Sotheby’s hopes for record sale of ancient Hebrew Bible

JERUSALEM (AP) — One of the oldest surviving biblical manuscripts, a nearly complete 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible, could soon be yours — for a cool $30 million.

The Codex Sassoon, a leather-bound, handwritten parchment tome containing almost the entirety of the Hebrew Bible, is set to go on the block at Sotheby’s in New York in May. Its anticipated sale speaks to the still bullish market for art, antiquities and ancient manuscripts even in a worldwide bear economy.

Sotheby’s is drumming up interest in hopes of enticing institutions and collectors to bite. It has put the price tag at an eye-watering $30 million to $50 million.

On Wednesday, Tel Aviv’s ANU Museum of the Jewish People opened a week-long exhibition of the manuscript, part of a whirlwind worldwide tour of the artifact in the United Kingdom, Israel and the United States before its expected sale, on Wednesday.

Muslims in Indonesia gear up for first day of Ramadan

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Millions of Muslims in Indonesia are gearing up to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan, which is expected to start on Thursday, with traditions and ceremonies across the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country amid soaring food prices.

From colorful torchlight street parades to cleaning relatives’ graves and sharing meals with family and friends, every region in the vast Southeast Asian archipelago seems to have its own way to mark the start of Ramadan, highlighting the nation’s diverse cultural heritage.

The country’s religious affairs minister on Wednesday evening will try to sight the crescent moon to determine the first day of the holy month. If the moon is not visible, as expected, the first day of Ramadan will be a day later. Most Indonesians — Muslims comprise nearly 90% of the country’s 277 million people — are expected to follow the government’s official date.

Indonesia’s second-largest Islamic group, Muhammadiyah, which counts more than 60 million members, said that according to its astronomical calculations Ramadan will begin on Thursday.

Hearts of Freedom and Canadian arms open wide

In 1979-80, more than 60,000 southeast Asian refugees came to Canada. Among them was Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe, then seven years old.

Winnipeg Muslims open doors to all for iftar

Non-Muslims who want to learn more about Islam — and who want to enjoy Middle Eastern food — are invited to Winnipeg’s Grand Mosque for a community iftar Friday.

Apaches tell court copper mine would harm sacred sites

PHOENIX (AP) — A Native American group that's trying to stop an effort to build one of the largest copper mines in the United States told a full federal appeals court panel Tuesday that the project would prevent Apaches from exercising their religion by destroying land they consider sacred.

U.S. federal government plans for a land swap that will allow Resolution Copper to build the mine will destroy the land in eastern Arizona known as Oak Flat, “barring the Apaches from ever accessing it again and ending their core religious practices forever,” said attorney Luke Goodrich, arguing for the group Apache Stronghold.

“We asked the court today to recognize the obvious — that when the government destroys a sacred site, religious liberty law has something to say about it,” Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at the nonprofit legal institution Becket Law, said in a prepared statement distributed after the hearing in Pasadena, California. "A win for Apache Stronghold will be a win for people of all faiths.”

The Apache group is seeking to halt the land swap while the case plays out in court. The panel of 11 judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to issue a decision in the next few months.

Pope Benedict XVI’s aide acknowledges criticism over memoir

ROME (AP) — The longtime secretary to Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged Sunday that his tell-all memoir, published in the days after Benedict’s death, had been criticized for casting Pope Francis in an unfavorable light, but insisted that some of the polemics were more about anti-Benedict prejudice than anything else.

In some of his first public comments since Benedict’s Dec. 31 death, Archbishop Georg Gaenswein said he remained loyal to Francis and that he was still waiting for the pontiff to give him a new job.

Gaenswein’s future has been the subject of much speculation following Benedict’s death and the publication of “Nothing But the Truth: My Life Beside Pope Benedict XVI.” In the memoir, Gaenswein charted his nearly 30 years working with Benedict, but also settled old scores, revealed palace intrigues and detailed some of the bad blood that accrued during the decade in which Benedict lived as a retired pope alongside Francis.

Published during the emotional period around Benedict’s Jan. 5 funeral, the book came to encapsulate the conservative criticism that has been directed at Francis and his more progressive bent by people nostalgic for Benedict’s doctrinaire papacy.

Pope promotes ‘humanitarian corridors’ for asylum-seekers

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis met Saturday with thousands of refugees and charity groups hosting them in Italy as he sought to promote legal migration routes to Europe as an alternative to smuggling operations that he said have turned the Mediterranean Sea into a “cemetery.”

Francis said “humanitarian corridors,” which have operated in Italy since 2016, saved lives and helped newly arrived asylum-seekers get acclimated while church groups provided housing, education and work opportunities.

“Humanitarian corridors not only aim to bring refugees to Italy and other European countries, rescuing them from situations of uncertainty, danger and endless waiting; they also work toward integration,” he said.

