The trauma of childhood sexual abuse is almost incomprehensible. Here, Michael Corry and Aine Tubridy explain some of the consequences

I've come to realise that sexual assault is an imposed death experience for the victim. That is, the victim experiences her life as having been taken by someone else. - Evangeline Kane

The emerging self, with its inherent potential, needs to be protected, and like a seedling, nurtured in fertile ground. Sexual abuse, like no other trauma, eclipses this natural unfolding with an impact of such magnitude that is rarely appreciated. Upwards of 150,000 adult women and men in Ireland have experienced statutory rape in childhood. Five times that figure experienced other forms of sexual abuse, ranging from inappropriate touching to the forced witnessing of exposure.

Picture an infant, whose window on the world is the rim of their cot, whose cry or smile elicits the unqualified unconditional attention of her mother and father, their watchful eyes holding her gaze completely, making her feel for those moments, the absolute centre of the world. In the infant's tiny mind an inner knowing is forming 'I am the reason this is happening'.

Now fast forward to a time when the same apparently loving father is gradually beginning to express his 'love' in a sexual manner, involving her in sex games which evolve over time into full sexual intimacy such as that shared by consenting adults. Her protestations are mollified, her cooperation validated and her secrecy rewarded. Variations of this premature sexualisation occur. Not for some fathers the process of seduction, but rather sadistic, brutal intercourse, instilling terror and pain, where every orifice is violated. She has no escape. Drunk or sober, day or night, he has access to her. Her reason for living has been reduced to being a sexual object, a sex slave. Once again, and in both examples of fathers, the belief holds 'I am the reason this is happening'. The same interpretation will be formed if the attentions are those of a grandfather, uncle, sibling, neighbour or babysitter.

What if Memorial Day reminds us of times when we had more freedom? What if freedom is dying right under our eyes? What if the memory of the past is more fulfilling than the reality of the present?

What if the federal government could write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event, no matter what the Constitution authorized? What if the majority in Congress rejects the idea of limited government and views the Constitution as granting it blanket power to do whatever it can get away with? What if the constitutional prohibition on the government's taking of life, liberty or property without due process of law is only for show and is not for real?

If you want to see a perfect example of how completely broken our regulatory system is, look no further than a speech that Daniel Gallagher, one of the S.E.C.'s commissioners, recently gave in Denver, Colorado.

It's a speech whose full lunacy is hard to grasp without some background.

It's by now been well-established that the S.E.C.'s performance in policing Wall Street before, after, and during the crash has been comically inept. It would be putting it generously to say that the top cop on the financial services beat has demonstrated particular incompetence with regard to investigations of high-profile targets at powerhouse banks and financial companies. A less generous interpretation would be that the agency is simply too afraid, too unwilling, or too corrupt to take on the really dangerous animals in this particular jungle.

The S.E.C.'s failure to make even one case against a high-ranking executive involved in the mass frauds leading to the 2008 crash - compare this to the comparatively much smaller and less serious S&L crisis twenty years earlier, when the government made 1,100 criminal cases and sent 800 bank officials to jail - became so conspicuous that by the end of last year, the "No prosecutions of top figures" idea became an accepted meme in mainstream news media coverage of the economic crisis.

The S.E.C. in recent years has failed in almost every possible way a regulator can fail to police powerful criminals. Failure #1 was that it repeatedly fell down on the job even when alerted to problems at big companies well ahead of time by insiders. Six months before Lehman Brothers collapsed, setting off a chain reaction of losses that crippled the world economy, one of Lehman's attorneys, Oliver Budde, contacted the S.E.C. to warn them that the firm had understated CEO Dick Fuld's income by more than $200 million; the agency blew him off. There were similar brush-offs of insiders with compelling information in cases involving Moody's, Chase, and both of the major Ponzi scheme scandals, i.e. the Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford cases.

Security services in Azerbaijan say they arrested 40 suspects and seized weapons as they thwarted a series of planned terror attacks against the Eurovision Song Contest.

Targets included the song contest venue and major hotels housing foreigners, the National Security Ministry said.

Azerbaijan has in recent months reported being the target of terrorist activities planned by groups with ties to al-Qaeda and Iran, and this appears to be most extravagant alleged plot revealed to date.

An oil-rich nation of 9 million people wedged between Russia and Iran, Azerbaijan has nurtured close relations with the United States and played an active role in Western-led counter-terrorist programmes.

The agents of the US company Blackwater are operating inside Syria and are involved in the deadly turmoil in the Arab country that began in March 2011, a political analyst tells Press TV.

"We have real evidence now that the Blackwater company is working in Syrian territories," said Taleb Ibrahim, a political analyst from Damascus, in an interview with Press TV on Monday.

Ibrahim also stated that there is a "third party" inside Syria that "wants to undermine" the six-point peace plan put forward by UN-Arab League envoy to Syria Kofi Annan in March.

"I accuse directly the Turkish intelligence and the Saudi intelligence and the Qatari intelligence."

Over the past few months, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have expressed support for arming of the Syrian rebels.

Forced medical treatment is not a rare occurrence confined to grimy hospitals in totalitarian regimes. Medical ethicists report that it is a common event that happens thousands of times each day in developed countries with sophisticated health care systems. Sarah's Last Wish is a true story of a brave young girl claiming her right to live and die with dignity. Her last wish is already changing the system...

