Saturday, January 18, 2014
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News Clips For The Day



Pope Benedict defrocked 400 priests in 2 years: report – NBC
By John Heilprin and Nicole Winfield, The Associated Press

A document obtained by The Associated Press on Friday shows Pope Benedict XVI defrocked nearly 400 priests over just two years for sexually molesting children. 
The statistics for 2011 and 2012 show a dramatic increase over the 171 priests removed in 2008 and 2009, when the Vatican first provided details on the number of priests who have been defrocked. Prior to that, it had only publicly revealed the number of alleged cases of sexual abuse it had received and the number of trials it had authorized. 

While it's not clear why the numbers spiked in 2011, it could be because 2010 saw a new explosion in the number of cases reported in the media in Europe and beyond. 

The document was prepared from data the Vatican had been collecting and was compiled to help the Holy See defend itself before a U.N. committee this week in Geneva. 


Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's U.N. ambassador in Geneva, referred to just one of the statistics in the course of eight hours of oftentimes pointed criticism and questioning from the U.N. human rights committee. 

The statistics were compiled from the Vatican's own annual reports about the activities of its various offices, including the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which handles sex abuse cases. Although public, the annual reports are not readily available or sold outside Rome and are usually found in Vatican offices or Catholic university libraries. 

An AP review of the reference books shows a remarkable evolution in the Holy See's in-house procedures to discipline pedophiles since 2001, when the Vatican ordered bishops to send cases of all credibly accused priests to Rome for review. 
Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger took action after determining that bishops around the world weren't following church law to put accused clerics on trial in church tribunals. Bishops routinely moved problem priests from parish to parish rather than subject them to canonical trials — or turn them into police. 

For centuries, the church has had its own in-house procedures to deal with priests who sexually abuse children. One of the chief accusations from victims is that bishops put the church's own procedures ahead of civil law enforcement by often suggesting victims keep accusations quiet while they are dealt with internally. 
The maximum penalty for a priest convicted by a church tribunal is essentially losing his job: being defrocked, or removed from the clerical state. There are no jail terms and nothing to prevent an offender from raping again. 

According to the 2001 norms Ratzinger pushed through and subsequent updates, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reviews each case sent to Rome and then instructs bishops how to proceed, either by launching an administrative process against the priest if the evidence is overwhelming or a church trial. At every step of the way the priest is allowed to defend himself. 

The Congregation started reporting numbers only in 2005, which is where Tomasi's spreadsheet starts off. U.N. officials said Friday that the committee has not received the document. 

In 2005, the Congregation authorized bishops to launch church trials against 21 accused clerics, and reported that its appeals court had handled two cases. It didn't say what the verdicts were, according to the annual reports cited by the spreadsheet. 
In 2006, the number of canonical trials authorized doubled to 43 and eight appeals cases were heard. And for the first time, the Congregation revealed publicly the number of cases reported to it: 362, though that figure includes a handful of non-abuse related canonical crimes. 

A similar number of cases were reported in 2007 — 365 — but again the Congregation didn't specify how many were abuse-related. Vatican officials, however, have said that it received between 300-400 cases a year in these years following the 2002 explosion of U.S. sex abuse cases in the U.S. In 2007, 23 cases were sent to dioceses for trial. 

By 2008, the tone of the Vatican's entry had changed. Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, traveled to the scandal-hit United States that year and is quoted in the annual report as telling reporters en route that he was "mortified" by the scale of abuse and simply couldn't comprehend "how priests could fail in such a way." 
That year's entry was also notable for another reason: For the first time, an official Vatican document made clear that nothing in the church process precluded victims from reporting abuse to police. 

There was also another first in 2008, a critical year as abuse lawsuits in the U.S. naming the Holy See as a defendant were heating up: For the first time, the Vatican revealed the number of priests who had been defrocked: 68. Some 191 new cases were reported. 

A year later, the number of defrocked priests rose to 103, while some 223 new cases were received, the vast majority of them abuse-related.
 