The Sant’Egidio Catholic charity, the Federation of Evangelical Churches and the Waldensian Church spearheaded the ecumenical humanitarian transfer initiative in Italy, which has brought more than 6,000 people to Europe, Francis was told.

Vatican closes embassy in Nicaragua after Ortega’s crackdown

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican said Saturday it had closed its embassy in Nicaragua after the country's government proposed suspending diplomatic relations, the latest episode in a yearslong crackdown on the Catholic Church by the administration of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

The Vatican's representative to Managua, Monsignor Marcel Diouf, also left the country Friday, bound for Costa Rica, a Vatican official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Vatican action came a week after the Nicaraguan government proposed suspending relations with the Holy See, and a year after Nicaragua forced the papal ambassador at the time to leave. It's not clear what more the proposed suspension would entail in diplomatic terms.

Relations between the church and Ortega's government have been deteriorating since 2018, when Nicaraguan authorities violently repressed anti-government protests.

Preparing for Ramadan

Expecting she won’t be at her best during the upcoming days of Ramadan, 10-year-old Aliyah Van Rooyen wants her classmates and teachers to realize exactly why that may be.

Mormon Church gives water to boost imperiled Great Salt Lake

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Donating a small reservoir's worth of water rights to Utah's Great Salt Lake. Replacing grass with rocks and water-wise landscaping around neatly manicured churches. Reducing water use by more than one-third outside the headquarters in Salt Lake City's Temple Square. These are among the actions that the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is taking to address the realities of a rapidly approaching, drier future.

Remarks from Bishop Christopher Waddell at the University of Utah on Friday underscored how the church — one of the biggest land and water rights holders in the western United States — is expanding its role in conservation and looking for solutions “that protect the future for all God's children.”

“Our ability to be wise stewards of the earth is dependent on our understanding of the natural resources we have been blessed with,” the high-ranking church official said at a symposium on the future of the Great Salt Lake at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law.

Speaking after a long list of scientists and Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, Waddell said the church's focus on stewardship spanned back to the Brigham Young era, noting that the faith's forefather endorsed what one historian said was a “radical notion” — that water is a public resource, not just a matter of private property rights.

2nd Vatican official says pope OK’d ransom payments for nun

VATICAN CITY (AP) — A second high-ranking Holy See official told a Vatican court on Friday that Pope Francis had authorized spending hundreds of thousands of euros in ransom payments to try to free a nun who was kidnapped by al-Qaida-linked militants in Mali.

Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra, the Holy See's No. 3, told the Vatican tribunal that he had sought, and received Francis’ approval to wire the money soon after he took up his duties as the “substitute” in the secretariat of state in late 2018.

Pena Parra was answering questions for a second day Friday after being called by defense attorneys representing the 10 people on trial for a host of alleged financial crimes.

One tangent of the Vatican trial concerns 575,000 euros wired from the Vatican’s Swiss Bank account to a Slovenian-based front company owned by Cecilia Marogna, a self-styled security analyst who was hired in 2016 by Pena Parra’s predecessor, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, as an outside consultant.

Vatican unveils new ethnographic display of Rwanda screens

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican Museums officially reopened its African and American ethnographic collections Thursday by showcasing intricately restored Rwandan raffia screens that were sent by Catholic missionaries to the Vatican for a 1925 exhibit.

The display at the Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum featured a scientific presentation of the restoration process as well as the research that preceded it, with consultations with Rwanda’s own ethnographic museum, a UCLA graduate student and Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa. It came as ethnographic museums in Europe and North America are grappling with demands from Indigenous groups and former colonies to return artifacts dating from colonial times.

The Rev. Nicola Mappelli, curator of the Anima Mundi museum, declined to comment on calls for restitution of the Vatican’s own ethnographic holdings, saying these were questions for the museum leadership. Speaking to The Associated Press during a visit to the new exhibit, he noted that the Vatican last year returned three mummies to Peru and a human head to Ecuador in 2017.

The museum director, Barbara Jatta, didn’t refer to the issue in her remarks at the opening, emphasizing however what she said was the Anima Mundi’s commitment to transparency and “dialogue with different cultures.”

Pope sought to lose ‘as little as possible’ in London deal

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis gave clear indications to get out of a disastrous London real estate deal by saying the Vatican must “start over and lose as little money as possible," an exit strategy that eventually involved paying off a broker 15 million euros, the Holy See’s No. 3 official told a court Thursday.

Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra, the “substitute” in the secretariat of state, was the highest-ranking witness to be questioned by defense attorneys for 10 people on trial for alleged financial crimes involving the London property and related dealings. His testimony was eagerly sought by the defense, given that he oversaw the final phase of the London deal in 2018-2019 as well as the negotiations with the broker, Gianluigi Torzi.

Prosecutors have accused Torzi of extorting the Holy See for the 15 million euros in exchange for ownership of the building, charges he denies. The nine other defendants have similarly denied wrongdoing.

