Jury finds ‘psychic’ Rose Marks guilty on all 14 fraud charges, faces possible 20 years in prison

Jury finds ‘psychic’ Rose Marks guilty on all 14 fraud charges, faces possible 20 years in prison

 http://www.palmbeachpost.com/videos/news/jury-finds-psychic-rose-marks-guilty-on-all-counts/vCDRNs/

            Lannis Waters

Rose Marks, a Fort Lauderdale woman who claims to be a psychic, waves to the media as she leaves the federal courthouse Tuesday Aug. 27, 2013 after the first day of her trial. (Lannis Waters/The Palm Beach Post)

View Larger

            Lannis Waters

Family members hustle Rosie Marks, who was distraught after the conviction of her mother Rose Marks, into a car after the verdict Thursday afternoon, September 26, 2013.

Prosecutors admit little sympathy for victims in Fort Lauderdale psychic’s $20M federal fraud trial

Ex-husband of romance novelist who paid millions to Fort Lauderdale psychic testifies at fraud trial

Best-selling author believed Fort Lauderdale psychic’s claims that Colin Powell loved her

Best-selling romance novelist accused of lying about Fort Lauderdale psychic on trial for alleged $25M fraud

Romance novelist Deveraux testifies in $25 million fraud trial against alleged psychic

Average storefront palm-reader or psychic ringleader who bilked clients for millions? Fort Lauderdale psychic on trial

View Larger

            Lannis Waters

Family members hustle Rosie Marks, who was distraught after the fraud conviction of her mother Rose Marks, into a car after the verdict Thursday afternoon. (Lannis Waters/The Palm Beach Post)

By Jane Musgrave

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

WEST PALM BEACH —

Even before the jury’s first guilty verdict was read, stifled sobs filled the courtroom. As the clerk repeated “guilty” 14 times, the quiet sobbing crescendoed.

“Psychic” Rose Marks turned to members of her family and put a finger to her lips, telling them to hush.

But it didn’t help.

Seeing the 62-year-old matriarch convicted of 14 fraud-related charges and immediately slapped in handcuffs on Thursday was too much for family members who were part of and benefited from the multi-million-dollar fortune-telling business that collapsed under the weight of a federal investigation.

Some reached out, trying to touch her. One threw a Bible. One called out to the lead investigator, mocking him. When they realized their beloved mother, grandmother and sister was about to walk through an open door and be taken to jail, shouts rang out.

“Mom, I love you!” one called. “Don’t be afraid!” yelled another.

“I’m not afraid,” Marks responded, as U.S. Marshals surrounded her. “I love you, too.”

The emotional end to the monthlong trial was not as unexpected as the verdict. When the trial began, cynics scoffed at the notion that a psychic could be charged with separating a fool and his money.

But, prosecutors methodically built a case, showing how Marks, her daughters-in-law and even her granddaughter preyed on broken people who came to their storefronts in midtown Manhattan and Fort Lauderdale to deal with tragedies life had handed them. Instead of solace or guidance, they told clients the only way out was to give them money — lots of it — with the promise it would one day be returned.

Instead, the psychics amassed a roughly $25 million fortune.

“I’ll be the voice of the victims. Justice has been served,” said Charles Stack, who began what appeared to be a quixotic investigation in 2008 before he retired from the Fort Lauderdale Police Department.

People understood the agony of those who trusted epic Ponzi schemers Scott Rothstein and Bernie Madoff, Stack said.

In many ways, Marks’ victims were more sympathetic. Unlike those who fell prey to Rothstein or Madoff, the psychic’s clients weren’t looking for money. “In this case, the victims were praying for hope, and hope is the unwavering belief in the unseen,” Stack said.

Stack, who said he understood why Marks’ family lashed out at him, is a hero to the victims, including best-selling romance novelist Jude Deveraux. He befriended the writer, helping her get over the shock of learning that her nearly 20-year relationship with Marks was a sham and she was unlikely to ever recover the $20 million she had given the psychic “to cleanse.”

“I’m glad she’s going to be taken off the streets and out of the business and she won’t hurt anyone else,” said Deveraux, 66, who splits her time between New York City and Southwest Ranches near Fort Lauderdale.

Deanna Wolfe, who lost nearly $1 million during her three-decade relationship with Marks, expressed mixed feelings about the verdict. “I don’t know if she started out meaning to do this or if the greed and the money just took over,” said Wolfe, 72, who lives in Virginia. “It’s a sad thing for everyone involved, including her family.”

Deveraux, who sought Marks’ help to deal with an abusive husband and the death of an 8-year-old son in a 2005 ATV accident, expressed no such ambivalence. “It was never a friendship,” she said. “There’s no sadness. None.”

Unlike other victims, she said she doesn’t care if she gets back any of the money she lost. Wolfe, who ran up huge credit card debts and borrowed money from a wealthy friend, said she is hopeful some of the money will be returned.

Attorney Fred Schwartz, who defended Marks, said the government seized all of Marks’ assets — including cars, a boat, motorcycles, jewelry, gold coins and a home near the Intracoastal Waterway. During the trial, he portrayed the victims as satisfied customers who were improperly convinced they were victims by Stack. He said he plans to appeal based on improper investigative procedures by government agents who he said kept key evidence from him.

He tried to prepare Marks for the possibility that, if convicted, she would be taken immediately to jail. He said she expects to die behind bars. While the punishment for the convictions on 14 charges carry a maximum punishment of roughly 250 years, realistically she faces of 10 to 15 years, he said.

“Rose believes that even with a 4- or 5-year sentence, given the wear and tear on her body from working since she was 8 or 9 years old, she would die in jail,” Schwartz said. During the trial she used a cane to deal with knee problems and experienced chest pains when the verdict was announced.

Her daughter and son-in-law, her two sons and their wives, her sister and granddaughter also each pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit wire/mail fraud. They will be sentenced before Marks learns her fate on Dec. 9.

---

THE CHARGES

The 14 federal charges Rose Marks was convicted of on Thursday:

• 1 count of conspiracy to commit mail/wire fraud
• 1 count of conspiracy to commit money-laundering
• 2 counts of mail fraud
• 2 counts of money laundering
• 6 counts of wire fraud
• 2 counts of filing false income tax returns

 

Source: U.S. court documents.

Related articles

• Florida Woman Claiming Psychic Powers Guilty Of Fraud (tampa.cbslocal.com)
• South Florida Psychic Convicted Of Fraud (miami.cbslocal.com)
• ‘Psychic’ talked $20m out of novelist (news.com.au)

Over 360,000 Gun Deaths Since 9/11 | Should The Civilsed World Invade America to Stop The Carnage?!

Over 360,000 Gun Deaths Since 9/11 — From the Outside It Looks Like America Is a Country Gripped by Civil War

Should the outside world intervene?

Last week, Starbucks asked its American customers to please not bring their guns into the coffee shop. This is part of the company’s concern about customer safety and follows a ban in the summer on smoking within 25 feet of a coffee shop entrance and an earlier ruling about scalding hot coffee. After the celebrated Liebeck v McDonald’s case in 1994, involving a woman who suffered third-degree burns to her thighs, Starbucks complies with the Specialty Coffee Association of America‘s recommendation that drinks should be served at a maximum temperature of 82C.Although it was brave of Howard Schultz, the company’s chief executive, to go even this far in a country where people are better armed and only slightly less nervy than rebel fighters in Syria, we should note that dealing with the risks of scalding and secondary smoke came well before addressing the problem of people who go armed to buy a latte. There can be no weirder order of priorities on this planet.

That’s America, we say, as news of the latest massacre breaks – last week it was the slaughter of 12 people by Aaron Alexis at Washington DC’s navy yard – and move on. But what if we no longer thought of this as just a problem for America and, instead, viewed it as an international humanitarian crisis – a quasi civil war, if you like, that calls for outside intervention? As citizens of the world, perhaps we should demand an end to the unimaginable suffering of victims and their families – the maiming and killing of children – just as America does in every new civil conflict around the globe.

The annual toll from firearms in the US is running at 32,000 deaths and climbing, even though the general crime rate is on a downward path (it is 40% lower than in 1980). If this perennial slaughter doesn’t qualify for intercession by the UN and all relevant NGOs, it is hard to know what does.

To absorb the scale of the mayhem, it’s worth trying to guess the death toll of all the wars in American history since the War of Independence began in 1775, and follow that by estimating the number killed by firearms in the US since the day that Robert F. Kennedy was shot in 1968 by a .22 Iver-Johnson handgun, wielded by Sirhan Sirhan. The figures from Congressional Research Service, plus recent statistics fromicasualties.org, tell us that from the first casualties in the battle of Lexington to recent operations in Afghanistan, the toll is 1,171,177. By contrast, the number killed by firearms, including suicides, since 1968, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, is 1,384,171.

That 212,994 more Americans lost their lives from firearms in the last 45 years than in all wars involving the US is a staggering fact, particularly when you place it in the context of the safety-conscious, “secondary smoke” obsessions that characterise so much of American life.

Everywhere you look in America, people are trying to make life safer. On roads, for example, there has been a huge effort in the past 50 years to enforce speed limits, crack down on drink/drug driving and build safety features into highways, as well as vehicles. The result is a steadily improving record; by 2015, forecasters predict that for first time road deaths will be fewer than those caused by firearms (32,036 to 32,929).

Plainly, there’s no equivalent effort in the area of privately owned firearms. Indeed, most politicians do everything they can to make the country less safe. Recently, a Democrat senator from Arkansas namedMark Pryor ran a TV ad against the gun-control campaign funded by NY mayor Michael Bloomberg – one of the few politicians to stand up to the NRA lobby – explaining why he was against enhanced background checks on gun owners yet was committed to “finding real solutions to violence”.

About their own safety, Americans often have an unusual ability to hold two utterly opposed ideas in their heads simultaneously. That can only explain the past decade in which the fear of terror has cost the country hundreds of billions of dollars in wars, surveillance and intelligence programmes and homeland security. Ten years after 9/11, homeland security spending doubled to $69bn . The total bill since the attacks is more than $649bn.

One more figure. There have been fewer than 20 terror-related deaths on American soil since 9/11 and about 364,000 deaths caused by privately owned firearms. If any European nation had such a record and persisted in addressing only the first figure, while ignoring the second, you can bet your last pound that the State Department would be warning against travel to that country and no American would set foot in it without body armour.

But no nation sees itself as outsiders do. Half the country is sane and rational while the other half simply doesn’t grasp the inconsistencies and historic lunacy of its position, which springs from the second amendment right to keep and bear arms, and is derived from English common law and our 1689 Bill of Rights. We dispensed with these rights long ago, but American gun owners cleave to them with the tenacity that previous generations fought to continue slavery. Astonishingly, when owning a gun is not about ludicrous macho fantasy, it is mostly seen as a matter of personal safety, like the airbag in the new Ford pick-up or avoiding secondary smoke, despite conclusive evidence that people become less safe as gun ownership rises.

Last week, I happened to be in New York for the 9/11 anniversary: it occurs to me now that the city that suffered most dreadfully in the attacks and has the greatest reason for jumpiness is also among the places where you find most sense on the gun issue in America. New Yorkers understand that fear breeds peril and, regardless of tragedies such as Sandy Hook and the DC naval yard, the NRA, the gun manufacturers, conservative-inclined politicians and parts of the media will continue to advocate a right, which, at base, is as archaic as a witch trial.

Talking to American friends, I always sense a kind of despair that the gun lobby is too powerful to challenge and that nothing will ever change. The same resignation was evident in President Obama’s rather lifeless reaction to the Washington shooting last week. There is absolutely nothing he can do, which underscores the fact that America is in a jam and that international pressure may be one way of reducing the slaughter over the next generation. This has reached the point where it has ceased to be a domestic issue. The world cannot stand idly by.

