DATELINE–Vatican City

As Holy Week drew to a close, a lagging Pope John Paul II delivered the traditional Easter address to a crowd of over 150,000 pilgrims, tourists, and Romans. After calling for peace in 61 languages and beseeching the world to end racism and xenophobia, the pope made a surprise announcement.

At the end of his two-hour appearance, fighting hand and head tremors that make moving and speaking difficult, John Paul spoke publicly about his struggles with Parkinson’s disease and informed the faithful that this disease would soon render him unable to execute his duties as pope. In an unprecedented move, he also urged the College of Cardinals, the body responsible for the election of popes, to choose a cleric of African descent to replace him.

“The face of the Holy Catholic Church in the third millennium is not white,” the pontiff explained, as he briefly extolled the role of Africans in the church from the times of the Roman Empire.

Invoking Easter as a time to “overturn the hardness of our hearts” and “impel individuals and state to full respect” for human rights, John Paul further declaimed that over the past 500 years the Catholic Church’s record on human rights issues has been mixed at best. Earlier this year, in fact, the Vatican issued edicts apologizing for its role in the Spanish Inquisition, the conquest of Latin America, and the Holocaust.

Sources close to the College of Cardinals believe the pope’s successor has indeed been chosen and will most likely be Francis Arinze, a 66-year-old Nigerian cardinal. Arinze, who converted to Catholicism from a traditional African religion when he was only nine years old, parrots Pope John Paul’s conservative social stances but is also known for reaching out to the Third World. In the past, Arinze called for talks with leaders of other religions, and is closely associated with a campaign to diversify the church.

The bishop’s fate will depend on the roughly 120-member College of Cardinals, which will designate the next leader of the Roman Catholic world. There are presently 15 Africans in the College of Cardinals, and almost half of the college’s members are neither European nor North American.

The charismatic and media-savvy African cleric, who has lived and worked in Rome for over a decade now, would represent that majority of Catholics who now live in the Third World; the fastest-growing Catholic population, on a percentage basis, is African.

“The Catholic Church is explicitly rejecting attitudes of racism and xenophobia,” comments Paul Wilkinson, a journalist who covers the Vatican for the Associated Press. “But the real question now is: ‘Which score will they settle? Latin America or Africa?’”

Wilkinson and other experts on the Catholic Church suggest that there is a power struggle under way and that Arinze may face competition from would-be candidates such as Bishop Ruíz García, the head of the Catholic Church in the war-torn Mexican state of Chiapas.

“What makes one more Catholic, spreading the Gospel and growing the community of Catholics or challenging unjust empires?” asks Wilkinson. “This is a fight for the very soul of the Catholic Church.”

García is one of several prominent Catholic leaders in Latin America championing the rights of the poor and denouncing the effects of neo-liberal economic policies in the Southern Hemisphere. In sharp contrast, Arinze has chosen not to involve himself in such worldly struggles, preferring that the church concentrate on bringing more believers to the faith rather than embroiling itself in national political disputes.

Sister Virginia Delacroix, who edits an Internet newsletter called The Vatican Today, believes the college is torn between a candidate who espouses the church’s antagonism toward the effects of free-market economic policies in the developing world and a candidate who can best serve diverse communities, rich and poor, while continuing to add to the church rolls.

DATELINE–Los Angeles

It’s no longer a question of whether but rather when. While many plan to mark Earth Day with dire warnings that our environment is killing us, several industries are positioning themselves to make a killing.

Call it making lemonade and out of life’s lemons. But what’s an environmental holocaust to one Birkenstock-clad petition-passer is an economic opportunity to legions of corporate fat cats, mom-and-pop businesses, and even foreign governments. Living on Earth has never been so hard or so potentially profitable.

Warm Globally, Profit Locally

In Southern California, rising ocean levels caused by global warming have geologists predicting the loss of residential acreage in heavily populated coastal areas. With the ocean expected to reclaim as much as 50 yards of prime beachfront property up and down the coast, tens of thousands of residents will be forced to relocate.

As engineers speculate where the waterline will stabilize, the property values of formerly less desirable inland apartments and houses have suddenly skyrocketed. This precipitous land rush has sparked a 20 percent price spike in some communities and even spawned boutique real estate firms like the Del Mar-based outfit Global House Warming.

According to broker David Bracchio, global warming is the biggest thing to hit the real estate industry since the Internet. “With the climate changing, some parts of the country will become unlivable, while previously undesirable areas heat up,” Bracchio exclaims. “It’s a very exciting time for us.”

