Lisbon - One year into a paedophilia scandal which has shocked Portugal, the country is sinking ever deeper into what is seen as a far-reaching national identity crisis.

The implication of top political and social personalities in a huge paedophile network with the apparent complicity of the authorities has shaken the very foundations of Portuguese democracy.

Doubts are now being cast even on the impartiality of judges handling the case.

The credibility of decision-makers is being undermined just as they face the challenge of a deepening economic recession.

The discovery of a paedophile network in the Casa Pia care homes for children is regarded as Portugal's most-serious crisis in almost 30 years of democracy.

SANTIAGO, Chile - For Chile's right wing, it has become the scandal that refuses to go away. Though the "Caso Claudio Spiniak" began as a squalid sexual matter, it has been transformed into a political issue that has divided supporters of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and pitted them against an increasingly combative news media.

The scandal has been agitating Chile since late last year, when María Pía Guzmán, a conservative member of Congress, denounced what she described as a prostitution and child pornography ring and accused Mr. Spiniak, the nouveau riche owner of a string of health clubs, of leading it. She said that some of her own political allies were involved.

"There is evidence that within the intimate circle of Spiniak's network, there are politicians," she said, citing accounts that she said she had heard at a shelter for sexually abused youths.

In the latest round of accusations, made public in July, people identified as procurers for the ring have implicated as clients the mayor of a large city and a Roman Catholic bishop renowned for his opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship. Both men have denied any involvement in the sex ring, but in a poll taken early this year, three-quarters of those surveyed said they believed that politicians were involved.

A just-amended lawsuit alleges six additional instances of unprovoked attacks on Iraqi civilians by Blackwater contractors.

Three people, including a 9-year-old boy, are said to have died.

Also added to the suit is a racketeering count accusing Blackwater founder Erik Prince of running an ongoing criminal enterprise involved in, among other things, kidnapping and child prostitution.

Alleged Pedophiles Helm Blair's War Room

A child-sex scandal that threatened to destroy Tony Blair's government last week has been mysteriously squashed and wiped off the front pages of British newspapers. Operation Ore, the United Kingdom's most thorough and comprehensive police investigation of crimes against children, seems to have uncovered more than is politically acceptable at the highest reaches of the British elite. In the 19th of January edition of The Sunday Herald, Neil Mackay sensationally reported that senior members of Tony Blair's government were being investigated for paedophilia and the "enjoyment" of child-sex pornography:

"The Sunday Herald has also had confirmed by a very senior source in British intelligence that at least one high-profile former Labour Cabinet minister is among Operation Ore suspects. The Sunday Herald has been given the politician's name but, for legal reasons, can not identify the person.

There are still unconfirmed rumours that another senior Labour politician is among the suspects. The intelligence officer said that a 'rolling' Cabinet committee had been set up to work out how to deal with the potentially ruinous fall-out for both Tony Blair and the government if arrests occur."

The allegations are the most serious yet levelled at an administration that prides itself on the inclusion in its ranks of a high quota of controversial and flamboyant homosexual men, and whose First Lady, Cherie Blair, has come under the spotlight for her indulgence in pagan rituals that resemble Freemasonic rites. Unconfirmed information also suggests that the term "former Labour Cabinet minister" is misleading and that the investigation has identified a surprisingly large number of alleged paedophiles at the highest level of British government, including one very senior cabinet minister

Hoping to avoid a repeat of a sex scandal that marred the presence of American police officers in Bosnia, U.S. law-enforcement personnel recruited to help reorganize Iraq's shattered police forces must acknowledge in writing that human trafficking and involvement with prostitution "are considered illegal by the international community and are immoral, unethical and strictly prohibited."

The new acknowledgment was instituted in February by DynCorp International, the private Washington-area company that recruited peace officers for Bosnia-Herzegovina on behalf of the U.S. State Department and is now rushing to hire new officers willing to spend the sweltering summer as police advisers and trainers in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

A senior State Department official, Paul Kelly, assured U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde(R-Ill.) this week that his department has been working with DynCorp to prevent a repetition of the revelations by Kathryn Bolkovac, a former Omahapolice officer hired by DynCorp for a UN-administered International PoliceTask Force that played the same advisory role in Bosnia now being envisioned for Iraq.

Two former employees of DynCorp, the government contracting powerhouse, have won legal victories after charging that the $2 billion-a-year firm fired them when they complained that co-workers were involved in a Bosnia sex-slave trade.

The court actions -- one in the United Kingdom, the other in Fort Worth, Texas -- suggest that the company did not move aggressively enough when reports of sexual misconduct among its employees began to emerge in 1999. The tribunal in the U.K. found that DynCorp employee Kathryn Bolkovac "acted reasonably," but that the company did not.