Related articles

• American gun use is out of control. Shouldn’t the world intervene? (fromthetrenchesworldreport.com)
• America + guns: should the world intervene? (paulocanning.blogspot.com)
• British Journalist Wants to Sick the UN on Gun Happy ‘Merica (slog.thestranger.com)
• American gun use is out of control. Shouldn’t the world intervene? | Henry Porter (theguardian.com)
• Over 360,000 Gun Deaths Since 9/11 — From the Outside It Looks Like America Is a Country Gripped by Civil War (alternet.org)

Duped Former Conspiracy Nut Converts To Reason | Heretic Ex-Truther Receives Death Threats

Charlie Veitch, the 9/11 Conspiracy Theorist Who Realized He Was Duped

by Brucella Newman

Former “truther”, Charlie Veitch

Once one of Britain’s principal conspiracy theorists as well as friend to David Icke and Alex Jones, Charlie Veitch, was known as a 9/11 “truther.”  As soon as he realized that he had been duped, he stopped.  But that was when his problems really began.

According to an interview Veitch gave to the Telegraph, Veitch, who had been Right-wing, joined the Territorial Army (TA).  After a drunken night out with his best friend, his friend had turned to Veitch and told him that they had been lying to him.  He told Veitch that 9/11 was not what he thought it was and that he was being given “special knowledge.”  Veitch’s friend went on to show him a video entitled Terrorism: A History of Government Sponsored Terror, a video that was produced by US radio talk presenter, Alex Jones.

Veitch was shortly after made redundant, so with some of his payout, he purchased a camcorder and megaphone, in the style of Alex Jones. He used eccentric methods to publicly express his beliefs, such as swooping on public spaces and embarking public transport to make announcements to whoever was available to listen.  In one piece of footage, Veitch was heard to say to a group of passengers: “I am a proponent of the idea that the Twin Towers were brought down in a controlled demolition manner.  Those buildings would not have collapsed in the slightest from a Boeing 767 hit.”

But one June afternoon, in New York City’s Times Square, Veitch began to film himself on his cell phone, as he made statements to camera about the devastation of the World Trade Center.  Only this time, his message was different from all the others he had posted on Youtube.  In the video, he said that he no longer believed that 9/11 was an inside job.

Because of his conspiracy theory films and the fact that he was at the forefront of what is known as “The Truth Movement” arm in the UK, Veitch had been approached by the BBC to go on an all-expenses paid 9-day trip to the United States, to examine these “conspiracies” from a scientific standpoint, with a view to furnish him with real information.

In the BBC program, entitled 9/11: Conspiracy Road Trip, 4 additional individuals, with divergent opinions from the official account of events of 9/11, had been selected to go on the road trip with Veitch.

The conspiracy theorists were given the opportunity to talk to building engineers, scientists, FBI and CIA agents, demolition experts and designers of the World Trade Center.  They were also allowed to talk to relatives of those who had tragically lost their lives, as well as pay a visit to the Pentagon, the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pennsylvania United Flight 93 site.

After all of the scientific evidence was put to Veitch, he did something completely out of the ordinary for a hardcore “truther.”  He did a U-turn and changed his mind.  Standing in front of the White House, on that sunny day in June, Veitch spoke to the BBC presenter and road trip leader, Andrew Maxwell. In front of the BBC camera, Veitch told him:

“I found my personal truth and you don’t have to agree with me, but I can’t push propaganda for ideas that I no longer believe in and that’s what I do, so I just need to basically… take it on the chin, admit I was wrong, be humble about it and just carry on.”

Before the end of his road trip, Charlie Veitch held up his cell phone in the middle of Times Square, pointed the phone’s camera on himself and told the world that he had changed his mind, that he had been wrong.  He said:

“This universe is truly one of smoke screens, illusions and wrong paths, but also the right path, which is [to] always be committed to the truth.  Do not hold on to religious dogma.  If you are presented with new evidence, take it on, even if it contradicts what you or your group might be believing or wanting to believe… you have to give the truth the greatest respect… and I do.”

Veitch’s turning point piece-to-camera at Times Square

After Veitch posted his video, the 9/11 Truth Movement’s reaction to one of its most prominent “truthers” changing his mind was one to be expected.  Veitch was labeled a flip-flop, a shill sellout who was taking cash for working for the BBC.  The Truth Movement did what any organization of its kind would do to someone who, for want of a better term, came to their senses.  They tried to discredit him.

Veitch told Myles Power in his BBC-funded interview, how he once had too much time on his hands, “Idle hands are the conspiracy theory world’s ideal way to get into your head,” he said, as he described how he started to watch Alex Jones and David Icke documentaries, as well as other scientific theory videos which he said spun a pretty convincing yarn on its conspiracies.  He became convinced that the Illuminati were behind it all, with its so-called New World Order.  After becoming absorbed by his interest in conspiracy theories, he took up his megaphone and camera and began to make films about them, which he said, elevated him to a “high priest” status of the Truth Movement.

But so with age, comes wisdom and reason.  Veitch began to look critically at the proponents of the conspiracy theories, beginning to not only question what could have been in it for the establishment to have blown up the World Trade Center, but in a sudden turnaround, he questioned the agenda of those who now came across to him as crazier and angrier than the actual perpetrators of terror; the Truth Movement.  He also said that the risk factor would be far too great for such so-called powers of the establishment, who had too much to lose, to instigate such an atrocity and then attempt to shroud it in secrecy.

He went on that the paper trail would be too vast and that there would be more likelihood of other world powers, with advanced technological methods of getting a hold of such information, should it even exist, than an organization like the Truth Movement.  He concluded by saying that if things were truly as the Truth Movement had claimed, then there would be a civil collapse, should the evidence be presented, but that there is no evidence, because it was not an inside job.

Veitch said that before he accepted the BBC’s offer of the road trip, that the activist, conspiracy, new age and spiritual worlds seemed to love him, but he now admits how he became arrogant and fell for the hype.  He had believed that the Truth Movement was about being purveyors of truth in the world, but realized that it was closer to a religious cult, with its indoctrination methods.

Charlie Veitch’s Times Square video provoked such aggressively negative responses from Truth Movement followers, who sent him messages telling him to rot in hell, that he was simply a pawn and that he was paid to do it.  Within days, he was renounced by his friends and sent death threats.  An email had been sent to his followers, claiming to be from Veitch and falsely admitting that he was a pedophile: a message that ultimately reached his mother, causing her utter distress.

Another follower had created a channel on Youtube, entitled Kill Charlie Veitch.  On the channel, he had said that he was coming to kill Veitch and that he should enjoy his last few days.  His face had also been superimposed on to a pig as it was being slaughtered.  Even David Icke had posted a message to say that Veitch would deeply regret his actions, while Alex Jones told him not to even bother communicating with him, as he no longer knew him.

In an interview on AdamVsTheMan on RT, Veitch opened up about how he had spent 4-5 years looking at the conspiratorial view on 9/11 until the BBC helped present him with hard facts.  He talked about how he already began to have his doubts before the US road trip, but really felt his change of heart when he was standing on top of Building 7 at the World Trade Center site, having just grilled building experts on the nature of the collapse of the Twin Towers.

Veitch has concluded that conspiracy theorists are professional victims who have a hatred of high achievers and who were likely to have been bullied at school.  He put his misdirection down to his vulnerable ego and has, unsurprisingly, become very cynical and misanthropic.  He may have come to his senses now, but he will always be remembered as The 9/11 Conspiracy Theorist Who Realized He Was Duped.

Veitch currently lives with his young child and fiancée in Manchester, England and is planning to become a documentary maker.

Written by: Brucella Newman

Source 1 

Source 2 

Source 3 

Related articles

• World Trade Center Conspiracy Theories Surface Again! (americanliberaltimes.com)
• Six really stupid 9/11 conspiracies debunked in about six seconds (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• 5 Things I’ve noticed about… 9/11 Conspiracy Theories (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)

Six really stupid 9/11 conspiracies debunked in about six seconds

Six really stupid 9/11 conspiracies debunked in about six  seconds

by: ANTHONY SHARWOOD

Nah, that’s just a missile. And  Santa Claus is the pilot. (AP Photo/Carmen Taylor, File)   Source: AP

PSYCHOLOGISTS will tell you that even perfectly sane people have the ability  to accept wild conspiracy theories. The more powerless or alone we feel, the  more likely we are to develop such theories.  

It’s all linked to self-esteem. If you’re the sort of person who feels  isolated or disenfranchised, you’re much more likely to develop wild theories as  a way of making you seem more knowledgeable, more powerful, more special.

That might help explain why many Americans are into conspiracies. The irony  of our technologically over-connected age is that there are scores of socially  disconnected people sitting in dark rooms extrapolating all sorts of crap from  factoids they find online. Here are six of the worst:

STUPID THEORY 1: The US government did it

SIMPLE REBUTTAL: People who say it was an inside job are split into  two camps. There are those who say the US government cooked up and enacted the  whole crazy plot, and those who say they let it happen without intervention. In  both cases, conspiracists generally claim that the aim was to give the Bush  government an excuse to wage war on the Islamic world.

So here’s your simple rebuttal. US governments have shown for decades that  they will intervene when and where it suits them. The last thing they need to do  to justify any foreign policy is kill 3000 of their own citizens.

STUPID THEORY 2: The twin towers did not collapse. They were  demolished.

SIMPLE REBUTTAL: 9/11 “truthers”, who would perhaps be more accurately  described as 9/11 “liars”, like to rope in an expert to tell you that no office  fire ever made a building topple. Well, that’d be because no office fire was  ever as big as these two, with as much jet fuel to help it along.

But the real reason the twin towers collapsed was structural. Most buildings  have their core structural supports at the centre. The towers had some major  central steel columns, but that elegant exterior steel shell was also crucial in  providing perimeter support. Also, the perimeter columns supported massive steel  trusses which supported each floor.

So basically, when the exterior of the building was penetrated so  devastatingly by the planes, the structure’s ability to hold itself up was  threatened. So when one floor went, the combined weight meant they all went.

Pretend the towers were a  conspiracy theory. Then pretend they were subjected to the force of logic.  Here’s your result. 11/09/2001. Source: AFP

STUPID THEORY 3: World Trade Center 7 did not collapse. It was  demolished.

SIMPLE REBUTTAL: Riiiight, so the world’s tallest tower collapses on  its neighbour less than 200m across the road. You’ve got 110 storeys of rubble  pummelling a 47-storey building, setting it on fire, covering it in untold extra  weight and inflicted untold stresses. And later that day, when the smaller  building collapses, it’s obvious the CIA did it with explosives. And Elvis left  the building right before it happened.

Oh, and if you want a secondary explanation of why the building really wasn’t  toppled by mysterious people with explosives, try googling any of the so-called  architects or engineers in the wacky YouTube vids. Almost none of them appear to  be either a) currently employed or b) affiliated with any group other than 9/11  conspiracy groups.

STUPID THEORY 4: FLIGHT 93 was shot down in Pennsylvania and the  people who were supposedly on it were murdered or relocated.

SIMPLE REBUTTAL: The small jet flying low in the area, which some  believe shot down Flight 93, was in fact a business jet which had been  instructed to fly low to inspect the wreckage. Also, the log of calls made from  Flight 93 is pretty compelling evidence that those were real people aboard a  hijacked jet. If these people are actors who are actually still alive somewhere,  the real mystery is why they haven’t made squillions in Hollywood. Because they  were seriously convincing.

And they’re fake trees and that’s  a fake wall and Gilligan is still stuck on Gilligan’s Island. Picture: Jeff  Swensen/Getty Images/AFP Source: AFP

STUPID THEORY 5: There was no “stand down” order, which proves the US  government dunnit.

SIMPLE REBUTTAL: A stand down order is an order from the North  American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) to scramble fighter jets. This didn’t  happen until too late on September 11, prompting conspiracists to say the  government deliberately held off to let the carnage unfold.

