The discovery announced Wednesday involved the White Rabbit Creamy Candy brand, which is sold in 50 countries but has already been recalled from stores in Britain and many Asian countries. Jerry Farrell Jr., Connecticut's consumer protection commissioner, announced that contaminated candy had been found at two stores in New Haven, one in West Hartford and one in East Haven. In each case, tests found traces of an industrial additive, melamine, in the candy.

"We're concerned, obviously, there may have been bags sold of these before we got to them," Mr. Farrell said on Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.

Last month, the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers about White Rabbit candy because of concerns over possible melamine contamination. In California, health officials have found traces of melamine after testing samples of White Rabbit candy. The American distributor has ordered a recall, but some of the candy may still be in stores.

Melamine is at the heart of China's scandal over contaminated dairy products. It is used to make plastics and fertilizers, but it is sometimes illegally mixed into food products, including milk, because its high level of nitrogen can help fool tests that measure protein levels.

In September, Chinese authorities acknowledged that more than 53,000 Chinese infants had been sickened after consuming powdered baby formula that had been contaminated with melamine. Of that total, 13,000 were hospitalized and four died.

Initially, the contamination seemed isolated to powdered baby formula as the state media focused on one company, the Sanlu Group. But officials then announced that tests had found traces of melamine in formula produced by 21 other Chinese dairy companies.

This week, the list of offenders grew as government tests found traces of melamine in some batches of dairy products produced by 15 more companies, according to news agency reports. And traces of melamine have now been found in samples of yogurt and other products made with Chinese dairy.

The scandal has focused widespread public anger at the government. Beijing has sought to place the blame on dairy companies and local officials, especially in Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital where Sanlu has its headquarters. This week, People's Daily, the authoritative newspaper of the Communist Party, published an unusual article in which a spokesman in Shijiazhuang apologized but also accused Sanlu officials of asking to cover up the problem in August, shortly before the beginning of the Beijing Olympics.

Thieves Mine Church Roofs as Lead Prices Rise

Hazel Thompson for The International Herald Tribune

St. Michael and All Angels Church in the village of Edmondthorpe, Leicestershire, England, where thieves have cashed in on record lead prices by stripping a section of metal from the roof.

EDMONDTHORPE, England - Thieves peeled long strips of lead from the roof of St. Michael and All Angels, until a barking dog sent them fleeing from this tiny Leicestershire village. But by then, they had left a hole of about 100 square feet in the top of the 800-year-old church.

For centuries, people have stolen religious artifacts in Europe, including chunks of religious buildings, but Britain is in the midst of an accelerating crime wave that some experts call the most concerted assault on churches since the Reformation.

Instead of doctrinal differences, the motivation is the near record price that lead - the stuff many old church roofs are made of - is fetching on commodity markets.

"The local parish church has become a victim of international demand for metals," said Chris Pitt, a spokesman for Ecclesiastical, a company that specializes in insuring religious buildings and other heritage sites in Britain.

Lead's price on global markets has rocketed sevenfold in the last six years, largely because of rising demand from industrializing countries like China and India. Centuries ago, its malleability made it a popular building material; now it is sought mainly for use in batteries for vehicles and backup power systems for computer and mobile phone networks. It is also used to make bullets and shot, cables and paints.

Because of booming demand, new mines are opening in South America and Asia, where deposits are plentiful. There is also a growing business in recycling lead, mainly from used batteries (where 75 percent of lead ends up) but also scrap metal.

Lead prices reached a record of $3,900 a ton late last summer mainly because of supply problems from mines in Australia, consumer demand in China for cars and motorbikes, and speculation by hedge fund managers on volatile commodities markets, said William Adams, a metals analyst at BaseMetals.com in London.

The price has pulled back since, trading at about $2,750 a ton, he said, but it could climb again on continuing supply problems and steady Chinese demand.

One of the oddest consequences of the historically high price is that idyllic corners of Britain - a nation that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution - are suddenly feeling the strain of Asia's industrialization.