The year 2010 was another milestone in the sex abuse saga, with the explosion of thousands of cases reported in the media across Europe and beyond. Some 527 cases were reported to the Congregation. No figures were given that year for the number of defrocked priests, rather the Congregation described new church laws put in place to more easily and quickly remove them. 

By 2011, with the new streamlined laws in place, the number of defrocked priests rose dramatically: 260 priests were removed in one year only, while 404 new cases of child abuse were reported. In addition to those defrocked, another 419 priests had lesser penalties imposed on them for abuse-related crimes. 

In 2012, the last year for which statistics are available, the number of defrockings dropped to 124, with another 418 new cases reported. 



This article didn't give the number of new cases the Vatican received and over exactly what time period, just that nearly 400 were defrocked. I notice that Pope Benedict in 2008 issued a document making it clear that there was no reason why the complaining parties were not free to report the crime to police. Up to that point they had been asked to keep silent until the church took action. The Vatican is now preparing to defend itself in a UN probe. There will be more in the news when that occurs, I assume. I will try to collect articles about it.





New England's 'lost' archaeological sites rediscovered – NBC
Wynne Parry LiveScience


Here, an abandoned farmstead in Preston, Conn., is hidden from view in this 2012 aerial photograph and only visible in the LiDAR scan of the area from 2010 (right).
Take a walk in the New England woods, and you may stumble upon the overgrown remains of a building's foundation or the stacked stones of a wall. Now, researchers have begun uncovering these relics from the air.

Examinations of airborne scans of three New England towns revealed networks of old stone walls, building foundations, old roads, dams and other features, many of which long were forgotten. These features speak to a history that Katharine Johnson, an archaeologist and study researcher, wants to see elucidated.

She and others know the story in broad strokes: After European settlers arrived in the 17th century, thousands of acres of forest were cleared to make way for much more intensive agriculture than that practiced by indigenous people. In the 19th century, people began leaving for industrial towns, allowing the forests to overtake their former farms.

"I think there is a general idea of what was happening, but it is not as well understood as it could be," Johnson, a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut, told LiveScience. [See the Aerial Images of 'Lost' Archaeological Sites in New England]

New Englanders have long known about these relics of the agricultural past. But Johnson and William Ouimet, her adviser and co-author, harnessed a new way to look for them, one that has proved useful in other places.  

They looked at publicly available data collected by using a remote-sensing technology known as light detection and ranging (LiDAR). These scans map the surface below using laser pulses, and they make it possible for researchers to look below tree cover. LiDAR has increasingly been used in archaeology of late, with researchers, aided by the technology, finding the ancient capital of the Khmer Empire, Angkor, was even more massive than previously thought. LiDAR has also revealed a lost city beneath the Cambodian jungle (near Angkor) as well as evidence of Ciudad Blanca, a never-confirmed legendary metropolis, hidden by Honduran rain forests.

In the new study, Johnson and Ouimet focused on parts of three rural towns: Ashford, Conn.; Tiverton, R.I.; and Westport, Mass. In the scans, stone walls showed up as thin linear ridges, forming enclosures that were likely once fields, lining old thoroughfares, and clustering around the foundations at the heart of old farmsteads.
The LiDAR also picks up on modern features, leading to potential confusion. Old building foundations can resemble modern swimming pools, for example. To verify what they see in LiDAR data, Johnson and Ouimet have been visiting sites.

This new information is best used in combination with historical documents, Johnson said.
"On a historical map, you might see just one dot, and a person's name representing a farmstead, but if you compare that with the LiDAR you might see all of the buildings, in addition to the layout, and the fields, and the road leading to it," she said.
Sometimes the past lives on in the modern landscape. Many stone walls that showed up in the scans of Westport, Mass., delineated property lines, both in modern times and on a map from 1712, she said.

This research will be detailed in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, and is now available online.




This laser technique is new to me, though it has apparently been in use for several years. Archaeologists have been using photographs taken from airplanes for a longer time, maybe 20 years, which will also show up visible irregularities in the soil caused by plowed fields even from prehistoric times. One thing that is really interesting about archeology is that they continue to use new scientific techniques in their work, especially in the dating of artifacts and bones.

