Pope Francis urged national leaders on Monday to implement global environmental agreements without delay, a message that looked to be squarely aimed at U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. Addressing a group of scientists that included theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, the pope gave his strongest speech on the environment since the election of Trump, who has threatened to pull out of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. During the campaign, Trump called climate change a hoax. But days later, Reince Priebus, Trump's designated White House chief-of-staff, told Fox News that the president-elect still believed climate change was mostly "a bunch of bunk." In his encyclical last year to the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, the pope called for swift action to save the planet from environmental ruin and urged world leaders to hear "the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor."

Source: CBC News November 28, 2016 17:31 UTC