VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Vatican has opened an extremely rare criminal investigation into embarrassing leaks of top-level sensitive documents alleging corruption and mismanagement in several of its departments.

The investigation, announced in the Vatican newspaper on Friday, will be carried out by an internal tribunal in a bid to find out who leaked the material.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Vatican on Friday told an ultra-traditionalist Roman Catholic splinter group they must accept non-negotiable doctrinal principles within a month or risk a painful break with Rome that would have “incalculable” consequences.

The ultimatum was issued after a two-hour meeting between Swiss-born Bishop Bernard Fellay, leader of the dissident Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) and U.S. Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican’s doctrinal department.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Vatican on Friday condemned the U.S. embargo against Cuba ahead of Pope Benedict’s trip there next week and said the pontiff was willing to meet Fidel Castro.

“The Holy See believes that the embargo is something that makes the people suffer the consequences. It does not achieve the aim of the greater good,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said.

ROME (Reuters) – This is not a lawyers joke. Italian lawyers have gone on strike – again – and they say that in their struggle for better working conditions and pay they are looking for inspiration to none other than Mahatma Gandhi, the little lawyer who liberated India.

“Lawyers are going through difficult times,” said Maurizio De Tilla, president of the United Lawyers Organisation, as he led a protest of about 2,000 lawyers outside one of Rome’s main court buildings.

ROME (Reuters) – This is not a lawyers joke. Italian lawyers have gone on strike – again – and they say that in their struggle for better working conditions and pay they are looking for inspiration to none other than Mahatma Gandhi, the little lawyer who liberated India.

“Lawyers are going through difficult times,” said Maurizio De Tilla, president of the United Lawyers Organization, as he led a protest of about 2,000 lawyers outside one of Rome’s main court buildings.

ROME (Reuters) – For 42 days three decades ago, U.S. General James Lee Dozier was the world’s most famous hostage and his captors, the Red Brigades, were Europe’s most feared and bloody terrorist organization.

Dozier, now 80, has come back to Italy, perhaps for the last time, to meet the members of the police special operations unit who liberated him in one of the most daring rescue raids of those dramatic years in Italian history.

FLORENCE (Reuters) – Art researchers and scientists said on Monday that a high-tech project using tiny video probes has uncovered evidence that a fresco by Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci lost for five centuries may still exist behind a wall of Florence’s city hall.

“Together with art historians and scientists combining historical evidence and technology, this research team has unlocked a mystery that has been with us for more than 500 years,” said Terry Garcia, an executive vice president of the U.S. National Geographic Society, which sponsored the research.

ROME (Reuters) – Pope Benedict and the Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans, met and prayed together on Saturday but made only glancing references to the divisions between their Churches.

Archbishop Rowan Williams spoke of the “certain but imperfect” link between the two Christian traditions during his address to the congregation at a joint service at the church of St Gregory the Great near Rome’s Colosseum.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict on Friday denounced the “powerful political and cultural currents” seeking to legalize gay marriage in the United States, where Maryland has just become the eighth state to allow it.

The pope’s latest comments in opposition to homosexual marriage came in an address to bishops from several Midwestern states on a regular visit to the Vatican.