Bracchio’s company hopes to mediate between the relatively affluent and well-insured beach dwellers who will be displaced and the predominantly middle-class inland owners who may find their homes enriched by newly minted ocean views. “It’s the only natural disaster I know of that’s a win-win situation,” says Bracchio. “The inlanders can either cash in and move to the suburbs or enjoy the perks of living seaside.”

Women Are From Earth, Men Are Also From Earth

At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a new certification program that trains therapists to diagnose and treat clients with “weather-related disorders” reports a two-year waiting list for admission. The course teaches licensed therapists the finer points of both well-known ailments such as seasonal affective disorder, and newer complaints such as transportation-related anxiety and respiratory stress injuries.

Ear-nose-throat specialist Dr. Andrea Ross, who heads the Ann Arbor training course, reports that the list of environmental-related physiological and psychological disorders is growing faster than scientists can record them. “In the last two years alone we’ve recognized 16 new conditions, including food-centric phobias and emotional defense suppression,” Ross notes. While many of these conditions are so new that scientists are divided on proper therapy, that hasn’t stopped record numbers of therapists from hanging out their shingles in pursuit of the environmental illness dollar.

But that’s not all. The domestic market for so-called enviro-therapeutic goods, including “sunlight” simulation lamps, oxygen-injecting HVAC systems, and furniture and household goods in “organic colors,” is expected to generate upward of $1 billion this year in billings for service providers and manufacturers.

The Cutting Edge of Evolution

If most of the innovation around environment-related services and goods is taking place in the U.S., the trend is indisputably global with a number of Third World nations joining the fray. In the Philippines, where less than half of the population has access to potable water and poor solid-waste disposal practices constitute a perennial problem, a government-sponsored research program has claimed a major breakthrough in environmental coping technologies: genes for surviving pollution.

As part of a biotech venture with the U.S. company Pharmacia (formerly Monsanto), the government of the Philippines has been carefully monitoring the health of three generations of a society of garbage-dump dwellers in the capital city of Manila. What researchers claim to have discovered and now hope to market is a gene that enables some humans to breathe toxic levels of carbon monoxide and other lethal gases without harm.

In clinical tests, the toxin-resistant gene has been successfully introduced into mammals, but no experiments with human subjects have yet been performed. Although such tests are years away, Pharmacia has already dubbed the gene Aramina in honor of Ara Mina Baboyan, the 7-year-old girl in whom the gene was first found and whose family has lived in one of Manila’s waste landfills for 40 years. Philippines President Joseph Erap Estrada lauds the discovery as “a first step towards a better living standard for all nations on Earth.”

DATELINE–Washington

Joshua Greenberg was doing a simple accounting reconciliation when he happened upon a red flag in the books of the Global Justice Network. A longtime volunteer at the Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit and a participant in this week’s A16 anti-globalization rally, the accountant could hardly believe his eyes when he traced the source of a string of $1,000 cash contributions to the GJN: employees at the Institute for Justice, a conservative legal organization based in Washington, D.C.

“Why would a bunch of right-wing lawyers in D.C. funnel money to a progressive group in Oregon that wants to smash the WTO?” asks Greenberg, who by day works as a senior analyst at PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP. “But when I took my questions to the executive director, she was obviously uncomfortable with the conversation.”

Greenberg decided to do a little research on his own and stumbled on the anti-globalization movement’s dirty little secret – when it comes to the WTO, the leftist anti-free trade movement is in bed, both philosophically and financially speaking, with radical right-wing conservatives.

Greenberg’s discovery, which was widely publicized in a report by the Wall Street Journal, has begun to undermine much of the rhetoric invoked by anti-free trade activists. “De-fund the Fund, Break the Bank, Dump the Debt” is the official rallying cry of the upcoming Mobilization for Global Justice protests; except for the issue of debt forgiveness, the protesters’ agenda bears a remarkable resemblance to economic policies long advocated by archconservative economists and legislators.

Indeed, on the eve of mass demonstrations in Washington, D.C., that target the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and are often referred to as “Seattle East,” organizers continue to be pestered by rumors of collusion with corporate interests.

“Who hates the IMF? Who wants to get rid of the World Bank?” asks Martina Shubyk, an economist at the University of Chicago. “People who don’t want U.S. tax dollars to bail out Third World countries, companies that don’t want to give a leg up to their suppliers in poor nations – and, of course, American union organizers.”

Shubyk points to the last two presidential campaigns of former Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan, as well as comments by Republican leaders like House Majority leader Dick Armey and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, as ironic testimony to the long-standing hatred that conservatives harbor for both the IMF and the World Bank and those organizations’ efforts to invest in and bail out Third World nations.