But NORAD didn’t actually track flights within America prior to 9/11. Also,  the hijackers turned off the transponders on their planes, which meant Air  Traffic Control couldn’t track them. And NORAD needed an alert from Air Traffic  Control to act. So basically, you had a system which ensured bureaucratic  bungles, but that’s a far cry from complicit officials.

STUPID THEORY 6: They weren’t planes, they were missiles.

SIMPLE REBUTTAL: Some of the worst nutters claim that the original  planes which struck the twin towers weren’t planes but missiles. This was  fuelled by an early eyewitness account broadcast on live TV from a journalist  who said he thought the first plane had no windows. But the journalist saw the  plane in a blink of his eye – a fact ignored by conspiracists who have seized on  this statement.

The obvious plane-sized holes in the buildings are a bit of a giveaway too.  But you know, maybe they were just caused by Batman or something.

Related articles

• Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories (thelibertarianrepublic.com)
• 11 Crazy 9-11 Conspiracy Theories Debunked (addictinginfo.org)
• 11 More Crazy 9-11 Conspiracy Theories Debunked (Part 2) (addictinginfo.org)
• 9/11: The Conspiracy of Conspiracies (carlcymru.wordpress.com)

Pentagon: Israel’s Future Fighter Jet Critically Flawed

Pentagon: Israel’s future fighter jet critically flawed

Leaked Pentagon report reveals fatal F-35 fighter jet flaws; ‘Unacceptable for combat or combat training,’ says report; Israel to buy 25 jets for $238 million each

Ynet

Fatal flaws within the cockpit of the US military’s most expensive fighter jet ever are causing further problems with the Pentagon’s dubious F-35 program, Israel’s future combat aircraft.

A new report from the Pentagon warns that any pilot that boards the pricey aircraft places himself in danger without even going into combat.

In a leaked memo reported by the RT news agency, a Pentagon official prefaces a report on the F-35 by cautioning that even training missions cannot be safely performed on board the aircraft at this time.

“The training management system lags in development compared to the rest of the Integrated Training Center and does not yet have all planned functionality,” the report reads in part.

The F-35 (Photo: Reuters)

“The out-of-cockpit visibility in the F-35A is less than other Air Force fighter aircraft,” one excerpt reads.

Elsewhere, the report includes quotes from pilots commenting after test missions onboard the aircraft:

“The head rest is too large and will impede aft (rear) visibility and survivability during surface and air engagements,” said one. “Aft visibility will get the pilot gunned (down) every time” in dogfights, remarked another.

“Aft visibility could turn out to be a significant problem for all F-35 pilots in the future,” the Pentagon admits.

In one chart included in the report, the Pentagon says there are eight crucial flaws with the aircraft that have raises serious red flags within the Department of Defense.

The plane’s lack of maturity, reduced pilot situational awareness during an emergency and the risk of the aircraft’s fuel barriers catching fire are also cited, as is the likelihood of a pilot in distress becoming unable to escape his aircraft during an emergency.

The Pentagon report described flaws as “unacceptable for combat or combat training.”

Yedioth Aharonoth reported that jet makers Lockheed Martin stated they are aware of the problems and that some have already been solved, adding that the aircraft’s maintenance and operation are being improved.

The latest news regarding the F-35s comes less than one month after a separate incident forced the Department of Defense to ground their entire arsenal of fighter jets. In February, jet makers Lockheed Martin issued a statement acknowledging that a routine inspection on a test plane turned up cracked turbine blade.

Each F-35 fighter jet is valued at $238 million and, according to recent estimates, the entire operation will cost the country $1 trillion in order to keep the jets up and running through 2050.

That high price tag has given several countries cold feet about the jet. Last week, Canada pulled out of a deal to buy 65 F-35s over fears that the aircraft could be too expensive to run. Italy reduced its purchase to 90 F-35s from an initial 131, and even the US has delayed some of its purchases.

 

Religious Siblings Kept Dead Mother, Claimed She Was God

Siblings kept dead mother, claimed she was god

Via The West Australian

Three adult siblings have been arrested after police found they had kept their mother’s body in their house for three years after her death.

The Daily Mail website in Britain reports that the trio, aged in their 50s and 60s, had initially refused entry to police who wanted to check on the elderly mother because they believed she was being abused.

Instead, they found she had been dead for years. Police arrested them after finding the skeleton of an elderly woman at their home in Usa in the country’s south-west, according to Jiji Press.

The Daily Mail reports that the Japanese sisters and brother insist that they have done nothing wrong – and say the reason they wanted to stay with their parent was that she had become a god.

The 65-year-old man and two women aged 59 and 52 are accused of conspiring to abandon a body.

When officers visited the home in order to investigate the possibility that the elderly woman was being abused, the siblings tried to refuse them entry.

One of the sisters told police: ‘There’s no need to let you see her. Get off our property,’ according to Asahi News.

When they managed to enter the house, they found Mrs Ishigai’s body lying face up on a futon – which the siblings said was ‘for religious reasons’.

Related articles

• Japan police arrest siblings over skeleton ‘mother’ (straitstimes.com)
• Three siblings arrested after living with mother’s skeleton, believing she was ‘goddess’ (japandailypress.com)

Amish Religious Fanatics Jailed for Hate Crimes

16 Amish men, women face unfamiliar life in federal prison for hate crimes

Prison sentences range from one to 15 years

www.wews.com

CLEVELAND – Sixteen Amish men and women who have lived rural, self-sufficient lives surrounded by extended family and with little outside contact are facing regimented routines in a federal prison system where almost half of inmates are behind bars for drug offenses and modern conveniences such as television will be a constant temptation.

The defendants, all members of the same Amish sect, were convicted in September of hate crimes in 2011 attacks meant to shame fellow Amish they believed were straying from the strict religious interpretations espoused by the sect’s leader. Fifteen of them received sentences ranging from one to seven years; the ringleader, Samuel Mullet Sr., got 15 years.

Prison rules will allow the 10 men convicted in beard- and hair-cutting attacks on fellow Amish in eastern Ohio to keep their religiously important beards, but they must wear standard prison uniforms instead of the dark outfits they favor. Jumper dresses will be an option for the six Amish women, who will be barred from wearing their typical long, dark dresses and bonnets.

It’s unclear where the Amish will serve their sentences, but some of the nearest options include men’s prisons in Elkton, a 90-minute drive southeast of Cleveland, and in Loretto, Pa., and women’s prisons in Lexington, Ky., and Alderson, W.Va. The dates they have to report could come any day.

Visits from family members might be difficult since they don’t drive modern vehicles. During the trial, relatives hired van drivers to take them more than 100 miles to the trial in Cleveland, where they often filled most courtroom seats.

“Amish people grow up with very strong communal connections and large extended families and participating in community activities, so being suddenly severed from that and isolated would certainly be a major change,” said Donald Kraybill, a longtime Amish researcher and professor at Elizabethtown College in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Amish country.

They all rejected plea deals that offered leniency, with some young mothers turning down possible chances for probation.

Amish communities have a highly insular, modest lifestyle, are deeply religious and believe in following the Bible, which they believe instructs women to let their hair grow long and men to grow beards and stop shaving once they marry.

Prosecutors say the 16 defendants targeted hair because it carries spiritual significance, hence the hate crime prosecution. The defendants had argued that the Amish are bound by different rules guided by their religion and that the government had no place getting involved in what amounted to a family or church dispute.

Most of the men were locked up, often in less strict local jails, after their arrests and will have some idea of what to expect in prison. The women remained free during the trial, and several have asked to stay out of prison during their appeals. The judge has rejected at least one such request, and more are pending.

The timing for moving those locked up to federal prisons and for those still at home to report to begin serving terms will be up to the prison system. When they report, they will be in the custody of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

The beard-cutting defendants aren’t likely to see many fellow Amish in prison. In the Amish region east of Cleveland where one of the attacks took place, Trumbull County Sheriff Thomas

Altiere has seen only one Amish inmate in his 20 years as sheriff, and Kraybill, the researcher, knows of just one current Amish inmate.

Attorney John Pyfer, who has represented hundreds of Amish in Pennsylvania in the past 40 years, said: “I just don’t think there’s a lot of Amish that go to prison, and certainly not federal prison.” The federal prisons bureau doesn’t keep figures of how many Amish inmates it has held over the years.

The federal system doesn’t prohibit locking up relatives in the same facility, so the defendants could wind up at some of the same locations. The defendants include Mullet Sr., four of his children, his son-in-law, three nephews and the spouses of a niece and nephews.

The response to the jailing of one beard-cutting defendant highlighted the closeness of Amish families, said Altiere, the sheriff. While two relatives visited the defendant, more than a dozen more prayed behind a glass partition.

Andy Hyde, a defense attorney for two decades in the Amish area around Holmes County south of Cleveland, has represented about 40 Amish defendants over the years and said how they handle lockup varies, much like non-Amish prisoners.

“They don’t all think alike,” he said. “They are as individual as we are, so it’s easy to lump them all together. There are bold, there are aggressive Amish. They are quiet; they are shy.”

Some low-key Amish won’t stand up when threatened in prison, Hyde said, but Mullet Sr. has encouraged a tough outlook.

“Grow up,” he said in a recorded phone call to a jailed son who was among the first arrested in the case. “You can take more than that. I know it’s rough.” Mullet

Sr. wasn’t as confident about his own ability to handle prison. “You’re in there like that — I can understand that real good,” he told his son. “I don’t know if I could handle it.”

The prison system allows an array of religion-dictated head coverings for inmates, including scarves for Jewish women and hijabs for Muslim women and, for men, turbans for Sikhs, headbands for Native Americans and yarmulkes for Jews. Baggy pants and full-length robes mandated by some faiths are prohibited.

Inmates can buy clothing items from a small selection, mostly white T-shirts and gray sweat suits, federal prison system spokesman Chris Burke said.

As for the beards, “That’s not an issue, as long as it doesn’t present some sort of security risk or security hazard, and I’m not aware of any case where that’s happened,” he said.

There’s also the danger of Amish being offended, or even damaged, by access to technology, though some Amish don’t eschew modern conveniences altogether, Kraybill noted. He wrote in his book “The Riddle of Amish Culture” that some Amish have selectively adopted technology, including generators to power farm equipment and refrigerated milk holding tanks.

Kraybill knows one Amish man whose prison job taught him to work with audio equipment. In 1999, four Amish serving time in Iowa for vandalizing a neighbor’s farm were released from jail early in part because officials worried they were being spoiled by television, electric lights and telephones.

Amish may have seen television at a neighbor’s home or in a public area like a restaurant, Kraybill said, “but to have it available constantly would create a whole new temptation for them.”

Related articles

• Ohio Amish face unfamiliar life in federal prison (seattletimes.com)
• Ohio Amish face unfamiliar life in federal prison (courierpress.com)
• Ohio Amish Face Unfamiliar Life In Federal Prison (cleveland.cbslocal.com)
• Ohio Amish face unfamiliar life in federal prison (salon.com)
• Convicted Beard-Cutting Amish Cult Members, Details Of Their New Life Behind Bars (radaronline.com)

Jewish Theist Superstition Leads To Genital Mutilation, Lawsuit and Reconstructive Surgery

Jewish Theist Superstition Leads To Genital Mutilation, Lawsuit and Reconstructive Surgery

Rabbi Mordechai Rachminov allegedly sliced off part of a baby boy’s corona glandis, the circumference of the base of the head of the penis in human males which forms a rounded projecting border, during the boy’s brit milah in the Bukharian Jewish Community Center in Forest Hills, Queens on October 16, 2011.

A brit milah, circumcision – file photo

Botched Circumcision Leads To Lawsuit

Shmarya Rosenberg at FailedMessiah.com

Rabbi Mordechai Rachminov allegedly sliced off part of a baby boy’s corona glandis, the circumference of the base of the head of the penis in human males which forms a rounded projecting border, during the boy’s brit milah in the Bukharian Jewish Community Center in Forest Hills, Queens on October 16, 2011 DNAinfo reported.

