promoearn: Fathers becoming fathers: The Vatican's secret rules

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Fathers becoming fathers: The Vatican's secret rules

Tuesday, February 19

Pope Francis delivers the traditional Urbi et Orbi Christmas Day blessing from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican on Dec. 25, 2018.

Fathers becoming fathers: The Vatican's secret rules

From a Stonehenge mystery to Bernie Sanders running for president, here's Tuesday's top news.

Today, we're carefully considering if our Instagram posts could land us in jail (*coughs* Roger Stone *coughs*). It's Ashley Shaffer, here with the news you heard about but may not have read.

Should we sell Montana, though? A petition online calls for paying off the national debt by selling Montana to Canada for $1 trillion. Some Montanans have questions about the petition, including, "How dare you?"

Catholic priests got women pregnant. Now there are rules.

Catholic priests break celibacy vows so often that the church drafted secret rules for those who father a child. The Vatican has required celibacy from priests for centuries, but frequent violation of that rule prompted the church to establish a secret set of guidelines for priests who father children. The latest revelation, first reported by The New York Times, comes amid a new wave of developments tied to the burgeoning sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the church for close to two decades, including what the Pope called the "sexual slavery" of nuns.

Protecting America from space attacks. It's a thing now.

It's not a "Star Trek" spinoff or new Michael Bay flick, it's a new branch of the military closer to liftoff after President Donald Trump signed a directive Tuesday to create the program. Space Force's mission? To patrol Earth's orbit and protect America from attack. Critics called the idea far-fetched and wasteful not long ago, but Trump remains enthusiastic about the idea, tweeting in August: "Space Force all the way!" It's been a harder sell in Congress (and the interwebs), where cost and redundancy concerns have stymied efforts to make the new military branch, set to start within the U.S. Air Force. Funding for the program will be in the administration's proposed 2020 budget, the White House said.

He lost his gun license but kept the gun

The gunman who killed five and wounded six last week in a shooting rampage in Aurora, Illinois, had his gun license revoked but kept the gun. Illinois State Police sent the convicted felon a letter in 2014 giving him 48 hours to get rid of his Smith & Wesson. If he saw the letter, he ignored it. That's the unfortunate norm in Illinois: Fewer than half of Illinois gun owners with revoked licenses abide the requirement to show they no longer own firearms, according to State Police data. State Police sent more than 10,800 revocation letters to residents last year, but "in most instances" gun owners failed to vouch that they no longer possess a firearm – a failure of life-and-death importance in Aurora.

Real quick

•	Ariana Grande has three hit songs – a feat last done by The Beatles.
•	This ISIS bride says she wants to return to the U.S. and face justice.
•	He tipped $22,000 at a hotel bar. Then the police arrested him.
•	The editor of an Alabama newspaper published an editorial calling for the Ku Klux Klan to "clean out D.C."
•	Three teachers joked about hanging students. Now they're on leave.
•	Manny Machado just agreed to largest free-agent contract ever: $300 million.
•	Sen. Bernie Sanders is running for president again.
•	USA Gymnastics named an ex-NBA VP as its new president and CEO, the fourth CEO in 23 months.

Stonehenge's greatest mystery solved?

Scientists have discovered the exact location of the quarries from where dozens of Stonehenge's massive stones came: western Wales, about 180 miles away. Now we're a step closer to Stonehenge's greatest mystery – why its stones came from so far away. The answer? They were relatively "easy" to remove, archaeologists theorize, as they were already natural vertical pillars: Using wood mallets, workers only had to bash wedges into the ready-made joints between pillars to break them apart, per a study. The two-ton stones were then dragged or carried to their location in present-day England.

The Stonehenge quarry, in the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire, west Wales.

University College London

Karl Lagerfeld: Chanel 'was a sleeping beauty – not even a beautiful one'

The fashion world is mourning the death of Karl Lagerfeld, an industry icon for over 40 years. The eccentric German designer blended fashion and art, favoring white hair, black sunglasses, and 19th-century-style shirt collars, and simultaneously was creative director of French (Chanel), Italian (Fendi) and eponymous international fashion labels. One of the most celebrated, if controversial, fashion icons of the 20th and 21st centuries, Lagerfeld died early Tuesday. He was around 85.