Nation and World briefs for February 6

Pope publicly acknowledges clergy sexual abuse of nuns

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE — Pope Francis on Tuesday publicly acknowledged the scandal of priests and bishops sexually abusing nuns and vowed to do more to fight the problem, the latest sign that there is no end in sight to the Catholic Church’s abuse crisis — and that it now has a reckoning from the #MeToo movement.

Francis admitted to the problem for the first time in public during a news conference while returning to Rome from the United Arab Emirates. The acknowledgment comes just two weeks before he hosts an unprecedented gathering of bishops to craft a global response to the scandal of priestly predators who target children and the superiors who covered up the crimes.

Francis was asked about priests who target adult women — the religious sisters who are the backbone of the Catholic Church’s education, health care and social service ministries around the globe — and whether the Holy See might consider a similar universal approach to combat that issue.

“It’s not that everyone does this, but there have been priests and bishops who have,” Francis told reporters. “And I think that it’s continuing because it’s not like once you realize it that it stops. It continues. And for some time we’ve been working on it.”

“Should we do something more? Yes. Is there the will? Yes. But it’s a path that we have already begun,” Francis said.

Authorities say pilot in fatal California wreck had fake ID

LOS ANGELES — The man piloting a small plane that broke apart over a Southern California neighborhood had false credentials identifying him as a retired Chicago police officer, authorities said Tuesday, but they still had no immediate answers for the cause of the crash.

Antonio Pastini was killed when the twin-engine plane he was piloting broke up shortly after takeoff and fell in pieces in Yorba Linda, igniting a fire in a home where four people died on Sunday. Pastini, 75, was initially identified as a retired officer but Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said there were no records of him working for the department.

Orange County sheriff’s spokeswoman Carrie Braun said the credentials recovered from Pastini were not legitimate, but that the pilot was indeed Pastini.

Aviation safety experts cautioned against drawing early conclusions about the cause of the crash.

“At this stage you don’t make assumptions. You let the evidence lead you where it leads you,” said John Cox, a former commercial pilot and a veteran crash investigator who is head of the consulting firm Safety Operating Systems.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators have been collecting parts of the aircraft, the plane’s records and information about Pastini, who was described as a commercial pilot with an instrument flight rating.

Apartment inferno kills 10; deadliest Paris fire since 2005

PARIS — Paris’ deadliest fire in more than a decade killed at least 10 people Tuesday as flames engulfed a nine-story apartment building, sending residents to the roof and clambering across balconies to escape.

A 40-year-old woman who lived in the building was arrested nearby and detained on suspicion of having set the fire not long before. French police opened a criminal investigation for voluntary arson resulting in death.

Survivors described a chaos of smoke and flames. One neighbor recalled clambering out of her eighth-floor apartment and over balconies to reach safety. Another resident, an off-duty police officer, threw on clothes and rang doorbell after doorbell, trying desperately to alert his neighbors.

Interior Minister Christophe Castaner spoke to reporters Tuesday morning at the scene as plumes of smoke speckled the sky.

“I want to salute the huge mobilization of the Paris firefighters,” he said. “More than 250 people arrived immediately and, throughout the night, saved over 50 people in truly exceptional conditions.”

It was the deadliest fire in Paris since the April 2005 hotel fire near the capital’s famed Opera that killed 24 people. More than 30 people were being treated for “relatively” light injuries, Castaner said. Among the injured were at least eight firefighters.

Authorities suspect the fire resulted from a criminal act, he said. Officials said the suspect had “a history of psychiatric problems.” A judicial official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as an investigation was ongoing, said the woman was drunk when officers detained her.

Red carpet nixed after Liam Neeson reveals racist thoughts

NEW YORK — The red carpet for the premiere of Liam Neeson’s latest film was canceled Tuesday, a day after a British newspaper published an interview in which the actor discussed wanting to kill a random black person nearly 40 years ago when a close friend told him she had been raped by a black man.