When the baby’s father, Gavriel Barukh, questioned Rachminov about the damage to his son’s corona, Rachminov told Barukh that the circumcision was valid, and that he had done an acceptable job.
Rachminov claimed the brit milah was “performed appropriately and that his conduct was within the standard of care and skill required of Jewish mohelim and circumcisers,” the lawsuit against him reportedly states.

The suit also alleges that Rachminov told the baby’s father that it wasn’t necessary to call a doctor. Later, after it became clear that the circumcision had gone wrong, Rachminov and the community center staff still allegedly failed to call a doctor, the suit claims.

The baby required corrective surgery.

Barukh claims that the delay in getting medical treatment for his son resulted in greater permanent damage to his son’s penis than otherwise would have been the case. The boy had to undergo one corrective surgery under general anesthesia so far, and he may need even more surgical procedures as he grows older, the lawsuit says.

The Bukharian Jewish Community Center, which is also named in the lawsuit, claims Rachminov no longer works there.
It declined to comment on the lawsuit as did the father’s attorney. A woman at Rachminov’s home told DNAinfo that she had not heard about any of the allegations against Rachminov and the community center.

 

Related articles

• Botched Circumcision Leads To Lawsuit (failedmessiah.typepad.com)
• Chabad Rabbi-Mohel Threatens To Sue Blogger Over Dangerous Circumcision Sucking Ritual (failedmessiah.typepad.com)
• President Clinton’s Event Disrupted by Anti-Circumcision Activists (blogs.browardpalmbeach.com)
• Canada’s pediatricians set to revise stance on circumcision after 17 years (vancouversun.com)

Derren Brown Exposing Theist Faith Healing Scams

Derren Brown Exposing Theist Faith Healing Scams

Derren Brown recently did a show called “Miracles for Sale” where he debunks and exposes common faith healing tricks used to con believers into coughing up donations.  Scams like this run rampant in America and believers are too busy believing to stop and question anything.  Knowledge is power, but often times, it is also a vaccine.

This clip is protected by the educational exemption of the Fair Use clause within the Digital Millennium Copyright Agreement.

Look for Derren Brown’s “Miracles for Sale”

Related articles

• TV illusionist: ‘And for my next trick, I will turn a straight man gay’… (telegraph.co.uk)
• Derren Brown to turn straight man gay on new show (thesun.co.uk)

Strange Maps

Cartographic curiosities

Strange Maps

600 – Münster’s Monster Mash

One of cartography’s most persistent myths: mapmakers of yore, frustrated by the world beyond their ken, marked the blank spaces on their maps with the legend Here be monsters.   It’s a pleasing hypothesis. For to label a cartographic vacuum with the stuff of nightmares solves two problems at …

Read More…

Strange Maps

599 – The Nazi Snail of Defeat: Yes, We’re Losing, but Very Slowly!

The end of Nazi Germany in two words? Pincer movement [1].   After it turns the tide at the bloody battles of Stalingrad (August 1942 – January 1943) and Kursk (July – August 1943), the Red Army relentlessly steamrollers westward to Berlin. The Anglo-American push eastward, also in the general …

Read More…

Strange Maps

598 – Fast Train to… Quincy? A Mirage Map of U.S. High Speed Rail

What to do with a dream that’s too big for reality? Among many other things, you could map it. Such a representation could serve as an exhortation – This is the plan, get going! But if the gap between cartography and reality remains unbridged, the exhortation becomes a souvenir of the road not …

Read More…

Strange Maps

597 – China’s Chicken Syndrome, and the Man in the Iron Curtain

What was first, the chicken or the map? That question is perhaps as unanswerable as the one featuring hen vs. egg [1]. Not that it matters. Stare long enough at these twin images, and you will never see a map of China again without thinking of an agitated chicken flapping its wings as it runs …

596 – Sound Like a Map to You?

Question: Which contest is the nec plus ultra for puzzle fans and quiz aficionados everywhere?  Answer: The MIT Mystery Hunt (MMH), which kicks off every year on the Friday before Martin Luther King Day [1] on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. The …

Read More…

Strange Maps

595 – It’s Always Chile in Norway: the Five Types of Territorial Morphology

Do Norwegians feel curiously at home in Chile, and vice versa? Do South Africans have a strange affinity with Italians? And Filipinos with Maldivians? They should, at least if they’re map nerds: each lives in a country with a territorial morphology [1] that closely resembles the other’s …

Read More…

Strange Maps

594 – Mind over Map: the World Is What You Make It

This is a map that takes some time to get your head around; quite literally, because to appreciate it fully, you need to consider it both with its north side and its south side up [1].  The world, ‘upside up’.   To spare you the risk of neck injury, we’re providing both versions below …

Read More…

Strange Maps

593 – Greenland by Way of a Drainpipe: Accidental Cartography IV

It was this map of Greenland that triggered this post. I say map, but I mean hole in a drainpipe.  This picture was sent in by Ruland Kolen, who was struck by this hole’s accidental resemblance to the shape of the world’s largest island: “Both Greenland and this hole look like a lion’s head …

Read More…

Strange Maps

592 – Build Your Own Poland

Occasional exceptions notwithstanding, this blog steers clear of maps from the twin realms [1] of fantasy and alternate history. This might seem odd, as both genres rely heavily on maps to flesh out the world they describe. Consequently,  both fantasy and alternate history teem with non-standard …

Read More…

Strange Maps

591 – Elizabeth II, Queen of the South Pole

It’s a question on the minds of many, this gift-giving season: What do you get someone who already has everything? The problem gets a bit more pressing if you’re the British Cabinet, and the Queen is coming round to visit. Their solution? Clever: two gifts – 60 table mats, and a chunk of Antarctica …

Read More…

Strange Maps

590 – Fake Metro Map of Montevideo

“Today, Montevideo is on a par with the great capitals of the world, like London, Milan and Rio de Janeiro. Finally, Montevideo has its Metro.”  – Estero Bellaco, Engineer and President of the Corporación Metro de Montevideo (CMM). Those words were spoken at the inauguration of the metro …

Read More…

Strange Maps

589 – Procrasti-Nation, Our Common Home

Why get done today what you can put off until tomorrow? Anyone who knows that feeling is an honorary citizen of this virtual country: Procrasti-Nation.   For Freud, the need to procrastinate is a function of the Pleasure Principle, which dictates that we seek gratification, or least avoid pain …

Read More…

Strange Maps

588 – No Land Ho: Sandy Island and the Age of Un-Discovery

Last week, the world didn’t so much lose an island, as gain a phantom island. To map-lovers, the former is a regrettable but increasingly common occurrence [1], what with rising sea levels and all. The latter, on the contrary, is an exciting event, all the more since it was presumed extinct. We …

Read More…

Strange Maps

587 – Maps as War by Other Means

War, as Clausewitz said, is the continuation of politics by other means [1]. But sometimes, war itself is being continued by other means – cartographic means. Maps are an excellent propaganda weapon against a (geo)political enemy. We trust cartography instinctively to ‘show us the right way’, and …

Read More…

Strange Maps

586 – “God Knew We Would Have Satellites”: A Map of Jesus In Arabia

How do you determine the value of a place? The answer to that question often reduces ‘value’ to ‘yield’: how much money does it generate? The genius loci [1] of a place is calculable by the monetary value of the crops it generates, of of the oil and gas that we frack out from under it. There’s …

Read More…

Related articles

• Can the shape of a country determine its economics? (kottke.org)
• Big Think’s Guide to Thinking and Doing Bigger in 2013 (bigthink.com)
• Germany reopens hundreds of Nazi investigations (news.blogs.cnn.com)
• Strange maps (abc.net.au)
• 600 – Münster’s Monster Mash (bigthink.com)

Moses vs Santa Claus (for those who are yet to see it) and other hilarities

Moses vs Santa Claus (for those who are yet to see it) and other hilarities

No intro needed. Just pretty funny!

 

And while you’re here, this is sheer genius:

 

And more genius (Jesus as a racist):

 

And Charlie Brooker on the Pope resigning:

 

And finally, this is sheer brilliance (if you are easily offended by swearing, stay clear):

 

 

– See more at: http://skepticink.com/tippling/2013/02/28/moses-vs-santa-claus-for-those-who-are-yet-to-see-it/#sthash.vAV5m0vB.dpuf

Related articles

• Black Mirror saw Charlie Brooker nail the zeitgeist (metro.co.uk)
• Charlie Brooker’s second Black Mirror drama ‘White Bear’ is another work of dark and twisted genius (mirror.co.uk)
• Philosopher submits gibberish fake abstract and gets accepted on theological conferences (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)

A Dominican Death: Giordano Bruno, 17 February 1600

A Dominican Death: Giordano Bruno, 17 February 1600

       “Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence upon me with greater fear than I receive it.”

He said that last week.  Now he shivers in the corner of his cell, wondering whether, for once in his life, he could have chosen his words more temperately.  What seemed, a week ago, to be a fine mixture of courage and defiance was not absolutely true even then; and now, on the morning of his death, Giordano is beginning to realize just how frightened he is.

The state of being dead will not be unwelcome, for Giordano feels he has nothing to fear from God, whereas his murderers will someday cringe under divine judgment – but the dying itself is a hideous mountain to climb before he can rest.  Pain is not something one gets used to, even after seven years in the care of the Roman Inquisition.  Giordano has learned that too much courage does not pay.  Pain borne in silence leads to more pain, and more, and yet more, until finally one’s screaming point is reached and the questioners are confident they have gained one’s attention.

The morning is February-cold.  He could almost, he tells himself, welcome a fire – and at that irony, he laughs for the last time in his life.  And then he hears footsteps and voices on the stairs, and he opens his body to the cold as if he could suck it into his pores and store it up against his imminent dire need.  The reverend brothers of the Company of Mercy and Pity have returned from their breakfast.

Dignity, he tells himself.  Above all else, dignity.  And maybe a few words at the stake, words that will be better chosen, more pointed, more memorable, than those words of hasty defiance when judgment was pronounced.  Since die he must, he would like to die in a way that men will remember – but what to say?  Never mind: for fifty-two years he has been a man of many words, and he is sure his tongue and talent will not fail him at the end.

Hooded figures, self-styled dispensers of mercy and pity, hover black in the smoky candlelight: “Giordano Bruno, born Fillipo Bruno of Nola, once of the Brotherhood of the Dominicans – do you know why we are here?”

“Yes, Robert, I know.”

“For the last time: do you recant your heresies?”

Giordano sighs.  “I’ve glorified God in my own way, not the Church’s, and that’s all there is.”  He pauses to order his words for a last debate with his inquisitor – his life has been a string of spirited debates – but a nail is already point-down on his tongue, and a moment later it is driven home; and even as he tries to scream, a second nail is driven upwards through his lower jaw into the palate.  The blood pouring into his throat chokes him into silence.  He hardly has attention to spare for the leather-and-iron clamp of the gag.

“Did you imagine we’d let you vomit your heresies in public?”

Now he is in violent motion, jerked along, stumbling and staggering between two of the righteous.  He realizes dimly that he has shat himself.  Breath and blood struggle for passage in his throat.  They pause under the arch of the gate – Giordano sinks to his knees and frantically pulls air in through his nostrils, but the respite is brief.  It is Grazio who tears the robe off Giordano’s back, Clemente who wads it up and wipes the scarlet trickles from the underside of Giordano’s jaw.  Officially, the heretic’s blood will not have been spilled.  Clemente does not clean off the backs of Giordano’s legs, for it is only appropriate that heresy should come to its just punishment naked, smeared and stinking.

