Some people think Mitt Romney is unfit to be president because he created MassHealth, but not Ruth Marcus. “I believe Romney is unfit to be president because he used a PowerPoint presentation to defend it,” she writes in the Washington Post . These oh-so-popular presentations are invariably dull and useless. “The…
Continue reading …US Catholic Church study blames 1960s permissiveness for rise in sexual abuse
May 18, 2011 No Comment
Report claims less than 5% of abusive priests were paedophiles as critics accuse it of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ exoneration A report on the child abuse scandal in the US Catholic Church has provoked condemnation for concluding that the permissive society of the 1960s was to blame for the rise in sexual offences by priests. The investigation commissioned by Catholic bishops said that the peak incidence of sexual abuse by priests in the 1960s and 70s reflected the increased level of other deviant behaviours in American society in the period, including “drug use and crime, as well as social changes, such as an increase in premarital sex and divorce.” Researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice said most of the abusive priests were ordained in the 1940s and 50s and were not properly trained to confront the social upheavals of the 1960s. David O’Brien, a historian of American Catholicism at the University of Dayton, said the report, Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010 , was dangerous because it seemed to exonerate bishops. “This recalls an old tabloid banner headline from an early pre-Boston stage of this crisis: ‘Bishops Blame Society’,” said O’Brien, referring to the sexual abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston in 2002. The study said there was no single cause of the abuse and concluded that few of the abusive priests were paedophiles, as their victims were not all pre-pubescent. Less than 5% of the abusive priests could be defined as paedophiles because the majority of victims were aged between 11 and 14. “There’s no indication in our data that priests are any more likely to abuse children than anyone else in society,” said lead researcher Karen Terry. But the finding was criticised by victims because the American Psychiatric Association defines paedophilia as an attraction to children aged 13 or younger. The researchers added that their vow of celibacy did not make priests any more likely to become sex offenders. Nor was homosexuality to blame as the victims were of both genders. The authors said the majority of abusive priests were “generalists” – sex offenders who do not specialise in a type of victim by age or gender or other characteristics. Terry said this was exemplified by the case of the founder of the Legion of Christ religious order, the late Reverend Marcial Maciel, who sexually abused young seminarians and also fathered three children. The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests dismissed the report as “garbage in, garbage out” because the bishops providing much of the funding for the report. But Terry defended the independence of the findings: “This is our report. None of the bishops had any influence on the findings of the study.” Researchers spoke with victims and their advocates, conducted surveys of bishops and diocesan officials who work with victims, and reviewed thousands of records, including a 1970s-era study on the psychology of priests and more than 1,000 case files of three treatment centres where abusive priests received counselling. The researchers called the crisis “history” as they found abuse claims peaked in the 1970s then began declining sharply in 1985, as general awareness of child sexual abuse and its impact grew and bishops began to respond to reported cases. But the study noted that church leaders remained more concerned with rehabilitating priests than with helping victims until 20 years later after those who suffered abuse mounted legal action. Catholicism Religion Christianity United States David Batty guardian.co.uk
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President pledges cash to support Egypt and Tunisia after criticism US has been too slow to support uprisings Barack Obama is to announce that the United States and the west will pour billions of dollars into the Middle East in support of Egypt, Tunisia and other countries embracing democracy, a move the White House portrayed as being on the scale of aid to former communist countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Speaking in Washington, the president will attempt to reposition the US as a champion of the newly-emerging Arab democracies. His speech comes amid criticism that the US has been too slow to support the uprisings, and has adopted contradictory approaches in its dealings with different countries. It is his most important speech on the Middle East since Cairo in 2009, when he called for a new beginning in relations between the US and the Muslim world. The support for Obama in the Arab world in 2009 has since dropped sharply. The speech will deal mainly with the Arab spring, hailing the benefits of democracy and respect for human rights, in spite of America’s long-time support for authoritarian regimes in the region. Senior Obama administration officials, briefing on the speech, said he will take a fresh look at the Middle East after a decade of tension and division. With the winding down of the Iraq war and the death of Osama bin Laden, “we are turning a page”, one official said, adding that the democracy movements reinforced this. The official suggested that the best way to support democracy was through economic reform, and drew comparisons with the