Boys Club

Coverups Continue

Abuse allegations response ‘inadquate, inappropriate The Irish Times

After a new damning report on the Catholic Church’s response to sex abuse in Ireland, tough new laws with criminal offence penalties are being introduced to force bishops to comply with their own promises. The new report states that the Church’s standing was prioritised over the needs of victims, even in recent years.

The report found that the Bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, misled the minister for children by claiming the church’s guidelines for handling abuse cases were being fully complied with. It also found he falsely told the Health Service Executive (HSE) that allegations of abuse were being reported to Garda.

In fact, two-thirds of complaints made between 1996 and 2008 were not reported to the Garda and no complaint was passed to the HSE during this period.

The report accuses the Vatican, through its opposition to the Irish bishops’ procedures for handling child sexual abuse, of giving comfort to dissenters within the church who did not want to implement them. In a secret letter to the bishops, Rome describes the 1996 rules as “merely a study document” and not official.

DSK Case Updates

Maid’s ‘Fiance’ Speaks The Daily Beast

NewsBeast met with Amara Tarawally, 35, in an immigration detention center in Arizona. He is the man contacted by ‘the maid’, whose credibility is now under examination in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. The next court appearance date has moved to August 1, while prosecutors and lawyers sort out next steps.

The maid’s defenders and attorney Kenneth Thompson, who is preparing a civil case against Strauss-Kahn, wants the phone call tape to be shared with them. Thompson believes that there is a bad translation of the in the dialect of the West African Fulani language, the language in which the maid spoke with Tarawally.

Amara Tarawally: The Latest Character to Emerge in DSK-Gate WSJ Law Blog

Hotel Stands by Its Maid in Strauss-Kahn Scandal CNBC

This article by CNBC suggests that we all need to take a chill pill on the DSK case. What you read in the newspaper or online one day is contradicted the next.

Two weeks ago, the story emerged that there were discrepancies in the maid’s story about timing and when she cleaned rooms at the Sofitel.

According to the source, key card evidence shows that at 12:26 pm the woman used her key card on two doors: Room 2820 and Room 2806, where the alleged incident occurred. She was found by a supervisor at around 12:28 pm, around the same time Strauss-Kahn was checking out of the hotel. (Note: previous reports are that DSK left the hotel without checking out.)

Prosecutors said that under questioning by investigators, she admitted that “after the incident in Suite 2806, she proceeded to clean a nearby room” before reporting the incident to her supervisor. But the source says that according to the key cards, the woman cleaned room Room 2820 well before the incident, instead of immediately afterward.

RedTracker

Girls Get on With It

Suck it up: Women soccer players don’t milk injuries like guys MSNBC

Extra Boost Lifts the U.S. NYTimes

Lauren Cheney, second left, celebrated with teammates during the semifinal match with France on Wednesday.Perhaps there’s a good reason why even men are going gaga watching women’s soccer this week. Sports scientists at the Chair of Training Science and Sports Informatics at Technische Universität München studied 56 football games, with a focus on stoppages of the game. When they looked at the data through a gender lens, they found that women are much less likely to roll around on the ground, looking permanently maimed than their male counterparts.

No matter the reason for the stoppage in play — a substitution, a goal, a throw-in, or a foul — female players will restart play at a much quicker rate. The gender difference for stoppage due to “injuries” is much more pronounced, with men spending on average 30 seconds longer on the ground.

We’re turning in Sunday afternoon to watch the finals of the Women’s World Cup when the American women meet the Japanese. The United States team seeks to become the first to win the Women’s World Cup three times, after taking titles in 1991 and 1999.

In yesterday’s smashing win for the American women — a true team effort — special praise was give to Megan Rapinoe (short blond hair in photo), 26, 5’7” and operating on surgically repaired knees. Previously, Megan Rapinoe was sent to the bench — demoted if you will by coach Pia Sundhage

Yesterday, for the second time in two games, Rapinoe rallied her teammates to victory.

“Megan has a confidence in herself; that’s a uniqueness she brings having been a starter for months,” (Abby) Wambach said. “The best part about this team is that she knows she makes a difference. She’s not sitting on the bench pouting; she’s sitting on the bench planning. Megan came in today, and I just felt a difference.”

Green Beings

Carbon Emissions Control Setback

Utility Shelves Ambitious Plan to Limit Carbon NYTimes

Kevin Riddell for The New York Times

American Electric Power has tabled indefinitely its plans to build a full-scale carbon-capture plant at Mountaineer’s 31-year-old coal-fired plant in West Virginia, citing the change in US political culture. This decision drives a huge hole in efforts to capture carbon emissions that result from burning fossil fuels and then injecting them deep under-ground, rather than in the atmosphere.

“We are placing the project on hold until economic and policy conditions create a viable path forward,” said Michael G. Morris, chairman of American Electric Power, based in Columbus, Ohio, one of the largest operators of coal-fired generating plants in the United States. He said his company and other coal-burning utilities were caught in a quandary: they need to develop carbon-capture technology to meet any future greenhouse-gas emissions rules, but they cannot afford the projects without federal standards that will require them to act and will persuade the states to allow reimbursement.

Sensual & Superyoung

The World Gets Fat

Mediterraneans Abandon Their Famous Diet NPR

“There’s no match for the huge marketing efforts and promotion of junk food, and we have to protect our children,” said Walter Willet, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health, and one of the researchers who helped to popularize the Mediterranean Diet in the U.S. back in the early 1990s.

“Children are the object of a huge amount of research on how to seduce them to eat more of foods that are horrible for them and making them fat and giving them obesity, and we know they’re going to die prematurely,” he said.

Bottom line, in today’s world you must be wealthy to eat like a peasant.