An independent inquiry into sex abuse in the German Catholic Church was supposed to restore faith in the embattled institution. But now the Church has called it off, citing a breakdown in trust with the researchers.

It was a major promise after a major disaster: In summer 2011, the Catholic Church in Germany pledged full transparency. One year earlier, an abuse scandal had shaken the country’s faithful, as an increasing number of cases surfaced in which priests had sexually abused children and then hidden behind a wall of silence.

The Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute (KFN) was given the job of investigating the cases in 2011. The personnel files from churches in all 27 dioceses were to be examined for cases of abuse in an attempt to win back some of the Church’s depleted credibility.

But now the Church has called off the study, citing a breakdown in trust. ‘The relationship of mutual trust between the bishops and the head of the institute has been destroyed,’ said the Bishop of Trier, Stephan Ackermann, on Wednesday morning.

The director of the KFN, Christian Pfeiffer, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the Church had refused to cooperate. At the end of last year, he contacted the dioceses twice […]

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The U.S. Agriculture Department cited drought and heat on Wednesday in designating 597 counties in 14 states as primary natural disaster areas.

‘As drought persists, USDA will continue to partner with producers to see them through longer-term recovery, while taking the swift actions needed to help farmers and ranchers prepare their land and operations for the upcoming planting season,’ Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement.

The designations make qualified farmers in the areas eligible for low-interest loans, the agency said.

Affected counties have suffered severe drought for eight consecutive weeks, which qualified them for the automatic designation.

Australians battle wildfires

The announcement comes a day after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that 2012 had been the hottest year on record for the continental United States and the second-worst for ‘extreme’ weather such as hurricanes, droughts or floods.

The year’s average temperature of 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit across the ‘Lower 48’ was more than 3.2 degrees warmer than the average for the 20th Century, NOAA reported. That topped the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree.

Drought shriveled crops across the farm belt, leading to an expected rise in food prices in 2013, according to USDA. It also turned forests of the mountain […]

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With a temporary ceasefire declared in the war over Christmas, fundamentalist Christian conservatives are looking for other places that religion may be under attack – and one radical thinks that that place may be the military.

Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, a right-wing Christian think tank that has been classified as a hate group, has flipped out over a ‘wacky

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It’s no news that the U.S. has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than most high-income countries. But a magisterial new report says Americans are actually less healthy across their entire life spans than citizens of 16 other wealthy nations.

And the gap is steadily widening.

‘What struck us - and it was quite sobering - was the recurring trend in which the U.S. seems to be slipping behind other high-income countries,’ the lead author of the report, Dr. Steven Woolf, tells Shots.

He says Americans of all ages up to 75 have shorter lives and more illness and injury. (An interactive graphic displaying the main results can be found here.)

Strikingly, even Americans who are white, insured, college-educated and upper-income are worse off than their counterparts around the world - a finding that no one quite understands.

‘People with seemingly everything going for them still live shorter lives and have higher disease rates than people in other countries,’ Woolf says.

The 378-page report was completed under the auspices of the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. It grew out of an effort last year that concluded the U.S. has a large and widening ‘mortality gap’ among adults over 50 […]

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Production at the world’s third largest source of oil has polluted surrounding waters with toxic substances, according to a new study. The findings add fuel to a fiery debate over a proposed pipeline connecting Canadian oil sands with US refineries.

Lakes as far as 56 miles away from production facilities near Fort McMurray, Alberta, show unnaturally high levels of substances linked to cancer. Researchers say they are the result of roughly half a century of development at the Athabasca oil sands.

While concentrations of carcinogens remain low compared with those found in urban lakes, scientists at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, called the findings, released Monday, ‘worrying’ and warned of future effects from the spread of oil sands contaminants.

‘We’re not saying these are poisonous ponds,

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