Immunity In Suit Sought For Pope
The
Vatican has sought the intervention of the
U.S. State Department to declare Pope Benedict XVI immune from a sexual
abuse lawsuit filed here, according to court documents.
A
church official contacted the State
Department May 20, asking it to notify a Houston federal court of the
pope's immunity as the head of a foreign state, according to the
defense motion. Vatican attorneys requested a delay on the matter
Thursday.
A
spokesman for the Archdiocese of
Galveston-Houston, which also was named as a defendant in the suit,
could not be reached for comment Friday.
The
lawsuit filed by plaintiff's identified as
John Does I, II and III accuses the pope, then acting as a cardinal, of
conspiring to cover up the alleged abuse about a decade ago. The suit
names a former seminary students as the alleged abuser.
chron.com 5/30/05
Growing Problem for Military Recruiters: Parents
Rachel
Rogers, a single mother of four in
upstate New York, did not worry about the presence of National Guard
recruiters at her son's high school until
she learned that they
taught students how to throw hand grenades, using baseballs as
stand-ins. For the last month she has been insisting that
administrators limit recruiters' access to children.
Orlando Terrazas, a former truck driver in
Southern California, said he was struck when his son told him that recruiters
were promising students jobs as musicians.
Meanwhile, Amy Hagopian, co-chairwoman of the
Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle,
has been fighting against a four-year-old federal law that requires
public schools to give military recruiters the same access to students
as college recruiters get, or lose federal funding. She also recently
took a few hours off work to stand beside recruiters at Garfield High
and display pictures of injured American soldiers from Iraq.
"We want to show the military that they are
not welcome by the P.T.S.A. in this building," she said. "We hope other
P.T.S.A.'s will follow."
Two
years into the war in Iraq, as the Army
and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become
boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move.
Mothers and fathers around the country said
they were terrified that their children would have to be killed - or
kill - in a war that many see as unnecessary and without
end. Around the dinner table, many parents said,
they are discouraging their children from serving.
At schools, they are insisting that
recruiters be kept away, incensed at the access that they have to
adolescents easily dazzled by incentive packages and flashy equipment.
A
Department of Defense survey last November,
the latest, shows that only 25 percent of parents would recommend
military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August
2003.
"Parents," said one recruiter in Ohio who
insisted on anonymity because the Army ordered all recruiters not to
talk to reporters, "are the biggest hurdle we face."
Legally, there is little a parent can do to
prevent a child over 18 from enlisting. But in interviews, recruiters
said that it was very hard to sign up a young man or woman over the
strong objections of a parent.
The
Pentagon - faced with using only
volunteers during a sustained conflict, an effort rarely tried in
American history - is especially vexed by a generation of more activist
parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their
children.
Lawrence S. Wittner, a military historian at
the State University of New York, Albany, said today's parents also had
more power.
"With
the draft, there were limited
opportunities for avoiding the military, and parents were trapped,
reduced to draft counseling or taking their children to Canada," he
said. "But with the volunteer armed force, what one gets is more
vigorous recruitment and more opportunities to resist."
Some of that opportunity was provoked by the
very law that was supposed to make it easier for recruiters to reach
students more directly. No Child Left Behind, which was passed by
Congress in 2001, requires schools to turn over students' home phone
numbers and addresses unless parents opt out. That is often the spark
that ignites parental resistance.
Recruiters, in interviews over the past six
months, said that opposition can be fierce. Three years ago, perhaps 1
or 2 of 10 parents would hang up immediately on a cold call to a
potential recruit's home, said a recruiter in New York who, like most
others interviewed, insisted on anonymity to protect his career. "Now,"
he said, "in the past year or two, people hang up all the time. "
Several recruiters said they had even been
threatened with violence.
"I had one father say if he saw me on his
doorstep I better have some protection on me," said a recruiter in
Ohio. "We see a lot of hostility."
nytimes.com 6/3/05
Porn Panic Over Eroto-toxins
Pornography, the U.S. Senate was told on 18
October, is a drug more dangerous than crack cocaine. That, at least,
was the opinion of some witnesses invited to testify on "the science
behind pornography addiction." It's not a view shared by everyone.
Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the sexual
trauma and psychopathology program at the university of Pennsylvania,
said unpublished research showed that "even non-sex-addicts will show
brain reactions on PET scans while viewing pornography similar to
cocaine addicts looking at images of people taking cocaine." Jeffrey
Satinover, a doctor whose website outlines therapies for homosexuals,
described porn as a designer drug, delivered efficiently over the
internet, which "does what heroin can't do." A third expert witness
said there was an urgent need for research on addiction to
"eroto-toxins."
New Scientist magazine
A Policy of Rape
NYALA,
Sudan—All countries have rapes,
of course. But here in the refugee shantytowns of Darfur, the
horrific stories that young women whisper are not of random criminality
but of a systematic campaign of rape to terrorize civilians and drive
them from "Arab lands" - a policy of rape.
One measure of the international community's
hypocrisy is that the world is barely bothering to protest. More than
two years after the genocide in Darfur began, the women of Kalma Camp -
a teeming squatter's camp of 110,000 people driven from their burned
villages - still face the risk
of gang rape every single day as
they go out looking for firewood.
Nemat, a 21-year-old, told me that she left
the camp with three friends to get firewood to cook with. In the early
afternoon a group of men in uniforms caught and gang-raped her.
Sometimes the women simply vanish. A young
mother named Asha cried as she told how she and her four sisters were
chased down by a Janjaweed militia; she escaped but all her sisters
were caught.
Gang rape is terrifying anywhere, but
particularly so here. Women who are raped here are often ostracized for
life, even forced to build their own huts and live by themselves. In
addition, most girls in Darfur undergo an extreme form of genital
cutting called infibulation that often ends with a midwife stitching
the vagina shut with a thread made of wild thorns. This stitching and
the scar tissue make sexual assault a particularly violent act, and the
resulting injuries increase the risk of H.I.V. transmission.
The government has also imprisoned rape
victims who became pregnant, for adultery. Even those who simply seek
medical help are harassed and humiliated.
On March 26, a 17-year-old student named Hawa
went to a French-run clinic in Kalma and reported that she had been
raped. A French midwife examined her and confirmed that she was
bleeding and had been raped.
But an informer in the clinic alerted the
police, who barged in and carried Hawa off to a police hospital, where
she was chained to a cot by one leg and one arm. A doctor there
declared that she had not been raped after all, and Hawa was then
imprisoned for a couple of days. The authorities are now proposing that
she be charged with submitting false information.
The attacks are sometimes purely about
humiliation. Some women are raped with sticks that tear apart their
insides, leaving them constantly trickling urine. One Sudanese woman
working for a European aid organization was raped with a bayonet.
Doctors Without Borders issued an excellent
report in March noting that it alone treated almost 500 rapes in a
four-and-a-half-month period. Sudan finally reacted to the report a few
days ago - by arresting an Englishman and a Dutchman working for
Doctors Without Borders.
I'm still chilled by the matter-of-fact
explanation I received as to why it is women who collect firewood, even
though they're the ones who are raped. The reason is an indication of
how utterly we are failing the people of Darfur, two years into the
first genocide of the 21st century.
"It's simple," one woman here explained.
"When the men go out, they're killed. The women are only
raped."
nytimes.com 6/5/05
Inmates' Religious Rights Law Upheld
WASHINGTON,
D.C.—The U.S. Supreme Court
upheld the constitutionality of a federal law requiring state prisons
to accommodate inmates' religions, including witchcraft and Satanism.
Justices today sided 9-0 with Ohio inmates
who had claimed they were denied access to religious literature,
ceremonial items and time to worship.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the
Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act is not an
unconstitutional government promotion of religion.
The 2000 law requires states that receive
federal money to accommodate prisoners' religious beliefs unless
wardens can show that the accommodation would be disruptive.
Foes of the statute had argued that inmates
requirements for special diets or religious symbols could make
management of prisons more difficult.
zenit.org 5/31/05
Coming Clean
INFECTIONS
that have been nearly eradicated
in some other countries are raging through hospitals here in the United
States. The major reason? Poor hygiene. In fact, hygiene is so
inadequate in most American hospitals that one out of every 20 patients
contracts an infection during a hospital stay. Hospital infections kill
an estimated 103,000 people in the United States a year, as many as
AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined.
