Religion: Council of Renewal

A fortnight hence in the Vatican, 2,600 bishops of the Roman Catholic Church will meet in a gathering so rare that only 20 others like it have been convened in the 20 centuries of Christian history. The purpose of the Second Vatican Council is what His Holiness Pope John XXIII, who has the Catholic prelate's traditional wariness of words that suggest drastic change, calls an aggiornamento—a modernization.

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Lech Walesa

Lech Walesa, the fly, feisty, mustachioed electrician from Gdansk, shaped the 20th century as the leader of the Solidarity movement that led the Poles out of communism. It is one of history’s great ironies that the nearest thing we have ever seen to a genuine workers’ revolution was directed against a so-called workers’ state.

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How One Nazi War Criminal’s Case Could Bring Others to Justice

Ending a trial that had dragged on for almost 18 months, a court in the south German city of Munich on Thursday convicted 91-year-old John Demjanjuk of being an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews at the Sobibor concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and sentenced him to five years in prison. The presiding judge, Ralph Alt, said the court found that Demjanjuk served as a Nazi guard at the camp in 1943 and, as such, played a crucial role in the “Nazi machinery.” The court sentenced Demjanjuk to five years in prison, and then set him free, saying he would not have to stay in jail pending his appeal — a decision that provoked a furious response from the families of Holocaust victims.

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