"Churches have become pretty savvy at protecting property inside their buildings, such as the altar ware and money in boxes," said Mr. Pitt of Ecclesiastical, "but now the most valuable thing these churches have is being taken away piece by piece, and that is tearing away the very fabric of these buildings."

Ecclesiastical is raising its premiums for churches after paying out claims last year totaling £9 million ($18 million), mostly for thefts of lead from roofs, he said. Before 2005, such claims were almost unheard-of.

A crucial problem for Britain's churches is that many go unused for long periods of time, largely because of a decline in churchgoing. Services here in Edmondthorpe, for example, are often held just six times a year.

In some cases, clergy members and parishioners discover roof thefts only once rain pours into the building, damaging cherished items like carved wooden screens and ancient organs. The thefts can lead to thousands of pounds of structural damage, too.

In Edmondthorpe, the damage will cost £10,000 ($20,000) to repair....

Some churches in larger and more prosperous towns have upgraded their internal security, little changed since medieval times, to systems that are distinctly 21st century.

After lead worth £7,500 was taken from the roof of St. Peter & St. Paul, in Rutland, a county neighboring Leicestershire, the church canon, Stephen Evans, installed a security system with outdoor cameras. Movement on the roof sets off warnings that are sent to up to six mobile phones.

For churches with less money, the introduction of more rudimentary deterrents may be inevitable.

"Nobody likes to think of barbed wire or that kind of thing on these buildings, but churches seriously have to look at that," said Tom Bates, a former insurance manager in the village of Waltham-on-the-Wolds, where lead was removed from the church of St. Mary Magdalene late last year.

"Ultimately insurance companies will say, 'Enough is enough,' " he said.

At St. Michael and All Angels in Edmondthorpe, Barbara Coulson, a lay minister, went ahead with a Good Friday service even after the theft. Thirty-six people attended as wintry gusts flapped the blue plastic covering the hole in the roof.

Ms. Coulson expected the roof to be repaired soon and said new security measures would be put in place.

Still, she said, churches like hers would remain vulnerable, in part because respect for faith traditions is often too weak to offset the temptation of cashing in on global markets.

"We increasingly seem to live in a world where the question 'Is nothing sacred?' so easily springs to mind," she said....

Historical preservation rules require many churches to replace roofs with original building materials, including lead, despite its attractiveness to thieves and its cost. So parishioners fear thieves will return after repairs have been made.

"Whenever I get an early morning phone call these days, I think, 'Oh no, they've taken the roof again,' " said John Deave, 80, a retired barrister and a churchwarden at St. Guthlac's church in Stathern, another Leicestershire village, where the church was vandalized in January.

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Published in the 27 July 2008

FORTY years ago last week, Pope Paul VI provoked the greatest uproar against a papal edict in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church when he reiterated the church's ban on artificial birth control by issuing the encyclical "Humanae Vitae." At the time, commentators predicted that not only would the teaching collapse under its own weight, but it might well bring the "monarchical papacy" down with it.

Those forecasts badly underestimated the capacity of the Catholic Church to resist change and to stand its ground.

Down the centuries, Catholics have frequently groused about papal rulings. Usually they channeled that dissent into blithe disobedience, though occasionally a Roman mob would run the Successor of Peter out of town on a rail just to make a point. In 1848, Pope Pius IX was driven into exile by Romans incensed at his refusal to embrace Italy's unification.

Never before July 25, 1968, however, had opposition been so immediate, so public and so widespread. World-famous theologians called press conferences to rebut the pope's reasoning. Conferences of Catholic bishops issued statements that all but licensed churchgoers to ignore the encyclical. Pastors openly criticized "Humanae Vitae" from the pulpit.

In a nutshell, "Humanae Vitae" held that the twin functions of marriage - to foster love between the partners and to be open to children - are so closely related as to be inseparable. In practice, that meant a resounding no to the pill.