And the danger is worsening as many hospital
infections can no longer be cured with common antibiotics. One of the
deadliest germs is a staph bacteria called M.R.S.A., short for
methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which lives harmlessly on
the skin but causes havoc when it enters the body. Patients who do
survive M.R.S.A. often spend months in the hospital and endure several
operations to cut out infected tissue. In 1974, 2 percent of staph
infections were from M.R.S.A. By 1995, that number had soared to 22
percent. Today, experts estimate that more than 60 percent of staph
infections are M.R.S.A.
Hospitals in Denmark, Finland and the
Netherlands once faced similar rates, but brought them down to below 1
percent. How? Through the rigorous enforcement of rules on hand
washing, the meticulous cleaning of equipment and hospital rooms, the
use of gowns and disposable aprons to prevent doctors and nurses from
spreading germs on clothing and the testing of incoming patients to
identify and isolate those carrying the germ.
Too few hospitals in the United States are
using these precautions, though where they are used they are highly
effective. In a pilot program, the veteran's hospital in Pittsburgh
reduced M.R.S.A. 85 percent, and the University of Virginia Medical
Center eradicated it. Unfortunately
most hospitals have not shown
the will to defeat infections.
More
than half the time, doctors and
other caregivers break the most fundamental rule of hygiene by failing
to clean their hands before treating a patient.
Gloves are not the
answer because pulling them on with dirty hands contaminates the
gloves.
Nearly three-quarters of patients' rooms are
contaminated with M.R.S.A., which, according to experts, can be found
on everything from cabinets to bedside tables. Once patients and
caregivers touch these surfaces, their hands become vectors for
disease. Ordinary cleaning solutions can kill these bugs, but surfaces
need to be drenched in disinfectant for several minutes, not just
sprayed and wiped quickly.
Frequently, stethoscopes, blood-pressure
monitors and other equipment are contaminated with live bacteria. Yet
doctors and nurses almost never clean the stethoscope before listening
to a patient's chest.
Astoundingly, most hospitals in the United
States don't routinely test patients for staph bacteria. Studies show
that 70 percent to 90 percent of patients carrying M.R.S.A. are never
identified.
Clothing is frequently a conveyor belt for
infections. When doctors and nurses lean over a patient with M.R.S.A.,
their coats and uniforms pick up bacteria 65 percent of the time, and
carry it to other patients.
Contaminated clothing is believed to be the
culprit at New York City's Mount Sinai Hospital, which has recently
struggled to control another type of infection called Clostridium
difficile. This common and
seldom life-threatening infection is
often caused by fecal material from one patient entering another
patient's mouth. Doctors at the hospital suspect that this infection
spread because clinical nursing assistants wear the same clothes while
doing two jobs: emptying bed pans and delivering food trays.
In February, the
Centers for
Disease
Control and Prevention declared that it will not support the growing
demand to make hospital infection rates public.
That's a shame
because if you need to be hospitalized, you should be able to find out
which hospitals in your area have the worst infection problems. This
secrecy may allow some hospitals to save face, but it won't save lives
or money.
nytimes.com 6/06/05
Vatican Convokes Historians Of Christianity
VATICAN
CITY—The Pontifical Committee
for Historical Sciences has convoked a seminar on the history of
Christianity, confident that rigorous historical research will foster
the move toward Christian unity.
The meeting, to be held this Friday and
Saturday at the Vatican, will touch on research of the past
half-century, as well as the questions that are still open in studies
of the history of Christianity.
The closed-door seminar will be addressed by
some of the most prestigious European historians, not all of whom are
members of the committee.
Monsignor Walter Brandmuller, committee
president, explained that the purpose of this Vatican institution is to
give space to "significant voices of Catholic historical culture at the
service of truth and of the Church."
In this connection, the committee hopes to
contribute to the common quest for Christian unity.
