Suit claiming Hebrew Nat'l hot dogs not kosher dismissed

NEW YORK (Reuters) - ConAgra Foods Inc has won the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by consumers claiming the company's Hebrew National hot dogs and other products are not kosher.

U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank in St. Paul federal court ruled on Thursday that he does not have jurisdiction over a dispute that he described as "intrinsically religious in nature."

Eleven consumers filed the lawsuit last May, asserting that ConAgra misled customers into believing that its products were kosher according to "the most stringent" Orthodox Jewish standards by including a symbol on its packaging.

The lawsuit alleged that ConAgra's contractors, meat processor AER Services Inc and kosher supervisor Triangle K, failed to follow proper religious procedures. The plaintiffs sought unspecified damages and an injunction against the labels as well as class-action status for consumers who have bought Hebrew National products since 2008.

But Frank said he was constrained by clear Supreme Court precedent barring civil judges from resolving faith-based disputes.

"Any judicial inquiry as to whether defendant misrepresented that its Hebrew National products are "100% kosher" (when Triangle K, an undisputedly religious entity, certified them as such) would necessarily intrude upon rabbinical religious autonomy," Frank wrote.

He noted that ConAgra, the only named defendant in the lawsuit, is a secular entity, while the plaintiffs chose to leave Triangle K and AER out of the lawsuit.

"It is Triangle K and its Orthodox rabbis who make such determinations," Frank said. "Naturally, therefore, this court cannot determine whether defendant's Hebrew National products are in fact kosher without delving into questions of religious doctrine."

Hart Robinovitch, the plaintiffs' lawyer, did not immediately return a call for comment on Thursday evening.

In a statement, ConAgra spokeswoman Becky Niiya said the company has "always stood by our kosher distinction and status."

"We know how important kosher quality is to our consumers, and we look forward to continuing to make Hebrew National 100% pure kosher beef franks and other kosher offerings," she said.

The case is Wallace et al v. ConAgra Foods Inc, U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota, No. 12-01354.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Additional reporting by Jonathan Stempel; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)

Judge orders Los Angeles archdiocese to release abusive priest files without omissions

LOS ANGELES, Calif. - A judge has ordered the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles to turn over 30,000 pages from the confidential files of priests accused of sex abuse without blacking out the names of top church officials who were responsible for handling their cases.

Judge Emilie Elias on Thursday ordered the nation's largest archdiocese to release the files by Feb. 22.

A record-breaking $660 million settlement with more than 500 victims in 2007 set the stage for the release of the files, but the archdiocese and individual priests fought for five years to keep them secret.

The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times went to court in January because the church had blacked out the names of church leaders who made key decisions about sexually abusive priests.

LA archbishop relieves retired cardinal of duties

FILE - In this Feb. 9, 2005 file photo, Archbishop Jose H. Gomez greets parishioners following an Ash Wednesday service at Mission San Jose in San Antonio, Texas. On Thursday, Jan. 31, 2013, Gomez relieved retired Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony of his remaining duties on the same night the church released thousands more files on priest sexual abuse. Gomez released a statement Thursday night Jan. 31, 2013, saying he has told Mahony he will no longer have any administrative or public duties. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Cardinal Roger Mahony, who retired with a tainted career after dodging criminal charges over how he handled pedophile priests, was stripped of duties by his successor as a judge ordered confidential church personnel files released.

The unprecedented move by Archbishop Jose Gomez came less than two weeks after other long-secret priest personnel records showed how Mahony worked with top aides to protect the Roman Catholic church from the engulfing scandal.

One of those aides, Monsignor Thomas Curry stepped down Thursday as auxiliary bishop in the Los Angeles archdiocese's Santa Barbara region. Gomez said Mahony, 76, would no longer have administrative or public duties in the diocese.

"I find these files to be brutal and painful reading," Gomez said in a statement, referring to 12,000 pages of files posted online by the church Thursday night just hours after a judge's order. "The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children."

The fallout was highly unusual and marks a dramatic shift from the days when members of the church hierarchy emerged largely unscathed despite the roles they played in covering up clergy sex abuse, said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit and senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

"It's quite extraordinary. I don't think anything like this has happened before," Reese said. "It's showing that there are consequences now to mismanaging the sex abuse crisis."

Several of the documents released late Thursday echo recurring themes that emerged over the past decade in dioceses nationwide, where church leaders moved problem priests between parishes and didn't call the police.

In one instance, a draft of a plan with Mahony's name on it calls for sending a molester priest to his native Spain for a minimum of seven years, paying him $400 a month and offering health insurance. In return, the cardinal would agree to write the Vatican and ask them to cancel his excommunication.

