Atheist Academic Wants to Arrest the Pope

A prominent atheist campaigner is working on a plan to have the pope arrested when he visits the UK in September. British academic Richard Dawkins tells the Times of London he's enlisted human rights lawyers to help prove a case of "crimes against humanity." If his plan works, Pope Benedict would be arrested in much the same way Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was on his visit to Britain in 1985.

“This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence," says Dawkins, who's working with author Christopher Hitchens on the plan. "The institutionalized concealment of child rape is a crime under any law," adds Hitchens. (More Pope Benedict XVI stories.)