Archeologists have to dabble in a lot of scientific fields – they have to keep up with the times and often branch into biology or chemistry. Reading articles on archeology is a good way to broaden your scientific understanding in general. They also don't tend to be so dense with jargon as do some other sciences. Looking at them on the Internet, when I find words I don't understand, I can look on Wikipedia and generally find something that is explanatory.




Chinese mom buys front-page ad in desperate bid to see son over holidays – NBC
By Ed Flanagan, Producer, NBC News

BEIJING -- Just how far would a mother go to ensure her son came home for the holidays?
One Chinese man in Melbourne, Australia, is learning the hard way after his mother printed "Letter to My Son" on the front-page of a Chinese-language newspaper.
The unnamed woman took out the full-page ad begging her son to come home for the Spring Festival this month. She even promised him that she would not give him her usual mother-son harassment about getting married.

"I’ve called you several times, but you don’t pick up. Perhaps this was the only way to get you to read my message?" begins the letter. "Dad and Mom will not pressure you to get married ever again. Please come back for Chinese New Year this year, Love Mom.”

An employee for the Chinese Melbourne Daily declined to comment on the identity of the mother, but confirmed to NBC News that the letter was real and that it had been printed on its cover on Jan. 14. An interview in Want China Times revealed that the mother lived in Guangzhou and that the son had been working in Melbourne since graduating from college there. 

Chinese media quickly picked up on the letter and the small Australian paper with a circulation of around 15,000 has been inundated with calls for more details.
The son has gained many sympathetic supporters online in China. They have been quick to express their own frustrations about intrusive questions on relationships and jobs that come with trips home during the New Year. 

"It seems that being single is a crime," complained one user on China’s twitter-like service, Weibo. "Why can’t parents learn to respect their children’s choices?"
"The mom must be rich! Does she need another son?" joked another.

Popular reaction to the letter harks back to a similar incident in 2011. Chinese tech company Tencent placed an ad in the lead up to the Spring Festival about the frustration, loneliness and love that China’s youth now associate with going home for their New Year on Jan. 31.

The great annual Chinese New Year migration has already begun, with state media predicting people will make 1.62 billion trips by plane, train, car and boat over the next 40 days.



This is a sad story, but I am pleased to see the positive action that the mother took. When families split up it causes real grief, and is often over something that is simple. Children do grow up and when they do the parents no longer have the same rights over what work they pursue, whether or not they are gay or other personal decisions. Sometimes an adult child makes the final rebellion – breaking off the relationship. I hope in this case that the son responds to his mother's ad and comes home for a visit.






Wealthy Chinese flee China, taking their fortunes with them – NBC
Robert Frank CNBC


Do the wealthy Chinese know something we don't?
A new report shows that 64 percent of Chinese millionaires have either emigrated or plan to emigrate—taking their spending and fortunes with them. The United States is their favorite destination.

The report from Hurun, a wealth research firm that focuses on China, said that one-third of China's super rich—or those worth $16 million or more—have already emigrated.

The data offer the latest snapshot of China's worrying wealth flight, with massive numbers of rich Chinese taking their families and fortunes overseas. Previous studies show the main reasons rich Chinese are leaving is to pursue better educations for their kids, and to escape the pollution and overcrowding in urban China.

But analysts say there is another reason the Chinese rich are fleeing: to protect their fortunes. With the Chinese government cracking down on corruption, many of the Chinese rich—who made their money through some connection or favors from government—want to stash their money in assets or countries that are hard for the Chinese government to reach.

According to WealthInsight, the Chinese wealthy now have about $658 billion stashed in offshore assets. Boston Consulting Group puts the number lower, at around $450 billion, but says offshore investments are expected to double in the next three years.

A study from Bain Consulting found that half of China's ultrawealthy—those with $16 million or more in wealth—now have investments overseas.

The mass millionaire migration out of China is also hitting luxury companies hard. Hurun said China's luxury sales last year fell 15 percent—the biggest drop in over a half a decade. Spending on gifts, which made up a sizable portion of luxury sales, fell 25 percent.