Thus – Giordano, all dignity a bitter memory, is hustled naked into the cart and trundled through the streets, freezing in the last dark minutes before a winter dawn.  He shivers, and Grazio hisses into his ear: “you’ll be hot enough soon, heretic.”  The cart stops on the edge of the Campo del Fiore, the Field of Flowers, where a small but gleeful crowd hugs itself for warmth in front of the high-piled faggots, the premonitory torches.  The crowd howls as the procession crosses the square, animal noises, a wallow of pigs, a snapping of dogs, a hooting of Barbary apes.  Giordano hears them through his agony – shame sickens him.  He digs his naked heels into the cobbles and tries to fight, rearing his head, panicking, eyes wild as a horse’s at the sight of fire.  They roll heavenward, up to where God’s little lights are still visible, fixed to the crystal globe of the firmament, obediently rotating around the terrestrial centre of God’s little universe.

Giordano stops fighting.  He stares up.  He has not seen the stars for seven years.  He looks up, up, up, through the mantle of the air and past the moon, beyond the purview of the sun and across the dark void.  He shrinks to a particle on a whirling grain of sand.  Clemente, another insignificant particle, shoves him from behind.  Infinity arches above them.  Giordano is entranced.  He lets himself be propelled unresisting towards the crowd, the torches, the stake.  He is busy trying to number the glitter of the stars, a count that he knows he will never finish.  This does not seem to matter.  He would shout for triumph if the clamp would let him.

Now they are binding him to the stake, pinching his flesh in the cold coils.  He pays no mind.  Robert shoves the crucifix almost into his face – he shies from it impatiently.  He wants to cry, “Look up, you fools!  It’s so obvious!  You’ll see I’ve been right all along!”  Impossible, alas, with his mouth nailed shut; but he has a strange idea the future will speak for him.

The Company of Mercy and Pity has provided no strangler.  With his own hand, Robert plunges the torch into the faggots at Giordano’s feet, and steps well back.  Giordano makes no sound, then or ever again.  He watches the sky for as long as his eyes last, though the stars begin to fade in the dawn and the smoke thickens over his head.  They are so clear to him: other suns, great suns, distant suns blazing down on God’s uncountable worlds, all of them swarming with God’s creatures, an infinite universe filled with the music of a mighty massed choir of spheres.

 

Related articles

• God in the Age of Alien Earths (ieet.org)
• Tweets & Retweets: 27 Feb 2013 (lelantosmetis.wordpress.com)
• Giordano Bruno burned at the stake today (humanisticpaganism.com)

Denver DA Arrests Psychics For Fraud, Going For Hat Trick

Denver DA arrests two psychics for fraud, going for hattrick

By idoubtit

Psychic parlor tricks and curses.

2 Psychics Arrested, 3rd Sought « CBS Denver.

One Denver psychic has been convicted of theft, a second was arrested this month in California and Denver prosecutors are still seeking to arrest a third psychic accused of convincing clients she was a “witch doctor.”

“In these cases, where after they’ve paid money for services rendered, they take additional money, I believe through theft and deception, through magic and things like that and then don’t give money back to the victims … that’s when we get involved,” said Stevenson.

Denver psychic Cathy Ann Russo is currently on probation after being pleading guilty last August to felony theft and misdemeanor theft. Over the course of five years, beginning in 2007, Russo conned a Hispanic man out of $35,250. according to court records.

She is still acting as a psychic, although when a CBS4 producer went to see her for a tarot card reading, she identified herself as “Miss Anna.”

Earlier this month, authorities in California arrested Denver psychic Isabel Costello on an arrest warrant for theft and conspiracy to commit theft issued by the Denver DA’s office.

They say the two women conned at least four victims out of thousands of dollars by convincing them their money was cursed, and the more money turned over to the psychics, the easier it would be to remove the curses.

In order to convince clients of their “powers”, they did things like making grapefruits bleed, tomatoes taste like salt and cracking eggs open revealing black yolks. Anyone have info on how these tricks worked?

The psychics took advantage of clients’ belief in black magic and curses.

When will ALL psychics who take money be able to be charged with fraud?

Related articles

• Crestline Psychic Accused Of Embezzlement (losangeles.cbslocal.com)
• 2 Psychics Arrested, 3rd Sought (illuminutti.com)
• 2 Psychics Arrested, 3rd Sought (denver.cbslocal.com)

Holy Shit! Man Claims Jesus Appears In Bird Poop on His Car!

Man Claims the Bird Poop on His Car Looks Like Jesus

By Hemant Mehta

… and he has a point:

 

[Jim] Lawry was in the driveway of his parent’s Brooklyn, Ohio home when he noticed the spot left behind by a passing bird. A closer look gave him quite a surprise and left him amazed.

Lawry’s son, parents and friends all came out to look. They too were amazed.

In an email to NewsChannel5, Lawry said he believed it was some sort of sign and wanted to share.

Well, holy shit.

I thought for a moment that Jim was a skeptic who was just having a little pareidolia-ic fun… but his Facebook profile suggests that he’s totally serious about this being a sign from (*ahem*) above:

 

I want to know how long it takes before he gets another carwash. Because, um, ew.

(via Christian Nightmares)

Related articles

• Holy Shit: Ohio man sees face of Jesus in bird droppings (dangerousminds.net)
• Ohio man finds Jesus in bird poop (rawstory.com)
• Holy c**p: Jesus ‘appears’ in a bird dropping (dailymail.co.uk)

Oscar Prints the Legend of Argo

Oscar Prints the Legend: Argo’s Upcoming Academy Award and the Failure of Truth

  One year ago, after his breathtakingly beautiful Iranian drama, “A Separation,” won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, writer/director Asghar Farhadi delivered the best acceptance speech of the night.

“[A]t the time when talk of war, intimidation, and aggression is exchanged between politicians,” he said, Iran was finally being honored for “her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics.” Farhadi dedicated the Oscar “to the people of my country, a people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment.”

Such grace and eloquence will surely not be on display this Sunday, when Ben Affleck, flanked by his co-producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov, takes home the evening’s top prize, the Best Picture Oscar, for his critically-acclaimed and heavily decorated paean to the CIA and American innocence, “Argo.”
Over the past 12 months, rarely a week – let alone month – went by without new predictions of an ever-imminent Iranian nuclear weapon and ever-looming threats of an American or Israeli military attack. Come October 2012, into the fray marched “Argo,” a decontextualized, ahistorical “true story” of Orientalist proportion, subjecting audiences to two hours of American victimization and bearded barbarians, culminating in popped champagne corks and rippling stars-and-stripes celebrating our heroism and triumph and their frustration and defeat.  Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir aptly described the film as “a propaganda fable,” explaining as others have that essentially none of its edge-of-your-seat thrills or most memorable moments ever happened.  O’Hehir sums up:

The Americans never resisted the idea of playing a film crew, which is the source of much agitation in the movie. (In fact, the “house guests” chose that cover story themselves, from a group of three options the CIA had prepared.) They were not almost lynched by a mob of crazy Iranians in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, because they never went there. There was no last-minute cancellation, and then un-cancellation, of the group’s tickets by the Carter administration. (The wife of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor had personally gone to the airport and purchased tickets ahead of time, for three different outbound flights.) The group underwent no interrogation at the airport about their imaginary movie, nor were they detained at the gate while a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard telephoned their phony office back in Burbank. There was no last-second chase on the runway of Mehrabad Airport, with wild-eyed, bearded militants with Kalashnikovs trying to shoot out the tires of a Swissair jet.

One of the actual diplomats, Mark Lijek, noted that the CIA’s fake movie “cover story was never tested and in some ways proved irrelevant to the escape.” The departure of the six Americans from Tehran was actually mundane and uneventful.  “If asked, we were going to say we were leaving Iran to return when it was safer,” Lijek recalled, “But no one ever asked!…The truth is the immigration officers barely looked at us and we were processed out in the regular way. We got on the flight to Zurich and then we were taken to the US ambassador’s residence in Berne. It was that straightforward.”

Furthermore, Jimmy Carter has even acknowledged  that “90% of the contributions to the ideas and the consummation of the  plan was Canadian [while] the movie gives almost full credit to the  American CIA…Ben Affleck’s character in the film was only in Tehran a  day and a half and the real hero in my opinion was Ken Taylor, who was  the Canadian ambassador who orchestrated the entire process.”

Taylor himself recently remarked that “Argo” provides a myopic representation of both Iranians and their revolution, ignoring their “more hospitable side and an intent that they were looking for some degree of justice and hope and that it all wasn’t just a violent demonstration for nothing.”
“The amusing side, Taylor said, “is the script writer in Hollywood had no idea what he’s talking about.”

O’Hehir perfectly articulates the film’s true crime, its deliberate exploitation of “its basis in history and its mode of detailed realism to create something that is entirely mythological.” Not only is it “a trite cavalcade of action-movie clichés and expository dialogue,” but “[i]t’s also a propaganda movie in the truest sense, one that claims to be innocent of all ideology.”

Such an assessment is confirmed by Ben Affleck’s own comments about the film.  In describing “Argo” to Bill O’Reilly, Affleck boasted, “You know, it was such a great story. For one thing, it’s a thriller. It’s actually comedy with the Hollywood satire. It’s a complicated CIA movie, it’s a political movie. And it’s all true.”  He told Rolling Stone that, when conceiving his directorial approach, he knew he “absolutely had to preserve the central integrity and truth of the story.”

“It’s OK to embellish, it’s OK to compress, as long as you don’t  fundamentally change the nature of the story and of what happened,” Affleck has remarked, even going so far as to tell reporters at Argo’s BFI London Film Festival premier, “This movie is about this story that took place, and it’s true, and I go to pains to contextualize it and to try to be even-handed in a way that just means we’re taking a cold, hard look at the facts.”

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Affleck went so far as to say, “I tried to make a movie that is absolutely just factual. And that’s another reason why I tried to be as true to the story as possible — because I didn’t want it to be used by either side. I didn’t want it to be politicized internationally or domestically in a partisan way. I just wanted to tell a story that was about the facts as I understood them.”
For Affleck, these facts apparently don’t include understanding why the American Embassy in Tehran was overrun and occupied on November 4, 1979.  “There was no rhyme or reason to this action,” Affleck has insisted, claiming that the takeover “wasn’t about us,” that is, the American government (despite the fact that his own film is introduced by a fleeting – though frequently inaccurate¹ – review of American complicity in the Shah’s dictatorship).

Wrong, Ben.  One reason was the fear of another CIA-engineered coup d’etat like the one perpetrated in 1953 from the very same Embassy. Another reason was the admission of the deposed Shah into the United States for medical treatment and asylum rather than extradition to Iran to face charge and trial for his quarter century of crimes against the Iranian people, bankrolled and supported by the U.S. government.  One doesn’t have to agree with the reasons, of course, but they certainly existed.

Just as George H.W. Bush once bellowed after a U.S. Navy warship blew an Iranian passenger airliner out of the sky over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 Iranian civilians, “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”  Affleck appears inclined to agree.

If nothing else, “Argo” is an exercise in American exceptionalism – perhaps the most dangerous fiction that permeates our entire society and sense of identity.  It reinvents history in order to mine a tale of triumph from an unmitigated defeat.  The hostage crisis, which lasted 444 days and destroyed an American presidency, was a failure and an embarrassment for Americans.  The United States government and media has spent the last three decades tirelessly exacting revenge on Iran for what happened.

“Argo” recasts revolutionary Iranians as the hapless victims of American cunning and deception.  White Americans are hunted, harried and, ultimately courageous and free.  Iranians are maniacal, menacing and, in the end, infantile and foolish.  The fanatical fundamentalists fail while America wins. USA -1, Iran – 0.  Yet, “Argo” obscures the unfortunate truth that, as those six diplomats were boarding a plane bound for Switzerland on January 28, 1980, their 52 compatriots would have to wait an entire year before making it home, not as the result of a daring rescue attempt, but after a diplomatic agreement was reached.
Reflecting on the most troubled episodes in American history is a time-honored cinematic tradition. There’s a reason why the best Vietnam movies are full of pain, anger, anguish and war crimes.  By contrast,

“Argo” is American catharsis porn; pure Hollywood hubris.  It is pro-American propaganda devoid of introspection, pathos or humility and meant to assuage our hurt feelings.  In “Argo,” no lessons are learned by revisiting the consequences of America’s support for the Pahlavi monarchy or its creation and training of SAVAK, the Shah’s vicious secret police.

