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ing his job too well.
• After all, several senior Vatican officials who ran afoul of the Vatican's entrenched ways have recently been transferred in face-saving "promote and remove" moves as the Vatican deals with the fallout from a high-profile criminal trial over leaked papal documents, a mixed report card on its financial transparency and its controversial crackdown on American nuns.
• But in an interview on the eve of his departure, Bishop-elect Charles Scicluna insisted he wasn't the latest casualty in the Vatican's turf battles and Machiavellian personnel intrigues. Rather, he said, his promotion to auxiliary bishop in his native Malta was simply that -- "a very good" promotion -- and more critically, that his hardline stance against sex abuse would remain because it's Benedict's stance as well.
• "This is policy," he told The Associated Press. "It's not Scicluna. It's the pope. And this will remain."
• Besides, he said laughing over tea at a cafe on Rome's posh Piazza Farnese, "If you want to silence someone, you don't make him a bishop."
• ___

• MIDLAND, Texas (AP) -- A parade float filled with wounded veterans that was struck by a freight train had crossed onto the railroad tracks after warning signals were going off, investigators said Saturday.
• Four veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were killed and 16 more people were injured when the train crashed into the flatbed truck in West Texas.
• It was the second of two floats carrying veterans in Thursday's parade in Midland. The first was exiting the tracks when the warning bells and signals were activated, 20 seconds before the accident, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. The second float didn't enter the tracks until several seconds after the warning system went off, the NTSB said. By that time, the guardrail was lowering.
• "Once the crossing becomes active, people should stop," lead investigator Robert Accetta with the NTSB said at a news conference Saturday afternoon.
• The timeline was pieced together by combining information from a video camera mounted on the front of the train, another one on a sheriff's car and a data recorder that acts like an airplane's black box, activating when the train blared the horn, NTSB member Mark Rosekind said.

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