“When Armey led the effort to renege on payment of U.S. dues owed to the IMF, he argued Republicans weren’t worth their weight in salt if they couldn’t ’say no to $18 billion to an international organization run by a French Socialist,’” Shubyk notes.

While the extent of the political alliance between organizers of this week’s protests and right-wing proponents of free trade is largely a matter of speculation, prominent conservatives continue to laud the organizers of the A16 protests. “Even though it’s eerie to see the ‘Break the Bank’ posters going up around town,” says Jose Piñera, a researcher with the Cato Institute, “I’d be stupid to look this gift horse in the mouth. In fact, we welcome this refreshing moment of common sense.”

Not as amused by the protests are representatives of the World Bank and the IMF who are meeting in Washington this week in the hopes of advancing a measure that would allow some of the poorest nations of Africa, Latin America, and Asia to sell goods to the United States and other Western nations without facing import tariffs or quotas.

“We really feel like we’re being sucker-punched,” says Christine Factor, a spokesperson for the World Bank, “when it’s the World Bank that has been trying to advocate for human rights and economic empowerment for half a century.” Although officials at the World Bank would not comment explicitly on the allegations linking conservatives and the A16 protests, Factor did urge the participants in the protests to “funnel their creative energies” toward getting Congress to ratify World Bank proposals.

“We have a debt forgiveness proposition on the table; we have a call for increased grants to developing nations; we are trying to give some of the poorest countries a chance at survival through trade and not loans,” asserts Factor. “We are the organization that is bringing the developing world’s agenda to the table. If not the World Bank, then who? The U.S. Congress?”

DATELINE–Santa Monica

While some gay activists are protesting the recent passage of an anti-gay marriage initiative in California, a feminist group has launched a movement questioning the institution of marriage, gay or otherwise.

The group, which calls itself Take Back the Knight, touts marriage as an “archaic and exploitative custom” and wants to see the privileges associated with marriage eradicated altogether rather than extended to gays and lesbians.

“You shouldn’t have to get married to get access to health care,” says Lexi Kober, Take Back the Knight’s lead organizer and a lesbian in her late 40s. “If gays feel that marriage laws deny them access to health care, they should agitate for universal health care, not gay marriage.”

Such an aggressive anti-marriage agenda has helped the group make enemies right and left. Prominent gay rights groups like the Human Rights Commission and the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund accuse Kober and her compatriots of being dupes for the religious right. But perhaps even more controversial than their politics are the activists’ unorthodox tactics, which include encouraging gay couples to “divorce” and disrupting gay weddings.

In a well-publicized incident, the nuptials of two gay men in Santa Monica degenerated into a heated shouting match when Take Back the Knight members hijacked the ceremony. When the rabbi asked the gathered guests, “If anyone among you knows of any reason why this man and this man should not be joined in holy matrimony,” the best man, who was a woman, stepped forward and shouted, “Marriage is murder – stop giving a corrupt institution minority cred.”

As for heterosexual unions, the feminists leave that battle to their gay activist counterparts. “Gays are already protesting straight weddings in response to the Knight Initiative,” explains a wry Kober. “We’re just trying to finish the job by going after gay weddings.” Indeed, Take Back the Knight exhibits a thoroughness that is reminiscent of 1970s-style activism – but with a 21st-century sensibility. Even the group’s name is an exercise in irony, referring to the anti-rape rallies focused on empowering women and the anti-gay marriage crusade of California state Sen. Pete Knight.

Irony alone may not be enough to shield the group from the political repercussions of disrupting gay weddings. Dave Guffin, a staff lawyer with the Los Angeles chapter of the ACLU, witnessed the Santa Monica wedding disruption and believes that Take Back the Knight supporters are doing more harm than good. “You know people are starving somewhere in the world,” Guffin chides, “but I don’t suppose those women would suggest no one should eat in a restaurant ever again.” Guffin and like-minded gays are trying to pressure Kober to disavow public disruptions.

Others have taken the news of the more-left-than-left protests as a welcome opportunity to discuss the role of traditional marriage in alternative lifestyles. With conservative causes such as military service and marriage headlining the gay legislative agenda, progressive gays have had few opportunities in recent years to flex their political muscle.

“Registering at Williams-Sonoma is not an inalienable, constitutional right,” asserts Menom Said of Women Not Wombs, a San Francisco-based organization for feminist lesbians. “Sometimes I think a lot of gays, especially gay men, are fighting for the right to economic privilege, rather than political equality.”