World/Nation
• Tea party-backed candidate loses in North Carolina
WASHINGTON - North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis captured the Republican nomination to oppose imperiled Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan on Tuesday night, overcoming anti-establishment rivals by a comfortable margin in the first of a springtime spate of primaries testing the strength of a tea party movement that first rocked the GOP four years ago.
In Ohio, Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald won the Democratic nomination to challenge Gov. John Kasich in the fall. U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, rolled to re-nomination for another term in Congress, his 13th.
On a night that was kind to Republican incumbents in three states, GOP Rep. Susan Brooks of Indiana easily fended off a challenge from the right, rolling up 75 percent of the votes in a three-way race. First-term Rep. David Joyce of Ohio had a slightly tougher time but was running well ahead of his tea party rival.
Anti-war Republican Rep. Walter Jones defeated his challenger in North Carolina.
In North Carolina, Tillis was winning about 45 percent of the vote with ballots counted in 72 percent of the state's precincts, easily surpassing the 40 percent needed to avoid a July runoff. Greg Brannon was trailing despite support from tea party favorite Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Mark Harris, a Baptist pastor, was third.
• Vatican defrocks 848 priests for abuse since 2004
GENEVA - The Vatican revealed Tuesday that over the past decade, it has defrocked 848 priests who raped or molested children and sanctioned another 2,572 with lesser penalties, providing the first ever breakdown of how it handled the more than 3,400 cases of abuse reported to the Holy See since 2004.
The Vatican's U.N. ambassador in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, released the figures during a second day of grilling by a U.N. committee monitoring implementation of the U.N. treaty against torture.
Tomasi insisted that the Holy See was only obliged to abide by the torture treaty inside the tiny Vatican City State, which has a population of only a few hundred people.
But significantly, he didn't dispute the committee's contention that sexual violence against children can be considered torture. Legal experts have said that classifying sexual abuse as torture could expose the Catholic Church to a new wave of lawsuits since torture cases in much of the world don't carry statutes of limitations.
Tomasi also provided statistics about how the Holy See has adjudicated sex abuse cases for the past decade. The Vatican in 2001 required bishops and religious superiors to forward all credible cases of abuse to Rome for review after determining that they were shuffling pedophile priests from diocese to diocese rather than subjecting them to church trials. Only in 2010 did the Vatican explicitly tell bishops and superiors to also report credible cases to police where required by local laws.
• Driver arrested after White House incident
WASHINGTON - Access to the White House complex was halted for about an hour Tuesday after a vehicle followed a motorcade carrying President Barack Obama's daughters through the gates.
Uniformed agents immediately stopped the vehicle after it trailed in behind the motorcade at about 4:40 p.m. EDT, the Secret Service said.
The driver, identified as Mathew Evan Goldstein, 55, was arrested and charged with unlawful entry. No hometown was given.
District of Columbia police swept the vehicle for explosives as it sat just feet away from the northwest gate of the White House. Access to Pennsylvania Avenue and the White House complex was restored an hour later.
- The Associated Press