NANCY PHILLIPS, STAFF WRITER - Philadelphia Inquirer
Stephan: This story is good news. For the first time there is a move to hold superiors in the hierarchy accountable. Where monetary reparations alone have not succeeded this accountability will.
Lawyers for Msgr. William Lynn, charged with child endangerment for allegedly enabling abusive priests in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, said Monday that prosecutors had erred in bringing a criminal case against him, and they have asked a judge to dismiss the charges.
Lynn, former secretary for clergy for Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, is the first member of the Catholic hierarchy in the nation to be criminally charged for assigning known abusers to posts that gave them access to new victims. Lynn, 60, who most recently was pastor of St. Joseph Church in Downingtown, has pleaded not guilty.
He was arrested in February along with two priests, the Rev. James Brennan and the Rev. Charles Engelhardt; a defrocked priest, Edward Avery; and Bernard Shero, a former parochial school teacher. Prosecutors say the other four men raped and sodomized altar boys in the mid-1990s.
Lawyers for Brennan, Engelhardt, Avery and Shero said Monday that prosecutors had offered to recommend prison sentences of 7½ to 15 years if the men would plead guilty to rape, conspiracy and other charges. Each rejected that suggestion.
Brennan, 47, is charged with raping and sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy in 1996 while on leave from Cardinal O’Hara High School.
Engelhardt, 64, Avery, 68 […]
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Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
DAVID EDWARDS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This is an example of how strongly those committed to willful ignorance are willing to go. This is the same thing we saw in the Texas Schoolbook Commission incident when they literally rewrote the history texts Texas children -- and students in other states -- will use. This conservative movement lives in a fact-free fantasy world in which what you don't like you simply rewrite. Sarah Palin is the leading manifestation of this rightwing psychosis. The media makes all this worse because Palin is an endless source of the sensoids they crave for ratings.
Sarah Palin supporters are literally attempting to rewrite history after she flubbed the story of Paul Revere’s ride last week last week, taking to Wikipedia with their own revisions to the beloved story in an effort to make Palin’s version look true.
‘He who warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed,’ Palin explained to reporters in Boston, Massachusetts Thursday.
But Wikipedia didn’t back up Palin’s suggestion that Revere’s mission was to warn the British or that he rang bells in the process so her fans tried to update the page.
‘Most colonial residents at the time considered themselves British as they were all legally British subjects,’ was the revision that one user added to the page.
That update was later reverted with the message ‘content not backed by a reliable sources (it was sarah palin interview videos).’
Another update to the page said, ‘Accounts differ regarding the method of alerting the colonists; the generally accepted position […]
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Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
Stephan:
Particles and anti-particles annihilate each other in a small flash of energy when they collide.
At the moment of the big bang, nearly 14 billion years ago, matter and anti-matter are thought to have existed in equal quantities. If that balance had persisted, the observable Universe we inhabit would never have come into being.
For unknown reasons — and fortunately for us — Nature seemed to have a slight preference for matter, and today anti-matter is rare.
This asymmetry remains one of the greatest riddles in particle physics.
But ongoing low-energy experiments with hydrogen atoms could be a key step toward solving it.
‘We can keep the antihydrogen atoms trapped for 1,000 seconds. This is long enough to begin to study them — even with the small number that we can catch so far,’ said Jeffrey Hangst, spokesman for the ALPHA team conducting the tests at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.
In the study, published in the journal Nature Physics, researchers report trapping some 300 antiatoms.
Scientists used CERN’s high-energy accelerator to create the antihydrogen atoms, and then chilled them to near-zero temperatures.
The aim is to use laser and microwave spectroscopy to compare the immobilised particles to their hydrogen counterparts.
The same team succeeded […]
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Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
Stephan: Not all the countries in the world place profit above all other considerations and, as a consequence, the quality of life for ordinary citizens in those countries is undeniably better. American Exceptionalism is increasingly is a toxic myth.
In the age of economic hardship and endless corporate layoffs finding personal time outside of the office is a luxury many have had to forego in today’s overworked culture. But now, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has included work-life balance in the Better Life Initiative- its latest well-being index.
Based on data from 34 countries, the OECD chose three indicators to measure work life balance. These include the amount of time devoted to personal activities, the employment rate of women with children age 6 to 14 and the number of employees working over 50 hours a week.
Not surprisingly, Northern European countries fared better when it came to leaving the office on time. For instance, the Netherlands and Sweden both only have 0.001% of their respective populations regularly working over 50 hours a week.
As for working mothers, the best country to live is Denmark, where 78% of mothers jump back into the workforce after their kids head to school. Turkey is at the other end of the spectrum, with only 24% of women with children also holding down a paying job.
If you’re looking for the most personal time, relocating to Belgium might be a good idea. Belgians […]
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Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
RANIA KHALEK, - Truthout.org
Stephan: Democrats and Republicans alike are selling off our common assets. These deals, as you can see, represent very poor business decisions that will degrade the quality of community life for years to come. If we stopped the wars, taxed the rich fairly, and made corporations pay their fair share, none of this would be necessary.
While we have been frantically playing defense against relentless assaults on multiple fronts, from anti-union legislation to draconian anti-choice laws to the attempted privatization of Medicare, the selling off of public assets to the private sector has received little attention.
As states face a budget shortfall of $125 billion dollars for fiscal year 2012, leaders are searching for creative ways to fill budget gaps, while refusing to consider the one legitimate solution: forcing tax-dodging corporations and the rich to pay their fair share in taxes. Rather than upset the moneyed interests who bought their seats in office, politicians of all stripes prefer to cut pensions, close schools, slash child nutrition programs, and most importantly privatize, privatize, privatize!
In 2008, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley auctioned off the city’s 36,000 parking meters to a Morgan-Stanley lead partnership, for a lump sum of $1.15 billion. According to Bloomberg, Chicago drivers will pay Morgan Stanley at least $11.6 billion to park at city meters over the next 75 years, 10 times what the system was sold for. The Mayor used millions from the deal to help balance the budget, but since then, Morgan Stanley has raised parking fees 42%. It now plans on stuffing more cars […]
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