The Pope's decision to issue a letter to Roman Catholics in Ireland to try to prevent further cases of child abuse by priests follows a wave of sex abuse scandals which have rocked the Church around the world. Here is a round-up of some of those events:

Ireland

Two major reports into allegations of paedophilia among Irish clergy last year revealed the shocking extent of abuse, cover-ups and hierarchical failings involving thousands of victims, and stretching back decades.

In one, four Dublin archbishops were found to have effectively turned a blind eye to cases of abuse from 1975 to 2004.

An article in Sunday's UK Guardian newspaper tells the story of Observer reporter Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian who was hanged in Iraq as a spy 20 years ago by Saddam Hussein.

In penning the article, the author Donald Trelford, who was editor of the Observer when Bazoft was arrested, seeks to "remember a friend and colleague whose death served as a warning to the world about Saddam Hussein".

The official story goes like this:

In September 1989, Bazoft went to Iraq to cover elections in Kurdistan. On the day his press party arrived in Baghdad, a massive explosion occurred at a military complex in the city.

Farzad met the deputy foreign minister, Nizam Hamdoun, and asked to visit the site. He enlisted the help of Daphne Parish, a British nurse he had met on a previous visit. They went on successive days to take photographs and collect soil samples, though they always stayed on public roads.

While waiting for an Iraq Airways flight to London on the 15 September, he was picked up at Baghdad airport and taken for interrogation by Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat secret police.

On November 1st, the Iraqis issued a tape showing him "confessing" to being a spy for Israel. Earlier the Iraqis had claimed he was spying for Britain. On March 15th 1990 he was hanged.

As a veteran journalist, it is appalling that Trelford is content to limit his analysis of the case of Bazoft to the official story. With the US and Israel winding up the world's press to prepare the public for the first Gulf "war", there was good reason to be suspicious of any reports that demonized Saddam in the 1989-1990 period. With everything we know now about how willing Western politicians are to fabricate rationale for war, it is nothing short of yellow journalism to hold fast to the official story. Worse still is the fact that a much more plausible account of the case of Farzad Bazoft, from a truly reliable source - ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky - has been available to Trelford for 15 years.

A man from Rockford, Minn., has been charged with a felony in Chicago for forcing his wife into prostitution, setting up sexual encounters in eight states.

The 32-year-old man was charged with felony pandering by the Cook County, Ill., sheriff's office after being arrested Sunday night at a downtown Chicago hotel. He was arrested when he arrived at the hotel where his wife spent the weekend having sex with strangers, the sheriff's office reported.

He was being held on $150,000 bail Wednesday.

According to the woman's account to investigators, the man threatened to take away or hurt their 3-year-old daughter to force her into having sex.

Lured by the vast natural resources of the Black Continent, Washington decided to set up AfriCom. But the GI deployment to Africa does not coincide with any needs in particular: everything is up for grabs. Seizing a windfall opportunity, they first went into Somalia militarily in the early 1990's. Their simple presence being enough to fuel popular uprisings, they can extend their counter-insurgency operations at will. The U.S. war is not just endless in time; it is also boundless in terms of the territorial space it besieges.

After 9/11, the U.S. followed Israel to become the second nation on earth that officially tortures people as a matter of public policy. As we saw earlier, it was such Israel-firsters as Alan Dershowitz who successfully pushed for the U.S.A. to join the Zionist torture brigade. Most other War on Terror abuses, including extrajudicial assassinations and disappearances, "pre-emptive" wars of aggression, ethnic profiling, omnipresent government surveillance, intrusive searches at security checkpoints, and so on were developed in Israel, then imposed on the U.S.A. by the Zionist neoconservatives who seized power in the wake of 9/11.

If the new, post-9/11, Constitution-free U.S.A. was modeled on Israel, and if this Zionist model was imposed on a shocked nation by the neoconservatives in Dick Cheney's office and the Pentagon during the Bush Administration, then why have so many unconstitutional policies continued so seamlessly under Obama, who criticized them during his campaign? Is there a continuing Zionist influence in and around the White House, beyond the obvious case of the self-proclaimed Zionist Vice President, Joe Biden?¹

The President's Chief of Staff is the man who controls access to the President. For that reason, the Chief of Staff has been called "the second-most powerful man in Washington next to the president."² Why, then, did President Obama appoint to that position Rahm Emanuel, son of a Zionist terrorist, himself a War on Terror enthusiast who has served with the Israeli Defense Forces and who may be, according to intelligence sources, an agent of the Israeli Mossad?³

Curiouser and curiouser.

Hervé Falciani, the computer specialist formerly employed by HSBC and involved in the leak of information on about 24,000 accounts at the bank, says he was once kidnapped by the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service.

Mr. Falciani told Le Matin Dimanche, a major Swiss weekly, that the Mossad was investigating potential ties between Hezbollah, the militant Shiite group, and the giant British bank.

"I've always said that these people introduced themselves as being from Mossad," Mr. Falciani said. "They told me they suspected Lebanese Hezbollah of trying to use the bank for criminal ends."

Mr. Falciani told the newspaper that he was singled out because he was Jewish and because of his presumed loyalty to Israel. "A terrorist group could put the bank's security at risk without too much difficulty," he said.

The Vatican claimed instances of sexual abuse of children were far more widespread in the secular world than in the Catholic church as it worked on Sunday to calm a growing row over allgations of priestly misconduct.

In a front page editorial, its official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano stressed: "For the love of truth, the number of incidents involving clergy is very small."


It blamed media coverage of the sex scandals rocking the Catholic Church in Ireland, Germany and Austria for implying that there was a higher instance of sexual abuse in the Church than in other parts of society.

"This has a negative effect on the Catholic Church...but it should be noted that abuse of children is more widespread in non-religious people and married couples than clergy," the paper said.

A top aide to former US president George W. Bush has defended the use of harsh interrogation techniques, insisting he is "proud" of the methods and they had helped prevent terrorist attacks.

Karl Rove also told the BBC in an interview broadcast Thursday that he did not believe waterboarding -- a simulated drowning method -- amounted to torture.

"I'm proud that we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists and gave us valuable information that allowed us to foil plots," he said.

"I am proud that we kept the world safer than it was by the use of these techniques. They are appropriate, they are in conformity with our international requirements and with US law," he added.

The Pope was drawn directly into the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal for the first time tonight as news emerged of his part in a decision to send a paedophile priest for therapy. The priest went on to reoffend and was convicted of child abuse but continues to work as priest in Upper Bavaria.

The priest was sent from Essen to Munich for "therapy" in 1980 when he was accused of forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex. The archdiocese confirmed that the Pope, then a cardinal, had approved a decision to accommodate the priest in a rectory while the therapy took place.

The priest, identified only as "H", was subsequently convicted of sexually abusing minors after he was moved to pastoral work in nearby Grafing. In 1986 he was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence and fined 4,000 marks ($2,800 in today's money). There have been no formal accusations against him since.

According to the chief of Japans Democratic Party who says that the 9/11 hijackers are alive and that 9/11 was a complete hoax. Dr. David Ray Griffin is a professor and author who wrote The New Pearl Harbor Revisited and he says that he agrees; the World Trade Center was a hoax.