On June 11, 1979, months before the hostage crisis began, the New York Times published an article by writer and historian A.J. Langguth which recounted revelations relayed by a former American intelligence official regarding the CIA’s close relationship with SAVAK.  The agency had “sent an operative to teach  interrogation methods to SAVAK” including “instructions in torture, and the techniques were  copied from the Nazis.”  Langguth wrestled with the news, trying to figure out why this had not been widely reported in the media.  He came to the following conclusion:

We – and I  mean we as Americans – don’t believe it. We can read the accusations,  even examine the evidence and find it irrefutable. But, in our hearts,  we cannot believe that Americans have gone abroad to spread the use of  torture.
We can believe that public officials with  reputations for brilliance can be arrogant, blind or stupid. Anything  but evil. And when the cumulative proof becomes overwhelming that our  representatives in the C.I.A. or the Agency for International  Development police program did in fact teach torture, we excuse  ourselves by vilifying the individual men.

Similarly, at a time when the CIA is waging an illegal, immoral, unregulated and always expanding drone execution program, the previous administration’s CIA kidnappers and torturers are protected from prosecution by the current administration, and leaked State Department cables reveal orders for U.S. diplomats to spy on United Nations officials, it is surreal that such homage is being paid to that very same organization by the so-called liberals of the Tinsel Town elite.

Upon winning his Best Director Golden Globe last month, Ben Affleck obsequiously praised the “clandestine service as well as the foreign service that is making sacrifices on behalf of the American people everyday [and] our troops serving over seas, I want to thank them very much,” a statement echoed almost identically by co-producer Grant Heslov when “Argo” later won Best Drama.

This comes as no surprise, considering Affleck had previously described “Argo” as “a tribute” to the “extraordinary, honorable people at the CIA” during an interview on Fox News.
The relationship between Hollywood and the military and intelligence arms of the U.S. government have long been cozy.  “When the CIA or the Pentagon says, ‘We’ll help you, if you play ball  with us,’ that’s favoring one form of speech over another. It becomes  propaganda,” David Robb, author of “Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies” told The Los Angeles Times. “The danger for filmmakers is that their product —  entertainment and information — ends up being government spin.”

Awarding “Argo” the Best Picture Oscar is like Barack Obama winning a Nobel Peace Prize: an undeserved accolade fawningly bestowed upon a dubious recipient based on a transparent fiction; an award for what never was and never would be and a decision so willfully naïve and grotesque it discredits whatever relevance and prestige the proceedings might still have had.*
So this Sunday night, when “Argo” has won that coveted golden statuette, it will be clear that we have yet again been blinded by the heavy dust of politics and our American mantra of hostility and resentment will continue to inform our decisions, dragging us closer and closer to the abyss.
***** ***** *****
* Yes, in this analogy, the equivalent of Henry Kissinger is obviously 2004’s dismal “Crash.”
*****
¹ The introduction of “Argo” is a dazzingly sloppy few minutes of caricatured history of Iran, full of Orientalist images of violent ancient Persians (harems and all), which gets many basic facts wrong.  In fact, it is shocking this intro made it to release as written and recorded.

Here are some of the problems:
1. The voiceover narration says, “In 1950, the people of Iran elected Mohammad Mossadegh, the secular democrat, Prime Minister.  He nationalized British and U.S. petroleum holdings, returning Iran’s oil to its people.”

Mossadegh was elected to the Majlis (Iranian Parliament) in 1944. He did not become Prime Minister until April 1951 and was not “elected by the people of Iran.” Rather, he was appointed to the position by the representatives of the Majlis.

Also, the United States did not have petroleum interests in Iran at the time.

2. After briefly describing the 1953 coup, the narrator says Britain and the United States “installed Reza Pahlavi as Shah.”

Wow. First, the Shah’s name was not Reza Pahlavi. That is his father’s (and son’s) name. Furthermore, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was not installed as Shah since had already been Shah of Iran since September 1941, after Britain and the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Iran and forced the abdication of his father, Reza Shah Pahlavi.
During the coup in 1953, the Shah fled to Baghdad, then Rome. After Mossadegh had been forced out, the Shah returned to the Peacock Throne.

This is not difficult information to come by, and yet the screenwriter and director of “Argo” didn’t bother looking it up. And guess what? Ben Affleck actually majored in Middle East Studies in college. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t graduate.

The rest of the brief intro, while mentioning the torture of SAVAK, glosses over the causes of the revolution, but lingers on the violence that followed.  As it ends, the words “Based on a True Story” appear on the screen. The first live action moment we see in “Argo” is of an American flag being burned.

So much for Affleck’s insistence that “Argo” is “not a political movie.”

Still, as Kevin B. Lee wrote in Slate last month, “This opening may very well be the reason why critics have given the film credit for being insightful and progressive—because nothing that follows comes close, and the rest of the movie actually undoes what this opening achieves.”

He continues,

Instead of keeping its eye on the big picture of revolutionary Iran, the film settles into a retrograde “white Americans in peril” storyline. It recasts those oppressed Iranians as a raging, zombie-like horde, the same dark-faced demons from countless other movies— still a surefire dramatic device for instilling fear in an American audience. After the opening makes a big fuss about how Iranians were victimized for decades, the film marginalizes them from their own story, shunting them into the role of villains. Yet this irony is overshadowed by a larger one: The heroes of the film, the CIA, helped create this mess in the first place. And their triumph is executed through one more ruse at the expense of the ever-dupable Iranians to cap off three decades of deception and manipulation.

And brilliantly concludes,

Looking at the runaway success of this film, it seems as if critics and audiences alike lack the historical knowledge to recognize a self-serving perversion of an unflattering past, or the cultural acumen to see the utterly ersatz nature of the enterprise: A cast of stock characters and situations, and a series of increasingly contrived narrow escapes from third world mobs who, predictably, are never quite smart enough to catch up with the Americans. We can delight all we like in this cinematic recycling act, but the fact remains that we are no longer living in a world where we can get away with films like this—not if we want to be in a position to deal with a world that is rising to meet us. The movies we endorse need to rise to the occasion of reflecting a new global reality, using a newer set of storytelling tools than this reheated excuse for a historical geopolitical thriller.

*****
UPDATE: February 25, 2013 – On the heels of Oscar Night’s unsurprising coda (made all the more bizarre by the inclusion of Michelle Obama, surrounded by awkward-looking military personnel, presenting the Best Picture to “Argo” from the White House, providing a deeply disturbing governmental imprimatur to the entire proceedings), The Los Angeles Times published a report Monday morning about how “Argo” is being perceived in Iran by Iranians themselves.
The conclusion is clear from the headline: ‘Argo’s’ Oscar gets a thumbs-down in Iran. Journalists Ramin Mostaghim and Patrick J. McDonnell quote several Iranians who have seen the movie, bootlegs of which are widely available, all of whom clearly have a better grasp on, not only the politics, but also the art (or lack thereof) of cinema itself.  “The perception that the film portrayed Iranians uniformly as bearded, violent fanatics rankled many who recall that Iran’s 1979 revolution had both secular and religious roots — and ousted a dictatorial monarch, the shah of Iran, reviled as a corrupt and brutal puppet of Washington,” Mostaghim and McDonnel explain.  Here’s what we hear from Iranians themselves:

“I am secular, atheist and not pro-regime but I think the film ‘Argo’ has distorted history and insulted Iranians,” said Hossain, a cafe owner worried about business because of customers’ lack of cash in a sanctions-battered economy. “For me, it wasn’t even a good thriller.”

“I did not enjoy seeing my fellow countrymen and women insulted,” said Farzaneh Haji, an educated homemaker and fan of romantic movies who was 18 at the time of the revolution. “The men then were not all bearded and fanatical. To be anti-American was a fashionable idea among young people across the board. Even non-bearded and U.S.-educated men and women were against American imperialism.”

“As an action film or thriller, the film was good, but it was not believable, especially the way the six Americans escaped from the airport,” said Farshid Farivar, 49, a Hollywood devotee, as he stretched his legs in an office where he does promotional work. “At any rate, it was an average film and did not deserve an Oscar.”

The piece ends with the reporters speaking with Abbas Abdi, one of the revolutionary students who planned the seizure of the American Embassy in 1979 and who spent some time in prison a decade ago for criticisms of the Iranian government:

In a brief telephone interview on Monday, Abdi said the Oscars had plummeted to the feeble level of Iran’s own Fajr Film Festival, not exactly one of the luminaries on the international movie awards circuit.
“The Oscars are now vulgar and have standards as low as our own film festival,” he said. “The Oscars deserve ‘Argo’ and ‘Argo’ deserves the Oscars.”

USA Today also has an Oscar follow-up entitled, “Tourists see a different Iran reality than ‘Argo’ image,” which details the warmth, generosity and hospitality of Iranians experienced by travelers when visiting Iran.

Related articles

• Iran dismisses “Argo” best picture Oscar (cbsnews.com)
• Argo’s Oscar and the failure of truth (mondoweiss.net)

Nazi Pope Resigns | The Pope, Pregnant Children, and Violence Against Girls and Women

The Pope, Pregnant Children, and Violence Against Girls and Women

by Soraya Chemaly

Pope Benedict XVI. (Vibe)

I find it strange that Pope Benedict XVI chose a week that will culminate in a global strike to protest violence against women toretire. And for health reasons no less. Orange smoke and irony and all that. On Thursday of this week, all over the globe, people will gather and dance for One Billion Rising, a day dedicated to striking against violence against women. As Eve Ensler, the founder of  V-Day which has organized the strike knows better than most, “violence against women is a global, patriarchal epidemic.“

Part of that epidemic is compulsory pregnancy. The Pope’s rationale is that his “age means he lacks strength to do job.” You could use the exact words to describe the nine-year old girl  whose family the Pope excommunicated for having a life-saving abortion after being raped and impregnated, with twins. It seems to me that her age meant she lacked strength to do the job, too. Actually, the job would have killed her.  These things happen. She and 16 million other pregnant adolescent girls a year, two million of whom are under age 15, strike me as 16 million good reasons to rise.

As does this girl: last Thursday a friend posted a story on Facebook, ”Dafne, 9-Year-Old Girl, Gives Birth To Baby Girl In Mexico.” Millions read and shared it over the weekend.  The link appeared with this caption: “The girl reportedly delivered a 5.7 pound baby by Caesarian section on January 27. She was 8-years old when she became pregnant.” Picky, picky feminist wordsmithy me thinks the caption should read, “The girl underwent a dangerous Caesarian surgery to delivery a 5.7 pound baby on January 27. She was 8-years old when a 17-year old boy forcibly inseminated her.”  Eight-year olds cannot consent to sex. They also cannot consent to having contraceptives implanted in their arms, but that’s now happened too. Just in case she gets ideas. On the same day, by coincidence, a 12-year old in Argentina gave birth to twins after she “fell pregnant.” Like she tripped by accident.

While nine is very young, girls this age having babies is not as rare as we’d like to think. The United States has more “teen” births than any industrialized nation, including girls as young as 10,  and our rates have been climbing.  However, 95 percent of teen births take place in poorer countries. According to W.H.O., “Half of all adolescent births occur in just seven countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria and the United States.” Many girls die because they do not have control over their bodies and their own reproduction.