"DynCorp is an enormous operation, with strong ties to the U.S. government," Bolkovac's legal representative, Karen Bailey, said in a prepared statement. "She took on the big guns and won. The plight of trafficking victims is appalling and I'm glad that Kathryn's case has gone some way to bringing it to wider attention."

The tribunal found that DynCorp Aerospace UK Ltd., a subsidiary of DynCorp Inc., violated the U.K.'s whistle-blowing statute -- the Public Interest Disclosure Act of 1998 -- when the company fired Bolkovac. A separate hearing is scheduled for October to determine what damages DynCorp should face.

Middle-aged men having sex with 12- to 15-year-olds was too much for Ben Johnston, a hulking 6-foot-5-inch Texan, and more than a year ago he blew the whistle on his employer, DynCorp, a U.S. contracting company doing business in Bosnia.

According to the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) lawsuit filed in Texas on behalf of the former DynCorp aircraft mechanic, "in the latter part of 1999 Johnston learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorpwere engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in other immoral acts. Johnston witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased."

Rather than acknowledge and reward Johnston's effort to get this behavior stopped, DynCorp fired him, forcing him into protective custody by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) until the investigators could get him safely out of Kosovo and returned to the United States. That departure from the war-torn country was a far cry from what Johnston imagined a year earlier when he arrived in Bosnia to begin a three-year U.S. Air Force contract with DynCorp as an aircraft-maintenance technician for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters.

UN children's fund, Unicef has deplored Britain for putting behind bars children with no criminal records, who were detained during August unrest in the country.

Unicef slammed the UK judicial system for violating its obligations to protect children rights after figures showed 45 percent of under-18s detained during August unrest had no criminal records.

The UN body described the UK judiciary's measure as "very worrying", which violated the 1989 UN convention on the rights of a child.

The agency is responsible to uphold the international treaty, which Britain signed up to in 1991.

Under article 37, remand must only be used as a last resort in criminal proceedings, where there are no alternatives to stop a child re-offending.

Two other UK-based agencies, the Howard League for Penal Reform and the Children's Rights Alliance for England (CRAE), said they believed custodial arrangements, especially for children who had not yet been put on trial, breached the convention.

The latest Ministry of Justice figures show that more than 40 percent of the 269 children whose court hearings were not completed by mid-September were remanded in custody. This compares with an average remand rate of 10 percent last year.

Of those on remand, 60 percent had no previous convictions and 45 percent had had no contact with the judicial system at all, including official reprimands or warnings.

Let's face facts: #OccupyWallStreet isn't going to accomplish anything unless somehow the movement starts costing our lizard people overlords money. LOTS of money. Because money is all that our lizard people overlords from planet Sociopath care about. Not ethics. Not morality. Not fairness. Not human decency (remember, they're LIZARD people, they view humanity as PREY, not as fellow travelers through the brief flash of time we call "life"). Money. That's it.

This is what has bothered me about protest chic for quite some time. Protests are flashy and reporters love them. But let's not forget that what took down segregation was not morality, was not protests, but, rather, that it was bad for business (same reason the Vietnam War ended). Mega-corporations only care about one color - green - that's it, and being told they had to leave 20%+ of their profit on the floor in the South because of legally or socially enforced segregation forcing them to turn away black patrons had always chapped their ass in the post-WW2 period. The purpose of the Civil Rights marches and such was primarily to give them cover to do the right thing (for their profits).

And yes, MLK Jr. understood this. Economics was something he used both as a carrot and a stick when he was talking with elites. Remember that the whole point of getting Rosa Parks thrown in jail was to give the black community a rallying point for a strike against the bus companies that enforced segregation, it was never about being arrested as an end in and of itself, the way it is with today's protest chic street theater.

Socialist firebrand Hugo Chavez condemned on Saturday the "horrible repression" of anti-Wall Street protesters and termed a Republican presidential candidate "crazy" for his criticism of Cuba and Venezuela.

Although still convalescing from cancer surgery in June followed by four rounds of chemotherapy, the 57-year-old Venezuelan president is quickly returning to the tough rhetoric and strong views that have made him famous worldwide.

Not surprisingly, Chavez expressed solidarity with American activists who have been staging rallies and marches against what they view as corporate greed by Wall Street.

The U.S. protests, which began last month in New York and have spread to Tampa, Florida, Seattle and other cities, have mostly been peaceful but sometimes resulted in confrontations. Dozens were arrested and police used pepper spray in New York earlier this week.

"This movement of popular outrage is expanding to 10 cities and the repression is horrible, I don't know how many are in prison now," Chavez said in comments at a political meeting in his Caracas presidential palace shown on state TV.