Bentley Motors last week said that its sales in China slowed last year in part because of "the migration of high net worth individuals from China."
In other words, it isn't that wealthy buyers in China are spending less—they're just disappearing.

Most are looking for permanent residences, Hurun said. The United States was their top destination, which any real estate agent in San Francisco, Seattle or New York can confirm. Europe is their second favorite destination, followed by Canada, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong.



People do want to get rich, and if they are rich they want to stay that way. Personally, I buy one Lotto ticket in each drawing of the Florida lottery – two a week. I have won only small amounts, but the urge to keep buying is there, and the cost isn't great. If I win the lottery I will attain security for myself and give some to family and friends, then give to charities.

I was surprised in reading this that so many Chinese have been able to get very wealthy. I thought Communist countries leveled out the wealth to such a degree that nobody is really wealthy or poor. It's interesting that it said much of the wealth gained was due to corruption and government favors.

That is another thing that seems to occur in all societies – people in privileged positions get wealthier. There was an article recently about our Congress in the US. A large percentage of them, I forget exactly how many, are millionaires. It's partly that millionaires are more likely to be able to afford to run for office, but also that due to special information and contacts that they make in Congress they are able to get richer. I'm sure that's both Republicans and Democrats, and I'm sure that there is corruption involved in it. It is regrettable, but it's human nature.




­ Three Years After Uprisings, Arab States Take Different Paths
by Greg Myre

­ Here's a snapshot of the Arab world on the third anniversary of its uprisings: Tunisians celebrated in the streets this month. Egyptians voted on a constitution that highlighted their bitter divisions. Beleaguered Syrians prayed that peace talks will bring an end to their nightmarish civil war.

The revolutionary fervor that gripped Arab nations in early 2011 has long since dissipated. All those that experienced uprisings have struggled to remake themselves and the prevailing mood across much of the region has been disappointment or worse.
Amid this messy process, several Arab Spring countries are working through significant events that will define the way ahead.

Here's a look at Tunisia, the most hopeful Arab Spring nation; Egypt, the most populous Arab state; and Syria, the most convulsed.

Tunisia
Tunisian politicians are poised to approve a new constitution hammered out during protracted negotiations between Islamist and secular parties.
This alone sets Tunisia apart from other Arab states where the battle between Islamists and secularists is still playing out, often with deadly results.
A broad cross-section of cheering Tunisians spilled into the streets on Tuesday to mark the third anniversary of the ouster of Zine el-Abidene Ben Ali, the autocratic president who ruled for nearly a quarter-century before fleeing to Saudi Arabia.
It's been a bumpy road for Tunisia. Protests have turned violent and high-profile assassinations threatened to tear the country apart. The negotiations on a constitution stalled and appeared near collapse at times. The economy is still weak.
But the parties have worked out compromises on tough issues. The constitution acknowledges that Islam is the religion of Tunisia but does not make reference to Islamic law. A section on women's rights has been praised.

Elections are planned for later this year and will test whether all Tunisians have bought into the constitutional compromises.

"The debate over the proper role of religion in Tunisian society is central, and reveals, like few other issues do, just how polarized Tunisian society remains," journalist Asma Ghribi wrote this week in Foreign Policy.

Egypt
Egyptians have voted often since the former president, Hosni Mubarak, was ousted in February 2011, but their differences only seem to get deeper.

Supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood clash with civilians and Egyptian riot police in Cairo on Friday. The Egyptian government has outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, and the group boycotted this week's vote on a new constitution.

In balloting this past week, Egypt overwhelmingly approved a new constitution, according to preliminary results. But it was seen as a highly controlled exercise by the military-backed government, and not a product of national consensus-building.
"Although formally the constitutional referendum is the first step toward the restoration of a fully democratic process in Egypt, there should be no illusion that Egypt will move in the direction of democracy," wrote Marina Ottaway of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

Egypt plans to hold elections later this year, but the Muslim Brotherhood, which swept the 2012 vote, has been declared a terrorist organization. Its leaders, including the elected president, Mohammed Morsi, have been jailed.