The crux of the London case rests on the passage of ownership of the London property to Torzi’s Gutt SA fund at the end of 2018 after the Vatican decided to prematurely exit another fund that had invested in it.

US tribes get bison as they seek to restore bond with animal

GOLDEN, Colo. (AP) — Dozens of bison from a mountain park outside Denver were transferred Wednesday to several tribes from across the Great Plains, in the latest example of Native Americans reclaiming stewardship over animals their ancestors lived alongside for millennia.

Following ceremonial drumming and singing and an acknowledgement of the tribes that once occupied the surrounding landscape, the bison were loaded onto trucks for relocation to tribal lands.

About a half-dozen of the animals from Colorado will form the nucleus of a new herd for the Yuchi people south of Tulsa, Oklahoma, said Richard Grounds with the Yuchi Language Project.

The herd will be expanded over time, to reestablish a spiritual and physical bond broken two centuries ago when bison were nearly wiped out and the Yuchi were forced from their homeland, Grounds said.

NY diocese facing flood of lawsuits files for bankruptcy

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — The embattled Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany became the latest diocese in New York to seek bankruptcy protection Wednesday as it faces hundreds of lawsuits alleging sexual abuse.

Bishop Edward Scharfenberger announced the Chapter 11 filing after months of negotiations between the upstate New York diocese and lawyers representing plaintiffs over a potential settlement.

The Albany diocese, like others in the state, is dealing with a deluge of lawsuits dating to when New York temporarily suspended the statute of limitations to give victims of childhood abuse the ability to pursue even decades-old allegations against clergy members, teachers, Boy Scout leaders and others.

“The decision to file was not arrived at easily and I know it may cause pain and suffering, but we, as a Church, can get through this and grow stronger together,” Scharfenberger said in a release.

Texas judge in abortion pill case is a conservative favorite

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Texas judge hearing a case that could throw into jeopardy access to the nation's most common method of abortion is a former attorney for a Christian legal group who critics say is being sought out by conservative litigants because they believe he’ll be sympathetic to their causes.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who's considering a lawsuit aimed at putting a nationwide halt to use of the drug mifepristone, was appointed by President Donald Trump and confirmed in 2019 over fierce opposition by Democrats over his history opposing LGBTQ rights. Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone in the body and is used with the drug misoprostol to end pregnancy within the first 10 weeks.

Kacsmaryk heard arguments in the case on Wednesday, days after he took the unusual step of telling attorneys during a status conference not to publicize the hearing because the case has prompted death threats and protests and he believed “ less advertisement of this hearing is better." Kacsmaryk said he would rule “as soon as possible."

A former federal prosecutor and lawyer for the conservative First Liberty Institute, the judge has ruled against the Biden administration on other issues, including immigration. He was among more than 230 judges installed to the federal bench under Trump as part of a movement by the Republican president and Senate conservatives to shift the American judiciary to the right.

Videos show scattered protests during Iran’s fire festival

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iranians have held scattered anti-government protests during an annual fire festival with ancient roots, according to videos circulating online.

The videos appeared to show protesters in different cities chanting against the country's ruling clerics and hurling firecrackers at security forces during celebrations of Chaharshanbe Soori, which took place on Tuesday. Hard-liners have long condemned the festival, which dates back to 1700 B.C., as un-Islamic.

Iran has seen waves of anti-government protests since September, when a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, died after being detained by the morality police for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic's strict Islamic dress code. At their height, the protests saw thousands of people across the country calling for the overthrow of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The protests have largely died down in over the past few months following a fierce security crackdown. More than 19,700 people were arrested and at least 530 protesters were killed, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that has closely monitored the unrest.

‘Nazi’ references: BBC sportscaster’s tweet revives debate

NEW YORK (AP) — The references seem endless, and they can come from anywhere. In recent days, Pope Francis compared Nicaragua's repression of Catholics to Adolf Hitler's rule in Germany. In Britain, a BBC sportscaster likened the nation's asylum policy to 1930s Germany, resulting in his brief suspension and a national uproar.

For Holocaust and anti-Nazi scholars and organizations, the two sentiments were understandable — but concerning. Invoking Hitler and Nazi Germany, they warn, often serves to revive a familiar and unwelcome line of argument.

“We have to be aware of, and confront, contemporary instances of discrimination, hate speech and human rights abuses across the world,” says Rafal Pankowski, a Polish sociologist who heads the anti-Nazi NEVER AGAIN Association. But he added: “Of course, the historical analogies must not be overused and devalued. The label `Nazi' should not be trivialized and reduced to a term of abuse against anybody we don’t like.”

Last week, Pope Francis was quoted as criticizing the government in Nicaragua, where religious leaders have been arrested or fled, for acting as “if it were a communist dictatorship in 1917 or a Hitlerian one in 1935.” Nicaragua responded by proposing to suspend Vatican ties.