The cold spring morning of March 24, 2011 promised a routine day as Maryanne Godboldo cleared away the breakfast dishes in her modest two story brick and weatherboard home in East Detroit. Unknown to Maryanne, a Wayne County child protection (CPS) worker was lodging a JCO5B form at the county courthouse. She did not agree with the treatment that Maryanne's 13-year-old daughter Ariana was receiving from her family physician and believed the girl should be medicated instead. The social worker intended to force Ariana from her home later that day and admit her to a nearby psychiatric facility for injections of strong antipsychotic medication.

Over a one month period alone, one US emergency department recorded 314 involuntary treatment orders. According to researchers at University of Louisville School of Medicine, half were psychiatric admissions, while the other 50% were coerced 'medical or surgical admissions'.

Current thinking in medical ethics defines the gold standard of patients' rights to medical decision-making as: '[mentally] competent individuals are allowed to make their own treatment decisions: incompetent ones are not,' according to researchers George Annas and Joan Densberger. This definition works well in cases of mental impairment or to authorize doctors to administer life saving medical treatment to depressed individuals who have declined treatment for a physical condition.

Increasingly though, treatments are forced onto persons who are mentally sound and competent to make decisions, but who merely prefer a different treatment option or wish to attend a different hospital than the ones their doctors prefer.

In some cases, coercion is carried out using potentially lethal force, as experienced by the Godboldo family in Michigan. Once the CPS worker had lodged the form, she returned from the courthouse and parked her government car not far from Godboldo's home. From her cell phone she dialled 911 to ask for police assistance to remove Ariana. When the officer confronted Maryanne at her front door, she asked to see a warrant. Allegedly, when no warrant was produced, Maryanne refused to hand over her daughter and closed her door. The situation rapidly escalated when police summoned backup. Within half an hour the tactical response team had arrived in body armour, with high calibre assault weapons, riot control agents and an armoured vehicle. Why?

Modelled on US covert ops in Central America, the Pentagon's "Salvador Option for Iraq" initiated in 2004 was carried out under the helm of the US Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte (2004-2005) together with Robert Stephen Ford, who was appointed US Ambassador to Syria in January 2011, less than two months before the beginning of the armed insurgency directed against the government of Bashar Al Assad.

"The Salvador Option" is a "terrorist model" of mass killings by US sponsored death squads. It was first applied in El Salvador, in the heyday of resistance against the military dictatorship, resulting in an estimated 75,000 deaths.

John Negroponte had served as US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. As Ambassador in Tegucigalpa, he played a key role in supporting and supervising the Nicaraguan Contra mercenaries who were based in Honduras. The cross border Contra attacks into Nicaragua claimed some 50,000 civilian lives.

In 2004, after serving as Director of National Intelligence in the Bush administration, John Negroponte was appointed US Ambassador to Iraq, with a very specific mandate: the setting up of "Salvador Option" for Iraq.

The fiscal compact is a "dangerous experiment" that will be "extremely painful" if implemented, an Oireachtas committee was told yesterday.

Prof Terrence McDonough of the school of business and economics at NUI Galway told the Committee on European Affairs the compact was "completely without historical precedent".

Forcing a country at the bottom of a depression to run budget cuts and tax increases year after year, and forcing the same policy on its neighbours, was not "the safe option".

"If the Irish people are against permanent austerity they should reject this treaty."

The fiscal compact, on which Ireland will vote in May, aims to place financial limits on how much countries can borrow in proportion to their revenue.

The European Commission called for direct euro-area aid for troubled banks, and touted a Europe- wide deposit-guarantee system and common bond issuance as antidotes to the debt crisis now threatening to overwhelm Spain.

The commission, the European Union's central regulator, sided with Spain in proposing that the euro's permanent bailout fund inject cash to banks instead of channeling the money via national governments. It also offered Spain extra time to squeeze the budget deficit.

The use of the rescue fund to recapitalize banks "might be envisaged" and would "sever the link between banks and the sovereigns," the commission said today in Brussels. Jose Barroso, the commission's president, said "it is important to use all possibilities offered in terms of flexibility."

Proposals for more liberal use of European bailout money are likely to face resistance in creditor countries such as Germany, Finland and the Netherlands, the scenes of growing taxpayer opposition to more aid.

As such a useful tool of exchange, money is not inherently evil. Money can be a springboard to such evil as bailout-begging banks too monstrous to fail gambling with taxpayer wealth - you know, private profits, public risk. Casino financialization with taxpayers as a backstop. The $700 billion TARP bailout actually being a $23.7 trillion bailout. But the root of all evil is the human brain.

New research has exposed, shall we say, the root of the problem. Pathocracy is its flower.

Definition: pathocracy (n). A system of government created by a small pathological minority that takes control over a society of normal people (from Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, by Andrew Lobaczewski).

A small minority of people are born psychopaths; they inherit a genetic deviance linked to certain structural abnormalities of their social brain.

The physical dynamic that exposes psychopaths is a reduction of gray matter in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is able to image this deviation fundamental to psychopathy. Potential benefits to humanity are immense; imagine something like a TSA screening (without the bureaucracy, groping and humiliation) to keep psychopaths from boarding the flight to power.