Organizers of the New York premiere of “Cold Pursuit” said they were cancelling interviews and photo opportunities for the film hours after Neeson appeared on “Good Morning America” to explain his past racist thoughts. He told interviewer Robin Roberts he is not a racist and moved past his desire for violence after seeking help from a priest and from friends.

Neeson said in an interview published Monday by The Independent that after learning his friend’s attacker was black, he “went up and down areas with a cosh (stick or truncheon)” hoping a black person “would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him.”

“It took me a week, maybe a week and a half, to go through that,” Neeson said.

Neeson told Roberts he had asked about the race of the attacker, along with other descriptive characteristics. He said Tuesday the topic came up because the interviewer asked him about how he tapped into the feelings of revenge that he displays in “Cold Pursuit,” which tells the story of a father who seeks violent revenge for his son’s death.

After 20 years police in 2 states link dead mother and son

Decades after the unidentified bodies of a woman and a 10-year-old boy were found in separate states beside a Southern interstate highway, investigators now say they were a mother and son and the boy’s father has confessed to killing them.

The case was cracked thanks to an online DNA database, help from international police and a consultant whose work led to an arrest in the Golden State Killer investigation, authorities in North Carolina and South Carolina said Tuesday.

But investigators in both states said they had never stopped trying to solve the 1998 cases that they never knew were related, separated by 215 miles along Interstate 85.

“I always kept the case file box under my desk, where it was purposefully in my way. Every time I turned, I hit it with my leg. I did this so the little boy couldn’t be forgotten,” said Orange County, North Carolina, Sheriff’s Maj. Tim Horne, who worked the case from the beginning.

North Carolina authorities even enlisted experts to create a sketch and a bust reconstructing the appearance of the child. But despite widespread dissemination, no one was able to identify him.

Michigan man gets life without parole in 6 shooting deaths

KALAMAZOO, Mich. — A man who fatally shot six strangers in southwestern Michigan was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison with no chance of parole, and some loved ones of those he killed said they believe he’ll face a greater, more permanent punishment.

“Someday when you die and you face God, he will make the ultimate judgment for what you’ve done,” Laurie Smith, who lost her husband and son in the February 2016 rampage, told Jason Dalton during the sentencing hearing. “All I can say is, I do not want to be you — not now and not then.”

Dalton, 48, pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder last month, just as jury selection was about to begin in his trial. Michigan has no death penalty, so he was guaranteed to receive the mandatory life sentence at Tuesday’s hearing in a Kalamazoo County court.

Dalton admitted shooting eight people in three locations in between picking up passengers for Uber. After his arrest , police quoted Dalton as saying a “devil figure” on Uber’s app was controlling him on the day of the shootings.

Four women were killed in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel restaurant: Barbara Hawthorne, Dorothy “Judy” Brown, Mary Lou Nye and her sister-in-law, Mary Jo Nye. Rich Smith and his 17-year-old son, Tyler Smith, were fatally shot while looking at a pickup truck in a dealer’s lot.

Costa Rica ex-leader Oscar Arias accused of sexual assault

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica — Former President Oscar Arias, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was enveloped in scandal Tuesday after a sexual assault complaint was brought against him by a nuclear disarmament activist.

Arias denied the allegation, saying he has never acted against the will of any woman and has fought for gender equality during his career.

According to the publication Semanario Universidad, the woman said the incident took place Dec. 1, 2014, at the ex-president’s home in the capital, San Jose, where she had come for a meeting related to her cause.

She told the publication that Arias grabbed her from behind, touched her breasts, began to kiss her and penetrated her with his fingers, while she reminded him that he was a married man.

“I do not remember well what he replied to me, but he continued to touch me, he inserted his fingers into my vagina and touched me everywhere and kissed me,” the woman was quoted as saying. “Then he told me to wait a bit and he left the office. I didn’t know what to do. I felt trapped in that moment.”