massive injection of American aid to Europe after the war, and with the support given to central and eastern Europe in 1989. The US is to relieve Egypt of up to $1bn in debt and lend or guarantee up to $1bn. The World Bank, the IMF and other multilateral institutions to provide a further $2bn-3bn. The official described Tunisia and Egypt as beacons, models to encourage others to pursue democracy. “It is the beginning of a long-term effort,” an official said. The speech is expected to last 45 minutes, a long one by Obama’s standards. He is to devote a big portion to castigating countries such as Iran and Syria. The US Treasury announced sanctions on Wednesday targeted for the first time at Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad over the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. Six other Syrian officials were also added to the sanctions list. “The actions the administration has taken today send an unequivocal message to President Assad, the Syrian leadership, and regime insiders that they will be held accountable for the ongoing violence and repression in Syria,” said David Cohen, the acting Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. The European Union on Tuesday imposed fresh sanctions against Syria but did not include Assad. The US assets freeze on Assad is mainly symbolic as the Syrian leader has few assets in the country but it is a sign the US has lost patience with a president it once hoped might initiate reforms. The US is facing criticism for engaging in military action to bring down the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, but refusing to become sucked into similar action in Syria. It has also faced criticism for being slow to cut ties with traditional US allies such as the former Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak. The US issued only a mild rebuke over the violent suppression by another ally, Bahrain, of pro-democracy protesters. Obama’s speech comes after intensive debate within the White House between those arguing that the US should be at the forefront of the democracy movement, and those whose concern is US national security and protection of oil supplies. The few billion dollars proposed so far is not comparable to the vast sums the US sent to Europe after 1945, and some of it has already been announced by the World Bank and the IMF. Obama will next week urge the leaders of the G8 rich countries to provide aid when he meets them at a European summit. On Tuesday, Obama pledged several hundred millions of dollars in aid to King Abdullah of Jordan, even though that country has not been at the forefront of the democracy movement. This could raise questions about the value of the billions of dollars to Egypt and Tunisia as incentives to the democracy movement. The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said that the president saw a historic moment of opportunity. “In the last decade, our focus in the region was largely on Iraq, which was a military effort, and on the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the fight against al -Qaida,” Carney told reporters. “That fight against al-Qaida continues, but there is an opportunity in that region to focus on advancing our values and enhancing our security, and that’s what the president looks forward to discussing in his speech.” As part of the attempt to portray the US as fully behind the reform movement, the White House yesterday released details of a call between John Brennan, a White House adviser on national security, and President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, urging him to sign a political agreement that would allow Yemen “to move forward immediately with its political transition”. Obama will also express his continued hopes for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. He will discuss the issue with the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, at the White House tomorrow, and is to address the conference of the Israeli lobbying organisation Aipac on Sunday before leaving for Ireland and Britain. A poll published on Tuesday by the Washington-based Pew organisation found that President Obama remains unpopular among countries polled in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world, except Indonesia. US foreign policy Barack Obama Arab and Middle East unrest Egypt Middle East Tunisia United States Africa Aid Ewen MacAskill guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The US has taken the dramatic step of personally sanctioning Syria’s president and a number of his top aides, in an attempt to pressure him to stop his ongoing violent crackdown on dissent. The Treasury Department will freeze all of Bashar al-Assad’s assets that are within US jurisdiction, and bar…
Continue reading …A Tacoma mom is livid that her 13-year-old son was questioned without her presence … by the Secret Service. Vito LaPinta was called into his school’s office on Friday and met by an agent who wanted to know his name, date of birth, Facebook name, and “if there was anything…
Continue reading …Now that he’s finally put the birther conspiracy to rest, President Obama has decided to rub it in a little. His campaign is selling snarky T-shirts that say “Made in the USA” on the front and have the president’s long-form birth certificate on the back, Politico observes. Anyone donating $25…
Continue reading …US officials have long insisted that American nuclear plants are safe from the kind of crisis that hit Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, because they have a newer, better venting system. But Tokyo Electric has now revealed that it installed the exact same vents years ago, the New York Times reports….