It was unclear whether the proposed agreement was enacted with the Rev. Jose Ugarte, who had been reported to the archdiocese 20 years earlier by a physician for drugging and raping a boy in a hotel in Ensenada, his file shows.

"He has been sexually involved with three young men in addition to the original allegations," Curry, then Mahony's point person for dealing with suspected priests, wrote in 1993.

In another case, Mahony resisted turning over a list of altar boys to police who were investigating claims against a visiting Mexican priest who was later determined to have molested 26 boys during a 10-month stint in Los Angeles.

"We cannot give such a list for no cause whatsoever," he wrote on a January 1988 memo.

Mahony, who retired in 2011 after more than a quarter-century at the helm of the archdiocese, has publicly apologized for mistakes he made in dealing with priests who molested children.

He has survived three grand jury investigations and several depositions by civil attorneys representing alleged abuse victims.

Prosecutors, who have been stymied for years in their attempts to see the internal church files, have said they will search for new evidence of criminal wrongdoing by church leaders. Most of the material, however, now falls well outside the statute of limitations.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Emilie Elias ordered the diocese to turn over the files Thursday without blacking out the names of top church officials who were responsible for handling the priests.

The judge gave the archdiocese until Feb. 22 to turn over the files, but they were released in less than an hour after she signed the order.

While the church left the names of church leaders intact, as specified, they removed names of victims, witnesses and priests who weren't accused. In some instances, whole sections were removed, including paragraphs of newspaper articles and efforts to black out other names even included the bylines of reporters and the phone number of the district attorney's office.

The church said in a statement that the files' release "concludes a sad and shameful chapter in the history of our local church."

The archdiocese, the nation's largest with 4.3 million members, had planned to black out the names of members of the hierarchy who were responsible for the priests, and instead provide a cover sheet for each priest's file, listing the names of top officials who handled that case. The church reversed course Wednesday after The Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times and plaintiff attorneys objected.

A record-breaking $660 million settlement in 2007 with more than 500 alleged victims paved the way for the ultimate disclosure, but the archdiocese and individual priests fought to keep them secret for more than five years.

Some church critics said Gomez's actions, particularly against Mahony, amounted to a slap on the wrist as long as he remained a cardinal and a member of the powerful Vatican body that elects the Pope.

The reprimand is a "purely symbolic punishment that they hope will satisfy at least some people in the archdiocese," said Terry McKiernan, founder of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks the release of priest files nationally.

"I don't think that many savvy observers of this will be deceived."

______

Associated Press Writer Shaya Tayefe Mohajer contributed to this report.

China punishes Tibetans in self-immolation cases

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese courts convicted eight Tibetans over accusations they incited others to self-immolate in the first such prosecutions to become publicly known, showing Beijing's resolve to stamp out the protests by criminalizing both the protesters and their supporters.

The convictions Thursday, reported by the official Xinhua News agency, also appear aimed at shoring up Beijing's claims that such protests against Chinese rule are instigated by outsiders with ulterior motives, rather than being homegrown demonstrations.

About 100 Tibetan monks, nuns and lay people have set themselves on fire since 2009, usually after calling for religious freedom and the return of their exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

A court in Aba prefecture in the southwestern province of Sichuan sentenced Lorang Konchok, 40, to death with a two-year reprieve and gave his nephew Lorang Tsering, 31, a 10-year prison sentence for their roles in encouraging eight people to self-immolate last year, three of whom died from their burns, Xinhua said.

Both were charged with murder.

Suspended death sentences are usually commuted to life in prison. Calls to the court rang unanswered Thursday.

In a separate report, Xinhua said a county court in Gannan prefecture in Gansu province sentenced six ethnic Tibetans to between three and 12 years in prison for their roles in the self-immolation of a local resident in October.

Four of them were convicted of murder after they obstructed police efforts to retrieve the body of a self-immolator, who was still alive when police put out flames but died without receiving timely medical treatment, Xinhua said. The other two were found guilty of public disturbance for causing chaos at the scene, Xinhua said.

Authorities initially responded to the self-immolations by flooding Tibetan areas with security forces to seal them off and prevent information from getting out. With those efforts doing little to stop or slow the protests, Beijing now appears to be seeking to weaken sympathy for them by portraying them as misguided and criminal.

At a regular daily briefing Thursday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said the Lorangs "pushed innocent people onto the road of self-immolations and the road of no return" to further what the government says is the Dalai Lama's goal to split Tibet from China.

"We hope through the sentencing of these cases, the international community will be able to clearly see the evil and malicious methods used by the Dalai clique in the self-immolations and condemn their crimes," Hong said.

The self-claimed Tibetan government-in-exile, the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala, India, has repeatedly appealed to Tibetans not to self-immolate, but it also says the message of the protesters cannot be ignored. It has criticized Beijing for imposing more draconian measures instead of addressing the grievances of Tibetans.

