London
Saudi prince murdered lover: A grandson of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah was found guilty this week of murdering his servant at a posh London hotel after the two returned from a Valentine’s Day evening out. Prince Saud Abdulaziz Bin Nasser Al Saud at first denied killing Bandar Abdulaziz, who was found dead in bed with broken ribs and bite marks on his face and arm. But after police retrieved footage from a hotel surveillance camera showing the prince attacking his servant in the elevator, Saud admitted to the killing. Prosecutors argued that the murder had a “sexual element” and produced witnesses who said the two men had long had an abusive and intimate relationship; the prince’s defense team spent much of the trial denying that.
Rome
Celibacy still ‘pure’: Pope Benedict XVI defended the celibate priesthood this week, saying celibacy isn’t the cause of priests’ sexual molestation of children. In a letter to seminarians, the pope said he understood that because of the scandal “many people, perhaps even some of you, might ask whether it is good to become a priest—whether the choice of celibacy makes any sense.” But he said that while he feels “profound shame and regret” for the global sexual-abuse scandal, the priestly mission with its celibate life is still “great and pure.” The letter marks the first time that the pope has spoken of celibacy in the context of the sexual-abuse scandal. It’s viewed as a response to a suggestion by Belgian bishops that the church consider allowing priests to marry.
Berlin
First Hitler exhibit: Germany has opened its first museum exhibit on Adolf Hitler since World War II. The German Historical Museum’s show, Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime, focuses on the complicity of the German people in the rise of Nazism. For decades after the war, German students were taught that Hitler had effectively hijacked the nation. “That much of the German people became enablers, colluders, co-criminals in the Holocaust” is now a mainstream view, said political analyst Constanze Stelzenmüller. “But it took us a while to get there.” The exhibit consists largely of everyday objects that ordinary Germans made to glorify their leader, such as a tapestry—interspersing images of townspeople, the Lord’s Prayer, and swastikas—woven by women at a church.
