Ever since Craig Finn's band The Hold Steady first broke through in 2004, he's gotten famous for a mix of hyper-literate story songs and classic-rock arrangements. After releasing a string of highly praised albums and EPs, Finn took a five-month break from The Hold Steady to record his solo debut, Clear Heart Full Eyes.

A decade after the clerical sex abuse scandal erupted in the United Sates, Catholic religious officials from all over the world met in Rome this week to tackle the painful topic.

The Vatican endorsed the symposium — called "Toward Healing and Renewal" — the aim of which was changing the culture of how the church deals with cases of pedophile priests.

One of the highlights was a late-afternoon penitential mass on Feb. 7 — apparently the first time a senior Vatican official conducted a service to ask the forgiveness of abuse victims.

When a fetus isn't growing as expected, doctors get worried. Often they decide to deliver a baby like that early by cesarean section, figuring it's the safer way to go.

But C-sections aren't always best for baby, according to new research.

Preemies who were small for their gestational age did better when they were delivered vaginally, researchers found. The babies delivered by C-section were 30 percent more likely to have trouble breathing, a big problem in preemies.

A Pennsylvania judge set a tentative trial date of May 14 for Jerry Sandusky, who is facing 50 counts of sex abuse of 10 boys.

Sandusky was in court in part to ask Judge John Cleland for greater freedom while he awaits a trial.

The AP reports:

"The attorney general's office wants him confined to the inside of his home while on house arrest awaiting trial, while the defense asked that he be allowed out occasionally to help with the case.

They may not be ready to accept GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's invitation to stand with him "shoulder to shoulder," but conservatives at their biggest annual gathering gave him a reception Friday that at times rose to rousing.

Tacitly acknowledging that his past positions on abortion rights and health care mandates have made him suspect with a swath of his party's base, Romney used his speech to describe his "path to conservatism" as a mix of family values, faith and his "life's work" in business.

Germany is putting off signing an international anti-piracy accord known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

ACTA, as the agreement is known, has been controversial for years. In many ways, it's been controversial in the same way that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has been in the United States.

We reported about the accord back in 2009, but slowly it's been watered down and signed by many countries including the United States, Japan and many European countries.

Using a new time-lapse technique, NASA was able to capture a spectacular view of how astronauts aboard the International Space Station see the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights.

As the AP says, NASA has released many videos of this before — just take a look at this stunning one released a couple of months ago — but this is time-lapse footage taken with high resolution cameras.

In any case, here's the video via BBC Mundo:

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