A growing sex-abuse scandal is rocking the world’s largest national congregation of Catholics. This week, a Brazilian priest was given a lengthy jail sentence after a court heard extracts from a diary that read like a paedophile priest’s how-to manual. The signs of abuse will be of particular concern to the church hierarchy.

Michael Brown, the bureaucrat who headed the United States’s response to Hurricane Katrina and himself became a symbol of man-made calamity, is going into the disaster-management business. He is setting up as a consultant, marketing his expertise on coping with catastrophe — natural and self-made.

Poland’s new right-wing government on Friday risked a damaging confrontation with Russia when it published a Warsaw Pact map showing detailed plans for Soviet nuclear strikes against western Europe. Poland threw open the doors of its military archives to show how most of Europe would have been laid to waste in a nuclear conflagration.

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni remained defiant in the face of pressure from British Prime Minister Tony Blair on the first day of the Commonwealth conference on Friday over the arrest of the country’s opposition leader. Museveni made it clear he was not going to take any lectures from Blair.