A seven-day hunger strike by Afghan asylum seekers has ended after officers removed them from the cathedral they were occupying

A seven-day hunger strike by Afghan asylum seekers has ended after officers removed them from the cathedral they were occupying. The company, Beppler and Jacobson, is on the verge of buying a nearby ski resort.”To us, frankly, it doesn’t matter who wins,” said Jim Costa, the American general manager. “People on both sides speak according to rumours, and I believe about 5 per cent of what I hear.”. Bianca, a resort and spa built by Yugoslavia’s Communist authorities decades ago, has been lavishly rebuilt by a British company at a cost of €9m (£6m), and now claims to be Montenegro’s finest hotel. He’s been involved in smuggling, he’s building a railway line to Albania, he wants Montenegro to become more like Albania than Serbia.” A student in Belgrade, he had come back specially to vote.But perhaps Montenegro is so beautiful that it doesn’t really matter who wins. He says the number of employees in the town council has ballooned in the past 20 years, but they are more inefficient than ever. “They are afraid of losing their jobs if Montenegro gets independence,” he claimed.

“The town council employees are the core supporters of union.”One bar along, a journalism student called Daniel Rakocevic, 19, claimed supporters of independence had been bribed to vote for it, while opponents had had their identity documents confiscated so they could not vote “I hate Djukanovic,” he said “Everything that’s happened here is his fault. It is developing fast, but without the anti-independence people in the local government, it would do much better, he believes. “I am a Montenegrin, and I will vote for Montenegro, because there is no other state for me,” he said.Luka works in the tourist business, which should be the town’s moneyspinner. He wore a red sweatshirt, the colour of the pro-independence movement led by 44-year-old Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, emblazoned with CRNA GORA (Montenegro) and the state’s symbol, a double-headed eagle. But yesterday afternoon, independence enthusiast Luka Bulatovic, 27, was sweetly reasonable. Friday night the front door was torn off its hinges and windows were broken, and one guy needed hospital treatment.” Last night she predicted would be even worse, so the staff were closing the bar at 9pm.When they pour out of the pubs and cafes they drive wildly round the town, shouting slogans for and against independence, often crashing their cars, she said.

The town is so small – population about 3,000 – that the green mountains rear up at either end of it.By day the “philosophers” of Kolasin (the stereotyped view of Montenegrins among other southern Slavs is that they are as loquacious as they are idle) debate independence over coffee and Coke and beer By night, however, they let their fists do the talking. Official enquiries never established a definite connection to the KGB as alleged, but what did Agca tell the Pope at their meetings?Paedophile PriestsWhen details of the church’s cover-up of the activities of paedophile priests emerged in the 1990s, the Vatican remained tight-lipped about how much it had known and for how long.. Is Montenegro a Mafia state ridden by Albanian racketeers, where everything is up for sale and independence will mean severing the people from their Serbian cousins? Or a place of fabulous potential, fatally hobbled by the Serbian placemen who will continue to dominate if they are not thrown out?

Today Montenegrins vote in a referendum on unshackling the state from Serbia. What made him take this landmark decision?Papal Assassination AttemptOn 13 May, 1981, John Paul II was gunned down by Mehmet Ali Agca He survived and visited Agca in prison. Some 40 scholars a day consult the archives, but no material after 1939 is available. If the archives were thrown open they could cast light on these mysteries:Pope JoanDid a German woman of English descent cross-dress to claim the papacy in 854, as described in many medieval church chronicles? The original source of these accounts has never been found and the church is anxious to play down the story.The Knights TemplarFeaturing in every conspiracy theory about religious history, these crusaders were banned by Pope Clement V in 1312, but his reasons remain obscure and much debated.The PillIn the mid-1960s Pope Paul VI sought advice from leading Catholics on whether to allow Catholics to use the Pill.

Most recommended he say yes, but in 1968 he came back with a definitive no that led to an exodus from the pews. It gives the impression that their church leaders are responding to the outside world’s legitimate concern to know the truth about this man with a gesture of defiance that brings the whole canon of saints into disrepute. It is precisely the sort of behaviour that leaves readers and cinemagoers prepared to give credence to Dan Brown’s conspiracy theories.Peter Stanford’s book of essays, “Why I Am Still A Catholic”, is published this week in paperback by ContinuumConfession time: Low moments in the life of the Catholic churchThe Vatican Secret Archives contain an estimated 2 million items, including 40,000 parchments, and take up 80 kilometres (50 miles) of shelving They date back over 1,000 years. Now that Germany has capitulated, however, that excuse has gone out of the window.At other times “technical reasons” have been quoted, or lack of manpower to do the cataloguing. It has also been suggested darkly that allowing free access would break the seal of the confessional. Matters were not helped in January of this year when Archbishop Sergio Pagano, Prefect of the Secret Archives, gave an interview with the Italian church magazine, Avvenire, where he bemoaned the “strange phenomenon” of all these experts wanting to poke around in the Pope’s private papers.So the archives on this much disputed period remain firmly closed. A favourite has been to use the same line as the German authorities in defending, until Brigitte Zypries’s change of heart, keeping archives closed, namely privacy considerations.