Last year, after a 10-year old in Columbia gave birth, experts blithely explained that “a C-section delivery for such a young mother is not unusual.” Given global trends (researchers, armed with competing theories, have noted that the average age of the onset of menstruation for girls has been steadily declining for decades) we can reasonably expect to see instances involving younger and younger girls. Little girls, and women who find themselves raped and pregnant often “want to die.” It’s only one reason why raped people shouldn’t be forced to carry pregnancies to term. Guess what else, besides the Papacy, of course, is a “job or life with no retirement age?” Whereas the Pope is retiring to “go back to his priesthood,” girls who are raped, pregnant and give birth or die cannot go back to their childhoods.

This was the conclusion reached by a doctor last year in the case a mentally-disabled girl, 10-years old, in Kansas, who had to have an abortion after becoming pregnant as a result of rape.  The Kansas medical review board that revoked the girl’s doctor’s license.

In Mexico, authorities “don’t know if [the girl] is being entirely truthful.” Mainly because of her age, but interesting choice of words. Is she saying she was raped? Or is she saying she wasn’t? The article linked to doesn’t say which. Turns out she’s saying that the boy was her “boyfriend.” As one commenter speculated, the child “may have even had feelings for” her rapist.  Authorities, in a perverse game of “he said/she said,” acknowledge that they are looking for the missing father, a 17-year old boy, “to acquire his own account of what occurred between the two.” In case he reveals that she was wrong in her assessment and wants to make it clear that he raped her?

Besides, it’s probably her parents fault, not his. “The new mother is one of 11 children… and her parents were unable to watch her while they worked.”  It wouldn’t have mattered, as her mother explained that her daughter had sex willingly and she “didn’t report it because she was not aware” it was a crime.

“Who has 11 children, anyway?” many people wondered. This is perhaps the most important question because another way of asking it is, “Who insists on compulsory pregnancy that impoverishes millions?” Globally, historically, that has been been the Catholic Church, which continues to put girls and women at risk worldwide through bullying policies that ensure that they will be poor and unhealthy as the result of unregulated childbearing and rearing.  This is the same Church that excommunicated a mother and doctors for saving a 9-year old victim’s life by when they ended her pregnancy with twins. Guess who the Church didn’t excommunicate? That’s right,her rapist stepfather.

Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, the retiring Pope of the Catholic Church, should be tried in the International Criminal Court of law for human rights abuses, not only for being head of an organization that has shielded and enabled child rapists, but for the deadly and systematic global obstruction of girls’ and women’s rights to life and health.

In the hospital where Dafne gave birth, 25 percent of the births are to teenage girls.  She lived, but pregnancy is THE leading cause of death for girls ages 15 to 19 worldwide.  A thoroughlyunholy international alliance between American evangelicals and the Vatican has resulted in the death of millions. While President Obama quickly repealed the “global gag rule” put into place by George Bush, which prohibited even the mention of abortion where US funds were being used for women’s health care abroad, the Helms Amendment, which restricts the use of US aid for the purposes of providing abortions, even in conflict zones where rape is endemic, still stands. It is in no small measure the result of this policy and the influence of the Catholic church that 150 million women cannot get the birth control they need or safe abortions that would save their lives.  We know how to stem these deaths— family planning, including both.

Meanwhile, here in the US, where Catholic Bishops and friends refuse to comply with the law and religiously-inspired Republican legislators spew venomous mythologies about rape, race, poverty, and women, the rate of maternal mortality has DOUBLED in 25 years. We now rank 50^thin the world for pregnancy related morbidity.  In New York City, black girls and women, are eight times more likely than white ones to die from pregnancy related causes. The girls and women dying globally often our poorest, darkest, young girls, regardless of what country they live in.

“Someone’s 10 years old, and they were raped by their uncle and they understand that they’ve got a baby growing in their stomach and they don’t want that,” explains the doctor in the Kansas case, Dr. Ann Neuhaus. Here, we don’t excommunicate people, we harass them and terrorize them, in some cases, we kill them. Have you seen The Assassination of Dr. Tiller?  Abortion clinic violence wrought by anti-abortion groups is constant and debilitating to those who do this work. In what can only be described as an archaic witch hunt, Kansas revoked Neuhaus’ medical license last year.  They had to take a break from praying that the Violence Against Women Act won’t pass to do it.

When these religious beliefs conspire with political ambition, it’s girls and women who pay the highest price.  Consider the eight men who all voted to block passage of the Violence Against Women Act on Monday. Every woman in the Senate with the exception of Sen. Deb Fisher (R-NE) co-sponsored the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which is now being held up byconcerns  that largely hinge on the color of the people involved in cases of abuse and the color of the authorities with jurisdiction over them.  Which is interesting, because in the case of the young girl who gave birth last week, many people think it’s a “Mexican” problem. Hmm.

“What kind of person would sleep with an 8-year old?” (No one was sleeping.)  The kind that has created what Mia Fontaine recently called, “America’s Incest Problem.”  Fontaine rightfully and cogently suggests how it is possible that our institutional rape tolerances have their roots in family and household rape tolerances.  No one wants to model our government more on an abusive, father-knows-best, privacy of the family, patriarchal unit than conservative Republicans using proxies like “states rights” and “lying bitches.” It’s not a random coincidence that people who obstruct the reauthorization of VAWA are those who object to family planning and women’s abilities to control their own bodies and fates.

Just a little more than a month after Governor Rick Scott of Florida held a lovely party at the Governor’s Mansion celebrating the passage of four new abortion restriction laws in that state (a state dedicated to faith-based abstinence programs), a 14-year old girl stuffed a towel into her own mouth, gave birth in her bathroom, feared her parent’s reaction, strangled her newborn, hid it in a shoe box, was discovered and charged with murder as an adult. She faces life imprisonment. She apparently didn’t know she was pregnant when she went into labor.  Before you laugh and think that’s impossible, one study found that in one out of every 7,225 pregnanciesa woman is in this situation until the moment of birth.  There are many reasons a woman might be in “pregnancy denial.”

As in Mexico, no one knows where the boy or man involved is either. He does not face murder, nor do the parents, teachers, state legislators or others who failed her.  The girl may, like many kids in abstinence-only situations, not even have known how she got pregnant.  Even if she did she may have taken this to heart:  As one abstinence teacher put it in a Texas classroom, “Go ahead and use a condom. You’ll still be known as a slut.”  If her tragic case isn’t a clear enough example of girl hatred, degradation and misogynistic abuse wrought by a system of oppression, I don’t know what is. And she’s white. And in a wealthy country.

For girls and women, the Pope represents an inconvenient morality.

Related articles

• Holy smokes! Goodbye Pope Benedict, but hello to plenty of movie pontiffs (timesunion.com)
• The Pope, Pregnant Children, and Violence Against Girls and Women (my.firedoglake.com)
• What is One Billion Rising? Founder Eve Ensler explains (guardian.co.uk)

Obama Murders George W. Bush’s Dog In Cold Blood

Obama Murders George W. Bush’s Dog In Cold Blood

 Author:   Bruce Myron Danus

Today, Flags will be flown at half-mast. It is a day that will live in infamy. Horrible crimes have been commited all across America, yet none stands out more clearly than the fact that our “President” is a cold-blooded murderer.

That’s right, “President” Barrack Obama has gone into a tribal rage and murdered Barney Bush, the beloved former First Dog. The picture above clearly shows Obama going into his crazy Sub-Saharan Tribal hunting rage and murdering Barney, fortunately, the Secret Service was able to rescue Barney away from Obama before he turned that poor animal into a meal fit for a Kenyan because we all know that Obama has eaten many dogs in the past. You can not deny photographic proof.

While this is possibly the most tragic event to have happened since the Chinese bombed Pearl Harbor, it does have a happy side to it. “President” Obama is currently working on banning all guns from the law-abiding citizens of America, allowing only illegal Mexicans and sin-skinned gang bangers/cracked coke cane and marijuanas dealers to own them. Now, however, we have proof that guns are only a problem when they are operated by the darker sub-species of humanity. Now we need to petition the Senate to ban all non-whites from owning anything that can be used as a weapon. If even the “President” of our great Country can’t control his tribal rage, and will murder an innocent creature in cold-blood, we must protect ourselves against this threat.

Senator August Weisz has already added a bill in the Idaho State Senate to ban non-Whites from owning weapons and putting ridiculously large wheels on any vehicle not made for off-roading. The rest of the Nation needs to follow his lead, or this Great Country will fall. This is the thanks that we get for bringing these types to America, giving them jobs and a place to live, and taking them from the jungles where they had to fear for their lives at every moment due to lion attacks. I guess the old saying is true, “You can take the tribal types from the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the tribal types”.

We must work together to end this senseless violence and pass this new law. Join with me to ban all Non-Whites from owning weapons. This should actually be a Worldwide law, but we will need to start with America, because the rest of the World follows our lead.

God bless you all, and have a safe day.

ARE UFOs JUST A CIA CON-TRICK?

ARE UFOs JUST A CIA CON-TRICK?

MIRAGE MEN BY MARK PILKINGTON

By HARRY RITCHIE

The way of things to come?: Or are UFOs just a CIA conspiracy?

Ufology is a faith that includes many beliefs, from the oddly popular one about Nazi aliens who live under the ground to David Icke’s contention that the Duke of Edinburgh is in fact a shape-changing, blood-sucking alien lizard.

But here’s the core of the faith – that some UFO sightings and encounters are real, the U.S. government knows all about these extraterrestrial visitations, and they’ve mounted a huge conspiracy to keep the aliens secret and us in the dark.

This book threatens to demolish that faith. Because here Mark Pilkington sets out to prove that the U.S. government really has been conducting a top-secret UFO conspiracy – only one designed not to hide UFOs but publicise them, fuelling and even creating the major UFO myths. Flying saucers, alien abductions, crash-landed spacecraft, secret underground bases in New Mexico – they were all created by the U.S. government.

As Mark Pilkington immediately acknowledges, that might sound only marginally less ridiculous and emptily melodramatic than claiming that the Royal Family are actually alien reptiles. But he begins to build a pretty convincing case that U.S. agencies really have been conducting just such a long-running disinformation campaign to promote UFOs. And it does make sense.

UFOs make the perfect cover story to hide experimental aircraft from prying Russian eyes as well as those of their own citizens. Ufologists are a particular pest to U.S. Air Force security, for ever trying to root around their secret projects and hack into their systems – they need to be led up various extraterrestrial garden paths and far away from finding out about actual highly-classified experiments in weaponry or aircraft.

The Roswell Incident: were alien bodies really found?

Pilkington’s theory would certainly explain why so many of the key UFO sightings and events happen near U.S. Air Force bases – such as Roswell, home of the famous ‘incident’ when an alien craft was supposed to have crash-landed, with a couple of aliens aboard.

And why so many extraterrestrial spaceships seem to behave like the pilotless drones and stealth aircraft developed by the U.S. Air Force. And why flying saucers should first turn up at the start of the Cold War, just when the U.S. Air Force was beginning to experiment with exotic new types of flight.

According to Pilkington, the campaign to promote the idea of UFOs was masterminded in the Fifties by the head of the CIA, Allen Welsh Dulles. More recently, many of the leaked fake documents and bogus stories seem to have come from the U.S. Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI).

One victim of fake UFO documents evidently supplied by the American government was Timothy Good, whose international bestseller about supposed contact with aliens, Above Top Secret, included completely bogus papers planted in the American National Archives.

Another is George Adamski, an early fan of flying saucers whose bestselling books in the Fifties described his meetings with a chap called Orthon from Venus and his own trips in flying saucers.

I came across one of Adamski’s mad books in my local public library when I was a boy, and I remember being disturbed and perplexed – this was a book, a proper printed book, so all this stuff about going to Venus and meeting Venusians … it had to be real, didn’t it? Now, it seems Adamski was an innocent, eager dupe and that Orthon and the spaceships weren’t figments of his silly or venal imagination but real people and vehicles supplied by the CIA.

