NY Diocese Made $997,500 Sex Abuse Settlement
The confidential $997,500 settlement, the latest revelation in the sex-abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church, fell just short of the $1 million ceiling above which the Albany diocese would have been required to get consent of its finance council, the New York Times reported on Thursday.
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Cool… Anthony Goicolea has a web site. I love his work, and I seem to keep seeing him in the neighborhood lately.
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In These Times has a good essay on 100 years of Japanese film — Popcorn and Sake. The online version is missing his list of eight films to start with:
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B’Tselem, the Israeli rights group, has issued an informative report on the settlements in the Occupied Territories — titled “Land Grab: Israel’s Settlement Policy in the West Bank”.
The research reveals that while the built-up areas of the settlements constitute only 1.7% of the land in the West Bank, the municipal boundaries are over three times as large: 6.8%. Regional councils constitute an additional 35.1%. Thus, a total of 41.9% of the area in the West Bank is controlled by the settlements.
As this map shows, Palestinian communities have become settlements in an Israeli West Bank.
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Washington Post article:
The FBI is visiting libraries nationwide and checking the reading records of people it suspects of having ties to terrorists or plotting an attack, library officials say.
The FBI effort, authorized by the antiterrorism law enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks, is the first broad government check of library records since the 1970s when prosecutors reined in the practice for fear of abuses.
Note that it is illegal under the Patriot Act for a librarian to state that they have turned over records to the FBI. The FBI has to obtain a search warrant from a secret court and must only “show it has reason to suspect that a person is involved with a terrorist or a terrorist plot – far less difficult than meeting the tougher legal standards of probable cause, required for traditional search warrants or reasonable doubt, required for convictions.”
This country is becoming a police state.
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After a court ruled that the Pledge of Allegiance containing the phrase “under God” (added in 1954) is unconstitutional, our elected leaders all rushed to proclaim their support for God:
House members gathered on the front steps of the Capitol to recite the Pledge of Allegiance en masse. The Senate unanimously approved a resolution sponsored by its Democratic and Republican leaders that expressed support for the reference to God in the pledge, and instructed the Senate’s legal counsel to intervene in the case. The vote was 99 to 0, with Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) absent.
Unanimous.
When the phrase “Under God” was added in 1954, Eisenhower said the change was being made “to recognize a Supreme Being” and advance religion at a time “when the government was publicly inveighing against atheistic communism”.
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On a slightly smaller scale than the WorldCom disaster, 15 of the city’s 24 plumbing inspectors were arrested.
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The Guardian has good article by Charles Glass, who was ABC’s chief Middle East correspondent in the 1980s and was kidnapped in Beirut in 1987. Many of the tactics currently being used in the Occupied Territories are the same used by Sharon in Lebanon in the 1980s.
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Handy chart of the Bush administration’s corporate connections.
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My friend David sent me an article on why Perl is Internet Yiddish. It’s not all tech-y until the end — worth reading for a commentary on the evolution of Yiddish.
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