News Briefs

A bomb attack on May 5 at a church in Arusha, Tanzania, killed two people and wounded a dozen more. The Vatican nuncio, Archbishop Francisco Padilla, escaped unharmed. • A degeneration of religion is how the Vatican’s culture minister, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, on May 8 described Mexico’s “Santa Muerte,” worshipped both by drug dealers and everyday Mexicans terrorized by drug violence. • The private prison conglomerate Geo Group Inc., which haas been accused by critics of human rights abuses, reported on May 8 that first-quarter profits rose 56 percent. • In the second tragedy to hit Bangladesh’s garment industry in two weeks, a fire at a factory in Dhaka killed eight people on May 8 even as the death toll from a building collapse at a nearby commercial center exceeded 1,000. • A delegation from Women’s Rights Without Frontiers was turned away from China’s embassy in Washington when it attempted on April 26 to deliver a petition seeking to end “gendercide” and forced abortion in China. • Former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt was found guilty on May 10 of the genocide of more than 1,700 indigenous Ixil Mayans during his rule in 1982-83.