bishop for management problems in his diocese and an Italian one in May for similar reasons.

On Monday, the Vatican said Benedict had "relieved from pastoral care" Bishop Robert Bezak of Trnava, Slovakia. 

No reason was given, but Italian news reports suggested administrative problems were to blame, and Slovak news reports quoted Bezak as saying he thought his criticism of his predecessor may have had a role.

Bishops normally hand in their resignation when they turn 75 years old, their customary retirement age.

The exercise of the pope's ability to fire a bishop has important implications, particularly concerning bishops who mishandle pedophile priests.

In the face of U.S. lawsuits seeking to hold the pope ultimately responsible for abusive priests, the Holy See has argued that bishops are largely masters of their dioceses and that the pope doesn't really control them. 

The Vatican has thus sought to limit its own liability, arguing that the pope doesn't exercise sufficient control over the bishops to be held responsible for their bungled response to priests who rape children.

The ability of the pope to actively fire bishops, and not just passively accept their resignations, would seem to undercut the Vatican's argument of a hands-off pope.

"If the pope can fire a bishop, that implies he's their supervisor," said Nick Cafardi, a U.S. canon lawyer and former chairman of the U.S. bishops' lay review board that monitored clerical abuse. "This will invite more lawsuits attempting to sue the pope in American courts."

Jeffrey Anderson, who is seeking to hold the Holy See liable for a case of an abusive priest in Oregon, said the Vatican was trying to have it both ways.

"They will remove, using their canon laws and their own protocols, bishops, priests and clerics for any reasons - for theological or any other reasons - but when it comes to sexual misconduct, they never use those same standards," he said.

Even the most well-known case,  that of Cardinal Bernard Law, ended when Law offered his resignation after the sex abuse scandal exploded in his Boston archdiocese 2002. 

Law subsequently was named archpriest of one of the Vatican's basilicas in Rome, St. Mary Major.

That said, things may be changing: The Vatican's sex crimes prosecutor, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, warned in February that bishops could face possible church sanctions for malicious or fraudulent negligence if they fail to follow the Vatican's rules on handling sexually abusive priests. 

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Cost to protect US secrets doubles to over $11 billion

Washington: The federal government spent more than $11 billion to protect its secrets last year, double the cost of classification a decade ago - and that is only the part it will reveal. The total does not include the costs incurred by the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other spy agencies, whose spending is - you guessed it - classified. 

John P. Fitzpatrick, head of the Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees the government's classification effort and released the annual report, said that adding the excluded agencies would increase the spending total by "less than 20 percent." That suggests that the real total may be about $13 billion, more than the entire annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. 

The costs include investigations of people applying for security clearances, equipment like safes and special computer gear, training for government personnel, and salaries for officials who review documents for classification and declassification. 


Spending on secrecy has increased steadily for more than a decade, driven in part by the expanding counterterrorism programs after the 2001 terrorist attacks, but also by the continuing protection of cold war secrets dating back decades. The total cost for 2001 was $4.7 billion, the oversight office said. 

The spending report, showing an increase of 12 percent from 2010, comes at a time of intense public debate over secrecy and leaks of classified information. Six prosecutions of government officials for disclosing classified information to the news media have occurred under the Obama administration, and two new leak investigations are under way. 

The antisecrecy group WikiLeaks set off a furor in 2010 and 2011 by obtaining and releasing hundreds of thousands of confidential United States government documents, including diplomatic cables. Both Republican and Democratic leaders of the Congressional intelligence committees have denounced recent leaks to the news media for damaging national security and have called for a crackdown. 

But some independent experts say the ballooning classification system is the problem, sweeping huge quantities of unremarkable information in along with genuinely important secrets. 

Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, said the classification of the amounts spent by the intelligence agencies on classification, for example, was unnecessary. 

"To me it illustrates the most important problem - namely that we are classifying far too much information," he said. "The credibility of the classification system is collapsing under the weight of bogus secrets." 

Costs are driven up in part by the slow pace of declassification, which has slowed drastically since a push in the 1990s. Many documents from the 1960s remain classified, and agencies still regularly go to court to defend their secrecy in the face of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. 

In May, a judge ruled that the C.I.A. could continue to withhold from the public one of five volumes of its official history of the Bay of Pigs operation, in which the agency trained Cuban exiles to invade Cuba in 1961 in a disastrous attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. 