One key question now is whether the head of the army, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, will run for president. He is hugely popular among those who supported the military's ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood last July, and would be certain to win if the Muslim Brotherhood was not able to field a candidate, according to analysts.
"Even if the general resigns his army position, his victory would openly restore the military to the central position in Egyptian politics it acquired with the 1952 coup d'état," Ottaway writes.

The U.S., a close Egyptian ally and a leading aid donor for decades, has found itself with little influence. Over the past six months, Egypt's military has consistently cracked down on opponents and rejected calls by Washington and others in the international community to move toward a genuine democracy.

Syria
The international community is making a major push to find a solution to Syria's civil war with peace talks in Geneva scheduled to start next Wednesday.
But not all the warring factions will be taking part. President Bashar Assad's regime will be represented. However, the opposition remains badly fractured. Extremist militias linked to al-Qaida definitely won't be there, and more moderate opposition groups were still trying to establish a unified front.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says the aim to to create a transitional government in Syria that would not include Assad, who has ruled for 14 years, preceded by three decade of rule by his father, Hafez Assad.

"It will become clear that there is no political solution whatsoever if Assad is not discussing a transition and if he thinks he is going to be a part of that future," Kerry said Friday. "It is not going to happen."

But Assad doesn't see it that way. He has insisted that he's not willing to step aside.
Meanwhile, the battlefield has become increasingly fragmented as the al-Qaida-linked militias gain ground and frequently clash with the other opposition groups.
The United Nations announced that it will no longer publish death tolls, saying it has become too dangerous and difficult to produce reliable figures. The Syrian war is considered the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, with roughly a quarter of Syria's 25 million people displaced by the fighting.



In a number of countries the Muslim Brotherhood have been in the news. Along with Al-Qaida, they are given as destabilizing forces and proponents of Sharia law, which spells the end of women's rights. The following clips from a Wikipedia article give their history. They have been around much longer than I realized.


Muslim Brotherhood
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Society of the Muslim Brothers  (Arabic: جماعة الإخوان المسلمين‎, الإخوان المسلمون, the Muslim Brotherhood, transliterated: al-ʾIkḫwān al-Muslimūn) is a transnational Islamic political organization which is considered a terrorist organization by both the Egyptian and Russian governments.[1][2][3] Founded in Egypt in 1928 [4] a Pan-Islamic, religious, and social movement by the Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna,[5][6][7][8] by the end of World War II the Muslim Brotherhood had an estimated two million members.[9] Its ideas had gained supporters throughout the Arab world and influenced other Islamist groups with its "model of political activism combined with Islamic charity work".[10]

The Brotherhood's stated goal is to instill the Qur'an and Sunnah as the "sole reference point for ...ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community ... and state."[citation needed] The movement officially renounced political violence in 1949, after a period of considerable political tension which ended in the assassination of Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud an-Nukrashi Pasha by a young veterinary student who was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.[11][12][13]

The Arab Spring at first brought considerable success for the Brotherhood, but as of 2013 it has suffered severe reversals.[19] After some six decades of government repression, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was legalized in 2011 when the regime of Hosni Mubarak was overthrown. As the country's strongest political organization, the Brotherhood won several elections,[20] including the 2012 presidential election when its candidate Mohamed Morsi became Egypt's first democratically elected President. However one year later, on 3 July 2013, Morsi was himself overthrown by the military and the organization is once again suffering a severe crackdown.[21] On 25 December 2013 the interim Egyptian government declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group as a response to an attack on a police headquarters in Mansoura on 23 December 2013.[1] The same day however, Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, a Sinai-based group, declared responsibility for the bombing, but till this moment the government still hasn't withdrawn from its declaration.[22][23]

The Brotherhood's English language website describes the principles of the Muslim Brotherhood as including firstly the introduction of the Islamic Sharia as "the basis for controlling the affairs of state and society" and secondly, work to unify "Islamic countries and states, mainly among the Arab states, and liberating them from foreign imperialism".[27]

