A priest in a town south-east of Paris was hit with sexual assault and child pornography charges after a 22-year-old former choirboy accused him of abuse, a prosecutor said.

A police search of his home also found pictures of a young parishioner.

The new case added to a wave of sexual abuse allegations made by church members across Europe in recent weeks that have put the Vatican on the defensive and fueled a growing sense of crisis.

Some of the cases have raised questions about whether Joseph Ratzinger acted aggressively enough against priests under his supervision as an archbishop and cardinal before he became Pope Benedict XVI.

French bishops said in a letter to the pope on Friday that they were ashamed of the 'abominable acts' of child sexual abuse by priests.

With the row over India getting access to David Headley growing acrimonious each day, the CIA's double agent saga seems all set to open up a can of incredible worms.

First, the case unmasks the pro-US face of the Indian English media. When the Headley saga first came to light, Vir Sanghavi of the Hindustan Times carried an editorial piece claiming that if 'Headley is CIA, and knew about 26/11, the CIA knew about the attack.' In other words, Sanghavi accepted the 'conspiracy theory' - which in the eyes of the English media was 'peddled' by Aziz Burney and this author during the terrible aftermath of 26/11 - that the event was a CIA/Mossad/RSS/ISI plot.

In November-December 2008, Vir Sanghavi and his cohorts in the English media attacked both Aziz Burney and this author for spelling forth the 'conspiracy theory'. Then after Headley's name surfaced, they changed tune, without of course admitting their debt to Mr. Burney or this author.

In Palm Sunday address pope says faith in God leads 'towards the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated'

Pope Benedict, facing the worst crisis of his papacy as a sexual abuse scandal sweeps the Catholic church, declared today he would not be "intimidated" by "petty gossip", angering activists who say he has done too little to stamp out paedophilia.

Addressing crowds in St Peter's square during a Palm Sunday service, the pope did not directly mention the scandal spreading though Europe and engulfing the Vatican, but alluded to it during his sermon. Faith in God, he said, led "towards the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion".

Interesting turn of events.... TPTB are not happy. Its either they silence him now, or else things would get out of hand if this hits the mainstream media. Just imagine him being interviewed on all the independent newspapers. the only way he can save his life now is go viral with his message with the help of the gold bugs.

Quote:
Le Metropole Members,

On March 25th at the CFTC Public Hearing on Precious Metals GATA made a dramatic revelation of a whistleblower source, Andrew Maguire, who has first hand evidence of gold and silver market manipulation by JPMorganChase and who has even tipped off the CFTC in advance of manipulative attacks on gold and silver. Just as in the Madoff case the regulator has done nothing to stop such manipulation.

On March 26th while out shopping with his wife, Mr. Maguire's car was hit by a car careening out of a side road. The driver of the vehicle then tried to escape. When a pedestrian eye-witness attempted to block the driver's escape he accelerated at him and would have hit him had the pedestrian not jumped out of the way. The car then hit two other cars in escaping. The driver was apprehended by the police after police helicopters were called in and following a high speed chase.

Andrew and his wife were hospitalized with minor injuries. They were discharged from hospital today and should make a full recovery.

Cheers
Adrian

Midas note: You have to be kidding me ... Another
Coincidence!

The sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church came to the Pope's doorstep last night as a group of victims appeared on Italian television to claim that two dozen priests had for decades abused children at a school for the deaf in Verona.

Three former pupils of the Antonio Provolo school who spoke on RAI, the state broadcaster, confirmed allegations made in a signed statement last year by 67 former students who described a regime of sexual abuse, paedophilia and corporal punishment from the 1950s to the 1980s. They said that 24 priests and lay brothers from the Company of Mary order were involved.

The three said the priests had "fondled and masturbated" them as well as sodomising them in dormitories, bathrooms and the priests' quarters.

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows, that the Iraq war is largely about oil" - Alan Greenspan former head of the Federal Reserve

Tin-pot Iraqi dictator-in-waiting, Ayad Allawi was the US-appointed 'interim-Iraqi Prime Minister' for 9 months in 2004-5. Today he defeated incumbent Nouri al-Maliki to the position of Prime Minister by 10,000 votes according to reports.