The C.I.A. has also spent years fighting lawsuits seeking the release of files on agency officials who oversaw an anti-Castro group that clashed publicly with Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. 

But Mr. Fitzpatrick of the oversight office said there can be valid reasons for keeping decades-old secrets. 

"Everything is more complicated than it seems," said Mr. Fitzpatrick, who worked in several intelligence agencies before taking his current position. "It could be the name of a source, a method of collection that's still in use, or an agreement with a foreign government that still needs to be protected." 

Air India pilots end strike

After 58 days, Air India pilots have finally ended their strike, soon after the Delhi High Court had asked all striking pilots to end their strike within 48 hours.

The court had also said that the 434 pilots on strike must submit letters to the management indicating their willingness to get back to work.

The Delhi High Court had asked the management to “sympathetically consider” reinstating the 101 pilots who had been sacked during the strike for calling in sick or not showing up to work.

The national carrier’s strike has cost the government close to Rs 600 crore.

Pilots are on strike because they believe their seniority and training is not being protected by the management. In 2007, Air India was merged with the domestic national carrier, Indian Airlines. Pilots from the former believe they are senior, and object to training offered to Indian Airlines pilots for the Boeing Dreamliner, for example.

Nitish gets senior BJP leader to switch sides, creating new stress-test for BJP

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An important member of the BJP in Bihar has switched sides - he has joined Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United). Sanjay Jha was sworn into Mr Kumar's party at the chief minister's residence in Patna.
 
In the crossover lies a new pain-point for Mr Kumar's party and the BJP, which together run the Bihar government, but have been attacking each other lately. At the heart of their dispute lies Mr Kumar's hostile relations with BJP leader and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.  Without naming him, Mr Kumar has ruled out supporting Mr Modi if the BJP decides to field him as its candidate for Prime Minister in 2014. Mr Kumar's party is an important member of the BJP-led coalition, the NDA.
 
Mr Jha, who joined the chief minister's party today was close to senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley and his party's Sushil Kumar Modi, who is the Deputy Chief Minister in Bihar. He was nominated by the BJP to the Bihar Legislative Council, and has in the past served as a mediator between the two ruling parties. BJP leaders worry that his move will be aped by several others within its ranks.


Mr Jha is widely expected to contest the Lok Sabha election in 2014 from Darbanga - the current MP from there is the BJP's Kirti Azad.

In a sign of their close ties, the chief minister visited Mr Jha's village of Araria Sangram three times in the last one year. Mr Jha has considerable weight among Brahmin voters in the state. Earlier this year, when he organised Bihar Diwas - a celebration of the state - in New Delhi, he did not invite any BJP leaders to the event. The event had only Bihar Chief Minister as speaker.

Tribunal rules against telcos in 3G roaming case

A telecom tribunal on Tuesday ruled against telecom companies offering 3G roaming mobile services where they do not have a licence. The tribunal gave a split verdict where a judge termed spectrum sharing pacts within a single telecom circle among telecom operators as illegal.

The chairman of the Telecom Disputes Settlement Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT), Justice S.B. Sinha, said that the department of telecommunications (DoT) should send out fresh notices to the telecom operators, while another judge on the tribunal called for an immediate end to the pacts.

The tribunal has also asked the telcos to appeal to a higher court.
Leading operators like Bharti, Vodafone and Idea had entered into an agreement with one another to offer 3G mobile services in circles in which they could not succeed in getting spectrum in an auction held last year.
Following that, the DoT had issued notices to the telecom firms on December 23, directing them to stop their 3G roaming agreements with immediate effect as the pacts were illegal, and had sought their response within 24 hours. Similar notices had also been issued to Tata Teleservices and Aircel, which had also entered into similar agreements to offer services in six circles. However, the latter two operators have already discontinued the arrangement.
Following this, the telecom companies moved the tribunal.

The December 23 decision had come after the unanimous view of telecom regulator Trai, the law ministry and the DoT that such roaming agreement was in violation of the telecom licences. Even the sector regulator Trai had termed the existing agreement among operators for offering pan-India 3G services, despite not having spectrum in all the circles, as violation of licence norms, a charge rejected by the industry.

Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal, too, had ruled that such roaming agreements are in violation of license norms and the operators cannot be allowed to offer services like this.