PAXTON — For decades, James C. Graham was tormented by a simple, but profound question: Why did his father seem to dislike him so much?

On Tuesday, the South Carolina man confirmed the bittersweet truth: The man who raised him wasn’t his father at all.

Graham’s extraordinary 25-year effort to find the truth about his father ended when a forensic anthropologist told him that his DNA matched samples taken from a deceased Catholic priest who grew up in Lowell and graduated from Boston College.

The case of a Michigan couple charged in the death of their 10-month-old daughter is bringing to light a debate about withholding medical care because of religious beliefs.

Seth Welch and his wife, Tatiana Fusari, both 27, were charged with felony murder and first-degree child abuse after their daughter, Mary, died earlier this month from malnutrition and dehydration, an autopsy revealed. The parents said they didn't seek medical help for their daughter because of their religious beliefs, though they declined to define their religion.

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Every state in the U.S. has laws protecting children from abuse and neglect, but in 34 states and the District of Columbia, there are religious exemptions that allow parents to forgo medical treatment for a child if it conflicts with their religious beliefs, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Department of Health and Human Services.

There are also religious exemptions to manslaughter laws in at least six states, Pew reported. However, in many states, including Michigan, these exceptions are not absolute.

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Because he was against Ken Starr, Penn’s logic is that he has a unique perspective on why Robert Mueller is harming the country, too. And as a Democrat bashing the Mueller investigation and making arguments that are useful to President Donald Trump, Penn has found a prominent new perch in the Washington ecosystem. Our interview was the first time he’s explained his Trumpian turn, which has earned him fresh enmity on the left.

Penn has now become a regular face on Fox News — CNN and MSNBC won’t book him — and a contributor to The Hill’s right-leaning editorial pages. There, he has repeatedly bashed the Mueller investigation as a “partisan, open-ended inquisition that, by its precedent, is a threat to all those who ever want to participate in a national campaign or an administration again” — followed up by more TV hits on Fox.

And despite the photos that decorate his office walls, he has willingly torched the Clintons, saying the Justice Department “broke their own rules” by ending an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, and noting that “Clinton Foundation operatives” urged the FBI to investigate Trump.
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In a sign of the Catholic Church's struggles with one of its most faithful followers, fewer than a quarter of an expected crowd of half a million people last weekend attended Pope Francis' public Mass in Dublin, Ireland.

The pope's Mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park on Sunday drew 135,000 people, far short of the estimated 500,000 people forecast to attend, according to official estimates published by Irish Central, The Journal and other Irish news sites. During the last papal visit to Ireland – in 1979 – Pope John Paul II attracted more than 1 million for a public Mass. That's a drop-off rate of almost 90 percent.

Florida's high-stakes gubernatorial race will be fought between a progressive Democrat vying to become the state's first black chief executive and a Republican congressman closely allied with President Donald Trump.

In a late primary season shocker, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum defeated the front runner, former Rep. Gwen Graham, who had led in the polls for most of the campaign. He emerged from a field of five competitive candidates, in which he was the only non-millionaire and only supporter of "Medicare for all" single-payer health care, to become the state's first black gubernatorial nominee.

"The point has never been lost on me that my name on the ballot is simply a vessel, is simply the name,' Gillum told a raucous crowd of supporters in Tallahassee on Tuesday night. "But what is underneath that name are all the issues that we care so deeply about."

Bishops and other leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania covered up child sexual abuse by more than 300 priests over a period of 70 years, persuading victims not to report the abuse and police officers not to investigate it, according to a report issued by a grand jury on Tuesday.

The report, which covered six of the state’s eight Catholic dioceses and found more than 1,000 identifiable victims, is the broadest examination yet by a government agency in the United States of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. There have been ten previous reports by grand juries and attorneys general in the United States, according to the research and advocacy group BishopAccountability.org, but those examined single dioceses or counties.

The report catalogs horrific instances of abuse, including a priest who raped a young girl in the hospital after she had her tonsils out, and another priest who was allowed to stay in ministry after impregnating a 17-year-old girl, forging a signature on a marriage certificate and then divorcing the girl.

“Despite some institutional reform, individual leaders of the church have largely escaped public accountability,” the grand jury wrote. “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.”

THE DEFINING CONCEPT of criminal guilt is “mens rea” — the guilty mind. The idea of mens rea emerged from 12th- and 13th-century developments in Catholic canon law that redefined criminal guilt to align it more closely with notions of sin: Your will is what makes you guilty. Criminals are distinguished by their freely willed intent to commit (or at least risk bringing about) a culpable act.

This vision shaped European and then American legal systems for centuries. But in the early 1900s, American social scientists proposed an alternative view. They saw crime as a matter of social, not individual, responsibility. They had studied the ways in which environmental factors, including poverty, could lead people to commit crimes, and they advocated for criminal justice reforms that aimed to rehabilitate those criminals.
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Today, however, neuroscience shows at a biological level what early 20th-century scientists showed at a social level: Our behavior has influences we cannot control. What we identify as free will, a person’s decisions and choices, always operates under a set of environmental and genetic constraints. In some cases — like the mass shooting committed in 1966 by Charles Whitman, who was later found to have a brain tumor — there’s an identifiable disorder. But in other cases, these constraints are part of typical development. New research shows how the brains of 18- to 25-year-olds — traditionally treated as adults by the law — are still developing the crucial decision-making and impulse control mechanisms that would otherwise restrain criminal behavior, leading scientists to advocate for mitigated sentences for this age group.
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Neuroscientist David Eagleman agrees that “Was it his fault, or his biology’s fault?” is the wrong question to be asking. In his 2017 Atlantic article “The Brain on Trial,” he explains, “The choices we make are inseparably yoked to our neural circuitry, and therefore we have no meaningful way to tease the two apart.” In other words, there’s no reliable way to separate free will from luck. Therefore, Eagleman says, we should stop focusing on blame altogether. Blame is “a backward-looking concept that demands the impossible task of untangling the hopelessly complex web of genetics and environment that constructs the trajectory of a human life.” We need to look forward instead, he argues, to study how an individual is likely to behave from now on and how we can structure social incentives so as to deter destructive behavior in the future.

A shift away from religion may make countries more prosperous, according to a new study.

Using data on countries ranging from Albania to Zimbabwe, researchers analysed the relationship between values held by different nations and their GDPs.

They found that lack of religion tended to come before economic growth over the course of the 20th century – a discovery that partially answers a long-standing question about the impact of secularisation on the economy.