Fresh allegations emerge over Bavarian school where Georg Ratzinger led choir for 30 years A series of allegations in Germany and Holland have plunged the Catholic Church into a renewed crisis over how it has dealt with child abuse after it emerged that the Pope’s brother ran a renowned choir at the centre of some of the latest claims. Reports of systematic historical abuse by clergy have surfaced at three schools in the Regensburg diocese in Bavaria. One of them is the much-heralded Regensburger Domspatzen, a thousand-year-old male choir and boarding school, whose choral master for 30 years was the Pope’s older brother, Georg Ratzinger. Monsignor Ratzinger has agreed to testify in any eventual prosecutions – but says that he knew of no abuse. And last night the German Justice Minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, joined a growing chorus of politicians in Berlin to criticise the church over its attitude to the investigation, accusing Catholic institutions of a policy of secrecy. ‘In many schools there was a wall of silence allowing for abuse and violence,’ said Ms Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a prominent critic of the church. She pointed to a Vatican directive from 2001 which required that even the most […]
A marine pest could be the key to a biofuel breakthrough, say scientists. Gribble, which resemble pink woodlice, plagued seafarers for centuries by boring through the planks of ships and destroying wooden piers. But now environmental scientists are taking a keen interest in the crustaceans. A team of British researchers has learnt that gribble have a gift for digesting wood not seen in any other animal. Enzymes produced by the tiny creatures are able to break down woody cellulose and turn it into energy-rich sugars meaning that gribble could convert wood and straw into liquid biofuel. A gribble-like processing plant could make sugars from woody raw material that can be fermented into alcohol-based fuels for vehicle engines. Researchers at the universities of York and Portsmouth made the discovery after carrying out an extensive study of digestive genes from the gribble species Limnoria quadripunctata. They found the crustacean’s long digestive tract is dominated by enzymes that attack cellulose and lignin, the normally indigestible material in woody plant tissue. The results of the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was made possible by the Biotechnology and […]
US companies will spend more this year on digital and online advertising and marketing than on print for the first time ever, according to a study released on Monday. Companies will spend 119.6 billion dollars on online and digital strategies and 111.5 billion dollars on newspaper and magazine advertisements and other print campaigns, according to the study by California-based Outsell. Outsell, which provides research and advisory services to the publishing and information industries, described the spending shift as ‘an industry milestone crossover event.’ It said overall US spending on advertising and marketing will increase by 1.2 percent in 2010 to 368 billion dollars. Outsell said 63 billion dollars, or 52.8 percent of total online advertising spending by companies, would be on their own websites, which it said constitutes a ‘powerful form of direct to customer marketing.’ ‘Advertisers are directing dollars toward the channels which generate the most qualified leads and most effective branding,’ Outsell vice president and lead analyst Chuck Richard said. ‘As they emerge from the recession, they need more accountability, and they’re spreading their spending over a widening set of options,’ he said. By category, Outsell said spending on print newspaper […]
SAN DIEGO — For all those dismayed by scenes of looting in disaster-struck zones, whether Haiti or Chile or elsewhere, take heart: Good acts – acts of kindness, generosity and cooperation – spread just as easily as bad. And it takes only a handful of individuals to really make a difference. In a study published in the March 8 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Harvard provide the first laboratory evidence that cooperative behavior is contagious and that it spreads from person to person to person. When people benefit from kindness they ‘pay it forward by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of cooperation that influences dozens more in a social network. The research was conducted by James Fowler, associate professor at UC San Diego in the Department of Political Science and Calit2’s Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, who is professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of medicine and medical sociology at Harvard Medical School. Fowler and Christakis are coauthors of the recently published […]
There was a time when Irish Catholics might have been delighted to see the pope lavishing attention on their bishops. On Feb. 15 and 16, however, when Ireland’s bishops were at the Vatican to discuss an ongoing child sex abuse scandal, Catholics back home were furious. Catholics were already upset about Pope Benedict’s refusal to apologize to the thousands of abuse victims in Ireland or even hint that he would meet with them, as some had requested. But what really set them off seems to have been the images of their bishops kissing the pope’s ring. Photos of the traditional greeting were plastered across broadsheet front pages and TV broadcasts over the following days. These, combined with images of the Vatican’s opulent Apostolic Palace — where the bishops met the pope and senior cardinals — as well as the regalia of all those elderly men and the complete absence of lay people or any woman, had a profoundly negative effect. The response was unqualified rage. Andrew Madden, the first person in Ireland to go public about his abuse by a priest, described the meetings at the Vatican as ‘a complete waste of time’ and the greatest act of […]
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Remote Viewing the Year 2060
