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Will the next pope be from Africa?
If the sole predictor of who would become the next pope was where the Catholic Church is growing fastest, then it is almost certain he would hail from Africa.
The continent’s Catholic population is expanding more rapidly than anywhere else, representing more than half of the global increase.
While there have been at least three pontiffs from Africa, the last – Pope Gelasius I – died more than 1,500 years ago – many would argue it is high time for another.
When the cardinals who vote for the leader of the Roman Catholic Church – known as the cardinal-electors – meet at the Vatican to choose Pope Francis’ successor, will these facts influence their decision making?
“I think that it will be great to have an African pope,” Father Stan Chu Ilo, a Nigerian Catholic priest and associate professor at DePaul University in Chicago, told the BBC, arguing that the leadership of the Church should better reflect the make-up of the global congregation.
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Russia-Ukraine ceasefire talks in London downgraded
London talks aimed at securing a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia have been downgraded and will no longer include US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff.
The meeting on Wednesday will instead take place among senior officials from the UK, France, Germany, Ukraine, and the US, while UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy will host a bilateral meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart.
Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Gen Keith Kellogg, is attending the talks instead of Rubio and Witkoff.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has ruled out recognising occupied Crimea as Russian territory, after reports suggested this could be discussed at the talks.
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Musk to reduce Doge role after Tesla profits plunge
Tesla boss Elon Musk has pledged to “significantly” cut back his role in the US government after the electric car firm reported a huge drop in profit and sales for the start of this year.
Musk has led the newly created advisory body – the Department for Government Efficiency (Doge) – since last year, putting the world’s richest man at the heart of cutting US spending and jobs.
But Musk said his “time allocation to Doge” would “drop significantly” from next month, adding he would spend only one to two days per week on it “as long as the president would like me to do so and as long as it’s useful”.
His political involvement has sparked protests and boycotts of Tesla cars around the world.
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Trump says he has ‘no intention of firing’ Fed boss
US President Donald Trump says he has “no intention of firing” Jerome Powell after repeatedly criticising the head of the Federal Reserve.
But he added that he would like Powell to be “a little more active” when it comes to cutting interest rates.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump also said he is optimistic about improving trade relations with China.
Last week, the president intensified his criticism of the Fed chief, calling him “a major loser”. The comments sparked a selloff of stocks, bonds and the US dollar, but financial markets have since been recovering from those losses.
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‘Grandpa Francis’: A nation remembers the Pope who braved a typhoon for them
aLashed by an off-season typhoon, Pope Francis stepped out on a rain-soaked makeshift stage in front of hundreds of thousands of weeping pilgrims in the central Philippines.
Organisers had warned him to cancel the 2015 open air mass in Tacloban as the weather had worsened.
But Francis was not be put off: he flew through the typhoon from the capital Manila to hold the mass in memory of more than 6,000 people who had perished in Super Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. As he rode in his popemobile around the vast airport carpark waving to the crowd, palm trees swayed furiously in the storm.
In Asia’s largest Roman Catholic country, all popes enjoy rockstar status. Here, religion brought by Spanish colonisers in the 16th Century has become woven into the very fabric of society, and given a distinctly Filipino intensity and colour. In some towns devotees are even nailed to the cross at Easter to imitate the suffering of Jesus.
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Why Vermont farmers are using urine on their crops
Urine was used as fertiliser in ancient Rome and China. Now farmers in Vermont are bringing this practice back to boost harvests and grow crops in a more sustainable way.
When Betsy Williams goes to the loo, she likes to know her pee won’t go to waste. For the last 12 years, she and her neighbours in rural Vermont, US, have diligently collected their urine and donated it to farmers for use as fertiliser for their crops.
“We’re consuming all of these things that have nutrients in them, and then a lot of the nutrients that are passing through us can then get recycled back into helping create food for us and for animals. So to me, it’s logical,” Williams says.
Williams takes part in the Urine Nutrient Reclamation Program (UNRP), a programme run by the Rich Earth Institute (REI), a non-profit based in Vermont. She and 250 of her neighbours in Windham County donate a total of 12,000 gallons (45,400 litres) of urine to the programme each year to be recycled – or “peecycled”.
Windham County’s pee-donations are collected by a lorry and driven to a large tank where the urine is pasteurised by heating it to 80C (176F) for 90 seconds. It is then stored in a pasteurised tank, ready to be sprayed on local farmland when the time is right to fertilise crops.