"Without falling into relativism," he added,
"dialogue, understanding, reciprocal respect and deeper knowledge of
the historians is fostering the path of unity."
zenit.org 5/31/05
AIDS, Pregnancy and Poverty Trap Ever More African Girls
Mozambique—They
met a year ago on the
dirt road outside her aunt's house, in this struggling township where
houses are built from bound-together reeds and the only water comes
from wells. Flora Muchave was 14. Elario Novunga was 22, nicely dressed
and, Flora said, full of promises.
Aid workers say there are 639 orphaned girls
in Patrice Lumumba.
One stood out: Flora's family had been
teetering on the edge of destitution since her father, a miner, died of
AIDS in 2000. Elario said he would change that. "He asked me to have
sex with him, and he guaranteed everything I would need," Flora
recalled. "He said he would take care of everything for me."
He lied. Elario gave Flora the equivalent of
about $4 and a baby, whose impending birth has forced her to drop out
of sixth grade. Before Flora's mother died in May, apparently of AIDS,
she forgave her daughter for ignoring her warnings about fast-talking
men. But she sketched out a bleak future for her only daughter.
"Now," Flora recalled her sobbing from her
deathbed, "you are going to suffer."
Flora Muchave's cautionary tale is nothing
new; Africa claims the world's highest adolescent birthrate and the
world's lowest share of girls enrolled in primary school.
But for the last 25 years, the trends had
been positive. African girls, like girls elsewhere, were marrying
later, and a growing percentage were in school.
The
AIDS epidemic now threatens to take
away those hard-won gains. Orphaned and impoverished by the deaths of
parents, girls here are being propelled into sex at shockingly early
ages to support themselves, their siblings and, all too often, their
own children.
With 12 million children orphaned in
sub-Saharan Africa because of AIDS, suffering abounds among boys as
well as girls.
But orphaned girls tend to fare worse, relief
officials say, because they traditionally hold a lower status in
African society, are more vulnerable to sexual exploitation and, for
anatomical reasons, are more likely than boys to contract
H.I.V.
In
Zimbabwe, a new Unicef study has found
that orphaned girls are three times more likely to become infected than
are girls whose parents are alive.
In Zambia, orphaned girls are
the first to be withdrawn from school.
In Zambia's capital, Lusaka, impoverished
relatives order some orphaned girls as young as 14 out on the street at
night, telling them they must earn their keep, a recent survey found.
In Lesotho, a growing number of adolescent girls are forced to work as
maids or prostitutes, Unicef researchers have reported.
Patrice Lumumba, on the Indian Ocean a
three-hour drive north of the capital, Maputo, is by no means
Mozambique's poorest township. Most of its houses of reeds or concrete
are well built and neatly maintained. Most residents have some
semblance of furniture, even if only a set of plastic chairs hauled out
for guests.
But AIDS has hit hard here, like everywhere
in southern Africa. One in every six people between the ages of 15 and
49 is infected with the virus in the surrounding Gaza Province. Of the
town's 43,000 residents, 1,583 are orphans. One in four primary school
students has lost at least one parent, according to Pedro Mausse,
headmaster of the primary school.
Flora's parents furnished their two-room reed
house, which has a corrugated metal roof, with a wardrobe, dishes and
two upholstered chairs.
Flora said she remembers how her father's
earnings from work in South Africa's mines kept the family supplied.
After he died in 2000 at 36, she said, her mother's earnings as a cook
for a Bible school - the equivalent of less than $35 a month - did not
go far enough.
nytimes.com 6/03/05
Review Sees Turkey's Entry Into EU Doubtful
ROME—The
latest issue of the review Civilta
Cattolica expressed doubt
regarding Turkey's possible entry into
the European Union.
The biweekly review, whose
drafts are
reviewed by the Vatican Secretariat of State before publication,
said its doubt is based on several factors.
"Above all, Turkey has never formed part,
geographically or politically, of Europe: The Ottoman Empire subjected
some European countries, but it had no part in European culture," the
review stated.
"In fact, Turkey's relations with Europe have
always been of conflict, open or latent, never of belonging," the
review said.