The encyclical quickly became seen, both in the secular world and in liberal Catholic circles, as the papacy's Waterloo. It was so out of sync with the hopes and desires of the Catholic rank and file that it simply could not stand.

And in some ways, it didn't. Today polls show that Catholics, at least in the West, dissent from the teaching on birth control, often by majorities exceeding 80 percent.

But at the official level, Catholicism's commitment to "Humanae Vitae" is more solid than ever.

During his almost 27-year papacy, John Paul II provided a deeper theoretical basis for traditional Catholic sexual morality through his "theology of the body." In brief, the late pope's argument was that human sexuality is an image of the creative love among the three persons of the Trinity, as well as God's love for humanity. Birth control "changes the language" of sexuality, because it prevents life-giving love.

That's a claim many Catholics might dispute, but the reading groups and seminars devoted to contemplating John Paul's "theology of the body" mean that Catholics disposed to defend the church's teaching now have a more formidable set of resources than they did when Paul VI wrote "Humanae Vitae."

In addition, three decades of bishops' appointments by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both unambiguously committed to "Humanae Vitae," mean that senior leaders in Catholicism these days are far less inclined than they were in 1968 to distance themselves from the ban on birth control, or to soft-pedal it. A striking number of Catholic bishops have recently brought out documents of their own defending "Humanae Vitae."

Advocates of the encyclical draw assurance from the declining fertility rates across the developed world, especially in Europe. No country in Europe has a fertility rate above 2.1, the number of children each woman needs to have by the end of her child-bearing years to keep a population stable.

Even with increasing immigration, Europe is projected to suffer a population loss in the 21st century that will rival the impact of the Black Death, leading some to talk about the continent's "demographic suicide."

Not coincidentally, Europe is also the most secular region of the world, where the use of artificial contraception is utterly unproblematic. Among those committed to Catholic teaching, the obvious question becomes: What more clear proof of the folly of separating sex and child-bearing could one want?

So the future of "Humanae Vitae" as the teaching of the Catholic Church seems secure, even if it will also continue to be the most widely flouted injunction of the church at the level of practice.

The encyclical's surprising resilience is a reminder that forecasting the Catholic future in moments of crisis is always a dangerous enterprise - a point with relevance to a more recent Catholic predicament. Many critics believe that the church has not yet responded adequately to the recent sex-abuse scandals, leading to predictions that the church will "have to" become more accountable, more participatory and more democratic.

While those steps may appear inevitable today, it seemed unthinkable to many observers 40 years ago that "Humanae Vitae" would still be in vigor well into the 21st century.

Catholicism can and does change, but trying to guess how and when is almost always a fool's errand.

To the Editor:

There is another point to be added to John L. Allen Jr.'s survey of the debate about Catholics and birth control: the modest but growing enthusiasm for "Humanae Vitae" among younger grass-roots Christians.

I teach theology, marriage and sex at Villanova University. Generally speaking, once my students actually read "Humanae Vitae," they find it to be persuasive and beautiful.

Speaking personally, there are people in my family who were once liberal Catholics and dissented from the birth control prohibition. But as we read the theology, and as we thought more about the environmental movement, slow food and organics, it just seemed to make more and more sense to consider the rhythms of our own bodies and learn more about the actual science behind natural family planning.

To our surprise and delight, the science holds up, and we've seen how the pope's "natural family" approach engenders more family communication, patience and generosity - virtues that are also not bad qualities for enhancing your sex life. Christopher C. Roberts

Philadelphia, July 27, 2008

To the Editor:

In "Humanae Vitae," Pope Paul VI warned that artificial birth control "could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards."

Written 40 years ago, these papal words have proved to be prophetic.

The constant insistence of the Roman Catholic Church that human sexual intercourse in marriage be the vehicle for human reproduction takes on new value in this age where cloning and every other kind of reproductive excrescence is promoted under the name of "science."

Richard H.