Continue reading …Mexican police saw something shocking when they aimed their X-ray scanners at a pair of tractor trailers at a checkpoint in Chiapas. The trucks were jammed full of 513 illegal migrants, many of them suffering from dehydration, the AP reports. Though air holes had been cut in the top of…
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His theories on society were fashionable 200 years ago, so why are British politicians such fans of this New York Times columnist’s new book? When David Brooks was a boy, he had two turtles named Gladstone and Disraeli. How come? “There’s a New York Jewish culture that has a saying ‘Think Yiddish, act British’,” says Brooks. “My background was filled with Anglophile Jews. Jews of a certain generation, really my grandfathers’ generation, gave each other names they thought would help them fit in – Irving, Sydney, Milton and Norman – and now in the US those are not English names any more, they’re Jewish names. And I was brought up in that culture. Hence the turtles.” Hence much more than that. Brooks, though a 49-year-old Canadian-born, suburban New York-raised, Chicago university-educated and now so much of a stellar New York Times columnist that the White House sometimes rings him to ask what he’s planning to write about, is deeply Anglophilic. “I am very British in that I’m reticent. There’s a survey of how many times people in different countries touch each other during an hour over coffee. In Rio it was 180, in Paris 120. London, zero.” How about new York? “Maybe 40? I feel very at home here.” We’re sitting in the Cinnamon Club, an Indian restaurant in Westminster frequented by policy wonks, and he looks more diffident than the only Englishman at our table. I resist the counter-cultural urge to play footsie. But what’s important about Brooks is not so much that he acts British, but that he thinks British. His new book, The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens, is steeped in the anti-rationalist philosophical reflections of the British Enlightenment. And this is no ordinary book: even before publication this week it has become, according to Times columnist Rachel Sylvester, “the must-read text for politicians searching for a new prism through which to examine the apparently intractable challenges of social immobility, school dropout rates, welfare dependency and crime”. Education secretary Michael Gove believes it contains vital clues for turning around failing schools; universities minister David Willetts reckons it may help define modern Conservatism; policy minister Oliver Letwin thinks it articulates the cherished Tory notion of the Big Society. The book is so hot that both David Cameron and Ed Miliband are meeting Brooks this week, and Steve Hilton, the PM’s top strategist, has invited him to hold a
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Diplomat says Benghazi committee plays key role in air strikes, fuelling suspicions British officers are ‘target-spotting’ on ground Nato’s bombing campaign against the Libyan regime is relying strongly on information supplied by rebel leaders in Benghazi with advice from a growing numbers of British officers, according to a senior European diplomat. Nato denies the rebel military has any target-spotters on the ground to direct the air strikes against Gaddafi. But the diplomat, familiar with the situation in Benghazi, said the main function of the rebels’ military leadership committee, the joint operations centre (JOC), was to help the Nato campaign. “The JOC is just below the [supreme] military council,” said the diplomat. “Its main job is to co-ordinate and make more effective the processing of military and tactical information back into Nato so air operations are based on the best information available.” The UK mission in Benghazi, inaugurated last month by Christopher Prentice, a former ambassador to Iraq and Jordan and currently the British envoy in Rome, started with a staff of six. This has expanded to around 40, most of them military officers advising the rebel leadership. In a sign of the struggle which still lies ahead for the rebels and the Nato mission, Gaddafi’s forces have intensified their campaign to take strategic ground in the western mountains. A road used by many of those fleeing the fighting was targeted, forcing the temporary closure of the border crossing into Tunisia. Jaber Naluti, a volunteer who has been trying to assist people in the area, told the Associated Press seven rebels had been killed. Other reports said that some shells fell inside Tunisia. Much of the fighting centred around the town of Yafrin, where locals said rockets and missiles were fired. In nearby Zintan, rebels repelled an advance by Gaddafi’s forces, killing eight and taking one prisoner, a local activist said. Disclosure of the growing British role in Benghazi is likely to reignite warnings of mission creep from those worried about David Cameron’s hawkishness and may fuel suspicions that British officers are acting as Nato target-spotters. Nato’s spokesman, Wing Commander Mike Bracken, said: “We do not have boots on the ground in Libya.” France, Italy and Turkey are also active in advising Benghazi’s government-in-waiting. Despite its deep reluctance to get involved in Libya, the German government said this week it was also sending a “liaison team” to Benghazi. Amid mounting exasperation among the UK’s military top brass that the bombing campaign has proved ineffective and may be helping to entrench a stalemate, Nato officials and European diplomats familiar with Libya are cautiously optimistic. TThree months after the first student protests in Benghazi were bloodily suppressed, triggering a mass revolt against Gaddafi, the western sources spoke of increasing “disarray and dissent” in the capital, Tripoli, and said the balance of morale had tipped strongly in favour of the revolutionaries. The rebels had “more people wanting to fight than they had weapons”, said the diplomat, while “Gaddafi increasingly has to resort to mercenaries and possibly conscripted schoolboys”. A Nato official said the Libyan leader was utterly dependent on a shrinking military and security apparatus whose days were numbered. “The sense of strangulation of the regime is there,” said the diplomat, although he conceded that Gaddafi loyalists were showing “remarkable resilience”. Arming the rebels was not a central factor in turning the tide, the source said. “Military supplies won’t be the key. More important will be a comprehensive push on strangulation of the regime politically and economically.” Despite the perception that the US was taking a back seat and leaving the anti-Gaddafi campaign to the Europeans, Nato officials said this was for public consumption and that the US remained the sole indispensable force in the operations. Around half of the 7,000 Nato sorties flown since the end of March were said to be by US forces, including attacks on ground targets, especially air defence sites and surface-to-air missile batteries. “The Americans are the rear end of the cow and we are the front end,” said a European Nato officer. Libya Arab and Middle East unrest Muammar Gaddafi Middle East Africa Nato Foreign policy US foreign policy Europe Military Ian Traynor guardian.co.uk
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