By April 2013, Egypt had "become increasingly divided" between President Mohammed Morsi and "Islamist allies" and an opposition of "moderate Muslims, Christians and liberals". Opponents accused "Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood of seeking to monopolize power, while Morsi’s allies say the opposition is trying to destabilize the country to derail the elected leadership".[78] Adding to the unrest were severe fuel shortages and electricity outages—which evidence suggests were orchestrated by Mubarak-era Egyptian elites.[79]

On 3 July 2013 Mohamed Morsi was arrested and detained by the military following a period of widespread protests of millions of Egyptians[75][80][81][82][83] demanding the resignation of Morsi. Tens of thousands also protested in support of Morsi.[84]



Tunisia seems to have the most hopeful status quo of the three nations mentioned in this article. “The constitution acknowledges that Islam is the religion of Tunisia but does not make reference to Islamic law. A section on women's rights has been praised.” I am always most critical of abuses to women, not merely because I'm a feminist, but because the conditions in so many parts of the Middle East, India and Africa are so very bad. They are truly inhumane. It is good to see that an Islamic nation is voluntarily supporting women and refraining from making the Sharia courts dominant over secular law.




­

Still Texting? OMG, That's Already So Old-School – NPR
by NPR Staff
­
If you have teenagers in your house, you may find this hard to believe, but texting is on the decline.
For the first time ever, traditional texting — the kind you do through your cell phone provider — has dropped in Britain. That's according to the annual technology predictions report from Deloitte, which reported that the number of text messages passed around by Brits decreased by 7 billion last year.

Instead, the company predicts, people in the U.K. will send around 300 billion instant messages in 2014. That's the kind of messaging that requires an app and uses the Internet. Old-fashioned texting is only expected to account for about 140 billion messages.

This trend will probably continue, David Gerzof Richard tells NPR's Lynn Neary. A media and marketing professor at Emerson College, Richard says people are increasingly using apps to send messages, even though texting hasn't been around for that long. He proposes several reasons why:

You pay for texts: With a texting plan from your cell phone provider, you usually pay to send text messages. With instant messaging services, including Facebook, Snapchat and WhatsApp, the app is free. You pay for a data plan — your access to the Internet — but you're not billed for your messages.

You can do more with instant messages: For example, you can set a time limit for how long messages on Snapchat can be seen; you can send audio or video clips with WhatsApp.

You don't have to worry about phone numbers: Most apps don't need them. "That's a nice thing about where this is all moving, the intersection of social and mobile," Richard says. "You can fire up an app, connect it to your Facebook, and all of a sudden you're able to pull in all of your contacts from Facebook and you never have to worry about the phone number."

"It looks like we're starting to move in a direction where the younger generation isn't thinking in terms of phone numbers, but in terms of usernames and handles," Richard says.

Where young people go, their elders will follow: The report also predicts that people over 55 will be buying smart phones at the quickest rate this year. Richard says that will drive even more people to instant messaging.

"Remember, if their kids are there and they want to be connecting with their kid, they're going to have to be on the platform to send them that message, like, 'Hey, come home, dinner's ready,' " he says.

It may seem too soon to talk about the good old days of texting, but technological turnover is another sign of the times.

"Texting really is just about a 20-year-old technology, and we're talking about it declining already," Richard says. "These are sort of the cycles that we're seeing in technology development."



Oh dear! I haven't even started texting yet! I just use my cell phone to make emergency calls from the road when I'm out driving, and of course I have my email account, which I do use a lot. I enjoy the really speedy letter communication and the funny little things people send me. I recently got on Facebook, but the messages people write on Facebook are so short and lacking in substance that I'm not enjoying it much except for the photographs. I also apparently don't know how to operate it for messages properly, because every time I send one off the prompt pops up for me to send another one. I have done a lot of “chatlog” work with my former boss who was living in Italy at the time, and I think that is probably “instant messaging,” but I don't want to pay money to buy an app for instant messaging. I don't think I would use it very much. I'm fine just as I am. Besides, I still like to hear familiar voices on the telephone, and if I have much to talk about I want the full communication I get by phone. I do talk for as much as an hour from time to time on the telephone.