Now there's one more CIA stooge ruling over yet another formerly sovereign nation and people.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual show in Washington would hardly be out of place in a Quentin Tarantino movie; picture a giant hall crammed with 7,500 very powerful people regimented by a very powerful lobby - plus half of the United States Senate and more than a third of the congress - basically calling in unison for Palestinian and Iranian blood.

The AIPAC 2010 show predictably was yet one more "bomb Iran" special; but it was also a call to arms against the Barack Obama administration, as far as the turbo-charging of the illegal colonization of East Jerusalem is concerned.

The administration has reacted to the quarrel with a masterpiece of schizophrenic kabuki (classical Japanese dance-drama) theater. Corporate media insisted there was a deep "crisis" between the unshakeable allies. Nonsense. One just has to look at the facts.

Only 10 days after scolding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for 43 minutes over the phone, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed up at AIPAC spinning the usual platitudes. At least she talked about a "change of facts on the ground" in Palestine and stressed the current status quo is untenable. Netanyahu for his part apparently told Clinton in private (and later Obama as well) that Israel would take "confidence-building measures" in the West Bank, but would continue anyway to build settlements like there's no tomorrow.

Two weeks ago Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman introduced a stunning piece of draconian diatribe euphemistically called the bipartisan Senate Bill 3081, or the 'Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010'¹. The bill is 'bipartisan' in the sense that it is the product of at least two different types of psychopathic personality disorder.

Constitutional expert, lawyer and author Glen Greenwald described the bill as:

"probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act. It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect - including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil. The bill requires that all such individuals be placed in military custody, and explicitly says that they 'may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,' which everyone expects to last decades, at least."²

And that's pretty much it, although, it's not merely at the president's discretion that all you disgruntled citizens can be detained indefinitely, but rather at the discretion of the entire psychopathic U.S. political and corporate elite. Of course, you wouldn't be called a disgruntled citizen, but rather an 'unprivileged enemy belligerent' and you would be defined as someone:

"who has engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners"

While the wording here appears to target bone fide 'terrorists', that is to say, those people who have been set up as terrorists by the US, Israeli and British governments and their affiliated Intel agencies, it is broad enough to potentially include anyone who protests, or is otherwise 'hostile' to the US government.

Have you ever felt hostile to the US government? Have you ever, perchance, marched down a street with a placard that flagrantly denounced the US government in some way? If so, you may have been 'materially supporting hostilities against the United States.'

But what interests me most is not so much that the bill was introduced (it's been a long time coming for anyone with eyes to see) but rather the string of 'homegrown terrorism' cases that have popped up in the mainstream media since. Coincidence?

You've gotta be kidding.

The European Union has backtracked on plans to create an "economic government of the European Union" following protests from Britain.

Backed by Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, and the European Commission, Gordon Brown told an EU summit dinner in Brussels late last night that the term, contained in a Franco-German bail-out plan for Greece, was contentious and had to be changed.

Today the revised wording - with "government" altered to "governance" - will be endorsed in summit conclusions designed to signal to global financial markets that the euro is stable and will recover from its current slump.

Secret documents today placed Pope Benedict XVI at the centre of allegations of cover-up by the Catholic church of a priest sex abuse scandal in the United States.

Letters from the Vatican show that the enforcement department headed by the pontiff, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, took control of the efforts to bring paedophile priest Father Lawrence Murphy to justice, first ordering in 1997 that a church trial could only go ahead in conditions of total secrecy and then changing tack in 1998 and quashing it.

The change of heart came after Fr Murphy, who had sexually abused 200 vulnerable youths at a school for the deaf in Milwaukee between 1950 and 1974, wrote directly to the future Pope begging for mercy.

Monsignor Tarcisio Bertone, then Cardinal Ratzinger's deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, responded by writing to the US church suggesting they take only lesser, pastoral measures against Fr Murphy.