But it is certainly capable of caus-ing some local difficulty.John CurticeJohn Curtice is deputy director of the ESRC Centre for Research into Elections and Social Trends.. A faction of American cardinals was reportedly preparing to force the resignation of one of their own last night – Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston – on the eve of crisis talks with the Pope on the paedophilia scandal in the US Catholic Church. In two prominent child abuse cases he has been accused of shunting the guilty priests from parish to parish instead of defrocking them and reporting them to the police.Some of his colleagues asked for patience yesterday “The trouble began on his watch and he wants to fix it. Give him a chance,” Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington DC told reporters gathered near St Peter’s Square.However, a report in the Los Angeles Times said that other leaders in the American Church intended urging the Vatican to remove Cardinal Law. “Many bishops are of the mind that the healing process really can’t begin until there’s a change of leadership in Boston,” one cardinal told the newspaper on condition of anonymity.”If the Holy See wants to send a strong signal of quality and standards of leadership,” he said, then Cardinal Law “will have to be replaced. It cannot be a phase-out.”Cardinal Law, who is the most senior of all the American cardinals, leading 64 million Catholics, is now known to have travelled secretly to the Vatican only last week to seek advice.

He returned to Boston saying he was determined to remain in his position.On Sunday, however, he gave his most abject apology to date for the Church’s failings. “I and many others have been late to recognise the inadequacy of past policies, the dimensions of the crisis and the changes required to restore a sense of trust,” he told a congregation. He was rewarded with a standing ovations while, outside, protesters chanted for his resignation.The Pope’s only public reference to the issue came in a pre-Easter letter to priests. He said a “dark shadow of suspicion” had been cast over priests “by some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of ordination”.Some in the American Church have indicated that they would like to see the beginnings of a conversation on areas hitherto considered taboo – measures to screen out gays seeking ordination and the viability of celibacy.Cardinal McCarrick said: “I think we’ll talk about whatever the cardinals want to talk about, because we want to make sure that we handle this and that we are able to say to our people that this is under control, that it won’t happen again and we’re moving in that direction.”. A museum in New York celebrating the era of the tenements – the dark and dank four or five-storey buildings that housed poor immigrant families around and before the turn of the last century – wants to evict its neighbours in the tenement next door so it can expand. The solution would seem to lie in the tenement next door.The museum has applied to use a legal tool known as eminent domain to force the residents to move out so that it can acquire the building and instantly double its area of public space.Derrick Smith, a British-born scientist who lives in the building, said: “This museum is supposed to honour the people who lived here. To be honouring the people who lived in the neighbourhood by using eminent domain, which is a very aggressive way to buy a building, seems to be duplicitous.”Ruth Abram, who founded the museum in 1988, said: “Our public tours are at capacity.

Every week, every weekend, the museum has to turn away visitors.”. William Butler Yeats would be horrified. Environmentalists in America have proposed tackling a massive overpopulation of mute swans by clipping their wings and pairing them off for life in barren, same-sex couplings. They say the plan may not inspire poetry – certainly not that penned by Yeats in “The Wild Swans at Coole” (“Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold, Companionable streams or climb the air”) – but it might just stop the swans getting the chop

William Butler Yeats would be horrified. The plan has emerged as one way of dealing with an overpopulation of swans in Maryland’s Cheasepeake Bay, where environmentalists say the birds are devouring grasses vital to the ecosystem.Dr Sladden, who works for a private environmental group near Warrenton, Virginia, said he has set 54 pairs of same-sex swans on private lakes or wetlands with less sensitive ecosystems.