China says Tibet has always been part of its territory, but many Tibetans say the Himalayan region was virtually independent for centuries until Chinese troops invaded in the 1950s.

Xinhua said Lorang Konchok met with one self-immolator the day before he set himself on fire. It said he recorded the man's personal information, took his photos and promised to spread word of his self-immolation overseas while conveying his last words to his family.

Xinhua said five other people goaded by the pair to self-immolate did not do so, either because they changed their minds or because police intervened.

Earlier this month, Xinhua reported that police in Qinghai province arrested a Tibetan monk who attempted to self-immolate last November and another Tibetan man who allegedly encouraged him. The men were arrested on charges of jeopardizing public safety and murder.

Police: Teen shot by fellow student at Ga. school

A student and parent react to seeing each other when buses arrive to unite parents and children at Emmanuel Baptist Church following a shooting at Price Middle school in Atlanta on Thursday, Jan. 31, 2013. A 14-year-old boy was wounded outside the school Thursday afternoon and a fellow student was in custody as a suspect, authorities said. No other students were hurt. (AP Photo/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Curtis Compton) MARIETTA DAILY OUT; GWINNETT DAILY POST OUT; LOCAL TV OUT; WXIA-TV OUT; WGCL-TV OUT

ATLANTA (AP) — A student opened fire at his middle schoolThursday afternoon, wounding a 14-year-old in the neck before an armed officer working at the school was able to get the gun away, police said.

Multiple shots were fired in the courtyard of Price Middle Schooljust south of downtown about 1:50 p.m. and the one boy was hit, Atlanta Police Chief George Turner said. In the aftermath, a teacher received minor cuts, he said.

The wounded boy was taken "alert, conscious and breathing" to Grady Memorial Hospital, said police spokesman Carlos Campos. Grady Heath System Spokeswoman Denise Simpson said the teen had been discharged from the hospital Thursday night. Campos said charges against the shooter were pending.

Police swarmed the school of about 400 students after reports of the shooting while a crowd of anxious parents gathered in the streets, awaiting word on their children. Students were kept at the locked-down school for more than two hours before being dismissed.

Investigators believe the shooting was not random and that something occurred between the two students that may have led to it.

Schools Superintendent Erroll Davis said the school does have metal detectors.

"The obvious question is how did this get past a metal detector?" Davis asked about the gun. "That's something we do not know yet."

The armed resource officer who took the gun away was off-duty and at the school, but police didn't release details on him or whether he is regularly at Price. Since 20 children and six adults were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December, calls for armed officers in every school have resonated across the country.

Hours after the Atlanta shooting, several school buses loaded with children pulled away from the school and stopped in front of a church about a half-block away. Parents tried boarding the buses. Police who initially tried to stop the parents, relented and screamed, "Let them off!" about the students.

James Bolton was at work when his sister called saying a teen had been shot at his son's school and was in the crowd as parents began swarming the fleet of buses.

"Move, I see my son, I see mine!" he said, running up to embrace James Bolton Jr. "As long as I got this one back I'm OK," he said, holding his son's head against his chest as parents nearby frantically searched for their children.

Bolton Jr. said he was in class when the intercom sounded and a school official announced the building was under immediate lockdown.

"They told us we had to be quiet," Bolton told The Associated Press. "They said something went on in the courtyard." Bolton said he was unaware that anyone had been shot until a reporter asked him about it.

Shakita Walker, whose daughter is an eighth-grader at the school, said she received a text from her that said, "Ma somebody's shooting and somebody got shot." Walker, who works at another school, said she jumped in her car and was thinking "just hurry up and get there."

Walker said her daughter called to tell her that they were being kept in the gymnasium, but she said she was anxious to see her to make sure she was OK.

The fear and anxiety was palpable in the crowd, as one person yelled, "Does anyone know what happened?"

Superintendent Davis sympathized with concerned parents who complained that it took too long for students to be released from the building. He said emergency procedures were followed according to protocol and school district officials would meet Friday to review their response. Calls to the school district were not immediately returned.

Mayor Kasim Reed condemned gun violence in a statement shortly after the shooting and said counselors were at the school to meet with students, faculty and family members.

"Gun violence in and around our schools is simply unconscionable and must end," Reed said. "Too many young people are being harmed, and too many families are suffering from unimaginable and unnecessary grief."

Outside the school, Laquanda Pittman said she still hasn't heard from her sixth-grade son. She said she heard the news of the shooting on TV and immediately came to the school.

"All types of stuff went through my head. I'm wondering whether it was my child who got shot, is my child OK, did he see what happened?" Pittman said.

She said she just wants to see her son.

"As a parent, you just think you can send your child to school and you hope they come home OK," she said.