If Turkey were to enter the Union, it would
"change the balance," in particular because it would become the second
most populous country of Europe, Civilta
Cattolica contended.
Moreover, "it is difficult to think that
Turkey can soon accept, not only with words but also with deeds, the
values proper to the European Union, such
as Western democracy,
respect of the human person, freedom of thought and of religion."
The review added that Turkey denies full
liberty to religions, with the exception of Islam, despite the fact it
describes itself as a secular country.
zenit.org 6/19/05
Immaculate Destruction
For
some time now the Air Force has been
pressing the White House for a new national-security directive that
would permit the deployment of space weaponry.
A decision could
come within weeks. Most space-to-ground weapons remain futuristic, but
previous presidents and Congresses have chosen not to deploy
anti-satellite weapons, fearing that doing so would set off an arms
race and endanger the information systems the United States relies on.
The new directive, if approved, would constitute a historic change in
policy as radical as President Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war.
Yet the idea of putting weapons in space has
its roots in American national mythology and in a strain of
19th-century strategic thinking that, curiously enough, seems quite
close to that of the Bush administration.
In January 2001 the National Space
Commission, which had been led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of
defense designate, warned the incoming President Bush of the potential
for a "space Pearl Harbor." The bumper-sticker phrase dramatized a real
concern for American defense planners. Over the years the military has
become more and more dependent on satellites for navigation, targeting,
command-and-control and other essential functions, yet satellites are
highly vulnerable. They can be shot down with guided missiles, their
ground transmitters can be attacked and the communication links between
the two can be jammed.
The space policy of the Clinton
administration emphasized defensive measures and arms control to deal
with these threats, but the Rumsfeld commission called for "the option
to deploy weapons in space" and a new policy to guide their
development. In 2002 President Bush withdrew from the Antiballistic
Missile Treaty, which banned space-based missile defenses, and ordered
a policy review. Since then the Air Force and other military commands
have called for deploying weapons that could cripple other countries'
orbiters, a space-based missile defense system and other weapons that
could rapidly attack targets anywhere on earth.
The strategic advantage of some of these
systems, however, is difficult to discern. A space-based ground attack
system would require dozens of satellites and cost 50 to 100 times as
much as ballistic missiles that can do the same job. As for
antisatellite weapons, they would do nothing to defend our satellites.
Whatever utility such weapons might have, the problem with all of them
is that spacecraft in orbit are vulnerable to relatively low-tech
countermeasures. And if other
countries, particularly Russia or
China, were faced with a space weapon that could cripple their
communications or strike them without warning, they might react just as
the United States would under similar circumstances.
Yet space is not so much a high ground as it
is a highway - and in some orbits it is as crowded as the New Jersey
Turnpike, mostly with commercial satellites and space debris. Any
space-based weapon would have to join this procession and roll along
with the rest of the traffic. How putting more or better weapons in
orbit would end their vulnerability Air Force officials have yet to
explain. But clearly they have faith that technology will find a way.
The Air Force's enthusiasm for space weaponry
accords with the Bush administration's preference for military
superiority over arms control and with Mr. Rumsfeld's view that the
United States should fight with high-tech weaponry and as few troops as
possible.
...While the Democrats would fight land wars,
compromise and negotiate, Midwestern Republicans would preach the
American way of life and command the world from the heights of the air
and the distances of the sea. Their ideal would surely have been space
weaponry. But the record of the last century suggests that, like
long-range bombers and aircraft carriers, killer satellites will not
save the United States from the messy realities of international
engagement.
nytimes.com 6/03/05
The Hip-Hop Media—A World Where Crime Really Pays
The rap diva Kimberly "Lil' Kim" Jones
parlayed the bare breast into a fashion accessory long before Janet
Jackson. But Ms. Jones was dressed like an office manager when she was
convicted of perjury earlier this spring for lying to a grand jury
about a Manhattan shootout that took place four years ago.
The Lil' Kim case has put artists on notice
that prosecutors have homed in on the Wild West gunfights that have
become common among rap crews in recent years. The
case has also
aimed a klieg light at hip-hop radio stations that boost ratings by
instigating potentially lethal disputes among rap artists over the
airwaves.
The shootout that led prosecutors to pursue
Ms. Jones so single-mindedly typifies the strain of violence that has
been commonplace in rap music for more than a decade.
Prosecutors, who had gathered evidence from
security cameras, were incensed when Ms. Jones failed to answer
truthfully about who had been present. That she continued to
misremember even after two of the principals confessed and went to
prison - virtually guaranteeing that she would be convicted of perjury
- made little sense, if measured by mainstream standards. But it
was perfectly logical in the world of hip-hop, where it is seen as more
noble to go to prison than to "snitch" to the authorities.
The
problem with this code of silence is
that it allows people to get away with murder.
That is precisely
what has happened so far in the deaths of legendary hip-hop stars like
Jam Master Jay, who was killed in 2002, and Tupac Shakur and the
Notorious B.I.G., who were both gunned down in the 1990's.
That the hip-hop code helped to prevent the
murderers from being brought to justice is easy to see. This
connection, however, has yet to dawn on the music magazine pundits who
lionize witnesses for not "snitching" while attacking law enforcement
officials for failing to solve high-profile hip-hop murders.
The July issue of the magazine XXL - "The
Jail Issue" - trumpets "exclusive interviews" with "hip-hop's
incarcerated soldiers."
For the time being, makers of luxury goods
seem to have embraced this "crime pays" marketing strategy. They
buy into the disturbing vision offered by some of these magazines. The
message is disastrous for minority young people, who are already at
risk of spending their lives in prison or of dying prematurely from
street violence.
The segment of the hip-hop
press that
embraces violence and criminality is clearly growing, both in influence
and affluence. This reflects the
extent to which hip-hop itself has
devolved from a richly blended tapestry that valued poetics and
sophisticated political commentary into a field where only
those
who have been shot, committed crimes and spent time in jail are judged
to hold the authentic street credentials that make them worthy of
studio recordings.
It also explains why Ms. Jones's record sales
will probably go through the roof if she heads off to prison. When
it comes to rap music, what's poisonous for the culture - and dangerous
for minority youth - tends to be great for album sales.
nytimes.com 6/08/05
Red Tide Shuts Shellfish Areas in New England
BOSTON,
June 3 - New England waters
are
being plagued by what may be the worst outbreak of red tide in the
region, a Massachusetts official said Friday.
"Everything
is just really on hold until this algae bloom clears up," said Barbara
Austin, who farms oysters and littleneck clams in Wellfleet, Mass.
The toxic
algae bloom
has led state
officials to close shellfish beds between Maine and Cape Cod so that
people do not eat infected
clams, mussels, oysters and scallops.
Scientists and state officials say the
outbreak, possibly caused by an unusually cold and wet winter and
spring, is worsening and, at minimum, is expected to last several
weeks.
Fishermen in the oyster- and clam-rich
centers of Cape Cod are out of work, and fish markets and restaurants
on the cape are scrambling to find more expensive substitutes, and, in
turn, selling the fish at higher than usual prices.
This species of algae, unlike a variety of
red tide that occurs off Florida, does not emit fumes that kill ocean
life or prevent people from swimming. Beaches have not closed. And it
affects only bivalves, not other seafood like lobsters or shrimp.
If shellfish infected with the New England
strain is eaten, the toxin
could cause numbness, breathing problems
or even death, said Dr. Don
Anderson, a senior scientist at the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who, along with other scientists,
has received emergency federal money to help monitor the problem.
No illnesses have been reported from this
outbreak. Different species of red tide bloom in
different parts of the world. The New England variety, Alexandrium,
often permeates the waters off Maine or New Hampshire, experts say. But
it rarely spreads with such ferocity and almost always drifts out to
the ocean before infiltrating the prolific shellfish bastions around
Cape Cod.
For days, Mr. Hickey and others have been
saying that the outbreak was not as bad as one in 1972, the first time
that officials think that red tide encroached on Massachusetts waters.
Then, the water around Cape Ann, 30 miles northeast of Boston, was
tinged reddish and some seabirds died. This time, the water has not
changed color, and no birds are known to have died.
nytimes.com 6/04/05