Fake spaceships, fake aliens, fake documents and even a fake underground alien base – it might all seem unduly elaborate and indeed expensive.

But the Americans certainly had the money for it, budgeting billions of dollars for the CIA’s black arts.

The Pentagon already had a good bash at that themselves, sponsoring a recruitment film of the Seventies, which claimed that UFOs were real and which included footage of a flying saucer landing at a U.S. Air Force base and a couple of aliens disembarking.

And that, you might think, is the Pentagon bang to rights. But at this point in the book, things begin to get even more complicated.

An AFOSI agent takes Pilkington aside and confides the real ‘truth’ – yes, there is a huge government conspiracy to produce a smokescreen of nonsense about UFOS, of course; however, it’s designed to hide not supersonic test-flights but … real UFOs.

Because, you see, by offering up a series of scary stories about UFO invasions and alien abductions, this will gradually desensitise the public to the eventual truth that the U.S. government really has been in contact with aliens.

Argh! Clearly, obviously, surely, this is more hokum, an attempt to exploit Pilkington with a slightly refined version of the same old stories – but he has previous as a Ufology believer and he can’t quite shake off the thrill of thinking that maybe, just maybe, an alien spaceship did crash-land at Roswell. That’s typical of a book that isn’t quite the rigorous hard-hitting investigation it could and should have been. Pilkington just about manages to hold on to his scepticism but ends with a spiel about nobody knowing for sure what the truth can be and Ufology being a murky, grey area.

No, no, no. There’s nothing grey about it. Either we have been visited by aliens and the American government is covering this up or we haven’t and it isn’t.

Either that debris at Roswell was part of a crashed flying saucer or it came from a test-flight that went wrong or a knackered high-altitude weather balloon. Either the Duke of Edinburgh is a blood-sucking alien reptile seeded from a distant star system or he is a human from Greece. So. What do you reckon? Great credit to Pilkington, though, for revealing who Orthon really was/ those aliens really are.

Related articles

• The Truth Behind UFO Sightings and the U.S. Air Force (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• ‘Star Trek’ Prototype Tractor Beam Developed By Scientists (huffingtonpost.com)
• Our Aliens Are Better Than Your Aliens (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)

Religious Fanatics | Theist Stampede Kills

Stampede Kills 10 at ‘Largest Gathering in History’

MASSIVE GATHERING ATTRACTS UP TO 30M DEVOTEES TO BATHE

By the Associated Press

(AP) – At least 10 people were killed and a dozen more injured today after a stampede broke out at a train station in the northern Indian town where millions of devout Hindus gathered for a religious festival dubbed the“largest human gathering in history.” As many as 20 people are feared dead, and some 30 others injured. News reports said the large crowds caused a section of a footbridge at the station to collapse leading to the accident.

News reports said tens of thousands of people were at the train station at the time. Television showed large crowds pushing and jostling at the train station as policemen struggled to restore order. “There was complete chaos. There was no doctor or ambulance for at least two hours after the accident,” an eyewitness told NDTV news channel. An estimated 30 million devotees were expected to take a dip at the Sangam, the confluence of three rivers—the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati—today, one of the holiest bathing days of the Kumbh Mela, which lasts 55 days.

1 of 12

Hindu devotees take a holy dip at ‘Sangam’, the confluence of Hindu holy rivers Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati, during the Maha Kumbh festival at Allahabad, India, Sunday, Feb. 10, 2013.

(Rajesh Kumar Singh)

Related articles

• Millions of Hindus bathe in Ganges to cleanse sins (sacbee.com)
• In pictures: The Maha Kumbh Mila (gulfnews.com)

Justice Department Paper on Drones Leaked

An Air Force RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle as reported by ABC News.

NBC News reportedly obtained and subsequently published a previously confidential Justice Department white paper concerning the use of deadly drone strikes on American citizens. The paper addresses guidelines and circumstances for executing such strikes.

Human rights advocates are concerned the guidelines are poorly defined and leave far too much room for interpretation. This creates a situation, they claim, conducive to ill advised and otherwise unlawful assassinations and executions. Concern is also being voiced that officials are publicly averting from discussion of such loosely defined procedures while implementing their use behind closed doors.

Contrastingly, those who support the policies outlined in the paper argue that such measures are required in order to enable the Justice Department to act in timely and effective manners. Severe circumstances call for severe measures, they suggest.

Meanwhile, John Brennan, nominated by President Obama to direct the Central Intelligence Agency, will soon appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss his nomination. Brennan has acted as Obama’s chief counterterrorism consultant while serving as Deputy National Security Advisor and Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. He is credited with designing what have come to be known as US drone assassination programs. The drone projects are reported to be controversial and complex, largely consisting of circumstances unknown to the American public.

Related articles

• Obama admin: Drones can target Americans abroad based on one official’s opinion (hotair.com)
• Feinstein demands more details on armed drone strikes against US citizens (thehill.com)
• EXCLUSIVE: Justice Department memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans (amresolution.com)
• DOJ Drones Paper: Obama’s Second-Term Cabinet, Agenda Faces New Scrutiny (huffingtonpost.com)
• Memo justifies drone kills even with patchy intelligence (reuters.com)
• Leaked DOJ Memo Justifies Drone Strikes on US Citizens (gizmodo.com)
• Drone strikes legal case revealed (bbc.co.uk)
• Legal reasoning behind drone strikes revealed for the first time (thetimes.co.uk)

Fatwa Fear | Islamic Fanatics Attack All-Girl Rock Band

Kashmir all-girl rock band gives up singing after fatwa

by FP Staff

ALSO SEE

• Kashmiri all-girls band faces threats online, CM orders probe

Pragash Band, an all girls rock band from Kashmir have decided to stop singing, after receiving a string of death and rape threats on their social media pages, as well as on their mobile phones.

The all-girls band, which came to limelight in late December last year after their performance at the annual ‘Battle of the Bands’ competition, had defied the convention by stepping into the male-dominated field of music.

They since received abusive and hate messages on their Facebook page, including from extremists who said the teenage girls should be raped and then drowned. The message read, “Post this status in advance. The three band girls raped in Jammu and thrown in river.”‘

Screengrab from CNN-IBN

The Times of India quoted Adnan Mattoo, owner of Band Inn, a musical academy where the girls trained, as saying that their talent is ‘astonishing’.

‘They are just 15 and too young to face such abuse.  They are hurt. They cried, but I tried to convince them to continue”, he told the newspaper.

The girls troubles were only compounded after the Grandmufti of Jammu and Kashmir Bashiruddin Ahmad termed singing as “un-Islamic” and asked them to abandon it.

The Grandmufti issued a decree, terming singing as un-Islamic.

“I have said that singing is not in accordance with Islamic teachings,” Ahmad told PTI.

The cleric said he advised the members of Pragash Band to “abandon” singing as it is against Islamic teachings and will not help them in playing any constructive role in the society.

“Society cannot be built or developed by doing un-Islamic acts like singing. I have advised these girls, and other Muslims as well, to stay within the limits of modesty as prescribed for them,” he added.

However, support has been pouring in from all corners on social networking sites for the band and Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has also backed them.

Omar came out in support of the girls yesterday saying police will probe the threats.

“I hope these talented young girls will not let a handful of morons silence them,” he said.

Related articles

• Kashmir girl band quits after fatwa (straitstimes.com)
• Kashmir girl band breaks up after threats (miamiherald.com)
• Kashmir girl band quits after fatwa (arabtimesonline.com)
• Fatwa issued against Kashmiri all-girl band #WTFnews #Vaw #Moralpolicing (kashmirsolidaritymumbai.wordpress.com)
• Kashmir’s all-girl group gives up (bbc.co.uk)
• Curtains down for Kashmir’s all-girl band (thehindu.com)
• Kashmir’s all-girl band gets support from chief minister Omar Abdullah: Who said what (ndtv.com)
• Case against online abusers of Kashmir girl band (thehindu.com)

5-Year-Old Girl Allegedly Raped In Haredi City, Police Met With Wall Of Silence

5-Year-Old Girl Allegedly Raped In Haredi City, Police Met With Wall Of Silence

An anonymous complaint to the Israel Police has reportedly sparked fears that a five-year-old girl was raped in the haredi Wast Bank city of Modiin Illit last week, but haredim have refused to cooperate with the police investigation and neither the girl or her alleged rapist has been located.

5-Year-Old Girl Allegedly Raped In Haredi City, Police Met With Wall Of Silence
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com

An anonymous complaint to the Israel Police has reportedly sparked fears that a five-year-old girl was raped in the haredi Wast Bank city of Modiin Illit last week, but haredim have refused to cooperate with the police investigation and neither the girl or her alleged rapist has been located, Ynet reports.

The girl reportedly received medical treatment, but members of the local haredi medical organization have also refused to cooperate with police.

Despite this lack of cooperation, the town is reportedly rife with rumors about the rape.

Police warned several haredim that they would be charged with obstruction of justice if they continue to refuse to cooperate.

Sometime in the past two weeks a man lured a five-year-old girl he saw on the street to a storeroom at a nearby synagogue. He allegedly sexually abused the girl for two hours.

The girl was allegedly treated by haredi medics and brought to a hospital in central Israel. But police could not find any evidence that a five-year-old girl had actually been treated at that hospital, and at least one of the hospital workers who were questioned by police denied having treated the child.

“Everyone is shocked. Some rabbis even discussed it over the weekend… One of them urged us to keep children safe and report anything of the sort. Nobody wants to protect such criminals, but parents know that in the haredi public the one who will be tarnished by this is the girl. She will not be able to get married and this will ruin her entire future. I have reason to believe that (her parents) took care of her and probably also took her to therapy, but they wouldn’t complain, so everyone who knew about the case simply respected their wishes,” a haredi resident told Ynet.

Other residents believe the rape never happened.

But another resident told Ynet that he had personally been order not to cooperate with police or the media.

[Hat Tip: Jonny.]

Related articles

• The ‘Tznius Chase’: Is This Photo Immodest? (jewishpress.com)
• Woman verbally abused by haredi bus passengers (theuglytruth.wordpress.com)
• Haredi Man Arrested For Allegedly Sexually Assaulting Hospitalized 11-Year-Old Girl (failedmessiah.typepad.com)
• Haredi Rabbi Arrested On Child Rape Charges (failedmessiah.typepad.com)
• 5-Year-Old Girl Allegedly Raped In Haredi City, Police Met With Wall Of Silence (failedmessiah.typepad.com)

Boy in the bunker: new details emerge about ‘menacing’ captor Jimmy | Alabama hostage standoff enters sixth day

Boy in the bunker: new details emerge about  ‘menacing’ captor Jimmy

Alabama hostage standoff enters sixth day

The hostage standoff in Midland City continues, as the town prepares to bury  the school bus driver killed by the suspected gunman.

As an Alabama stand-off and hostage drama enters a sixth day, more details  have emerged about the suspect at the centre, with neighbours and officials  painting a picture of an isolated man with few friends and no close family.

Authorities say Jim Lee Dykes, 65 – a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War  known as Jimmy to neighbours – gunned down a school bus driver and then abducted  a five-year-old boy from the bus, taking him to an underground bunker on his  rural property.

    He doesn’t like law enforcement or the government telling him what to do.  He’s just a loner.The driver, 66-year-old Charles Poland, was being buried on Monday  (AEDT).

Menacing … Ronda Wilbur, a neighbour of  Jimmy Lee Dykes, points as she  speaks with the media about encounters she’s had with him at the scene of the  shooting and hostage taking in Midland City, Alabama. Photo:  Reuters

Dykes, described as a loner who railed against the government, lives up a  dirt road north of Dothan in the south-east corner of the state. His home is  just off the main road north to the state capital of Montgomery, about 130km  away.

Advertisement

The FBI said in a statement that authorities continue to have an open line of  communication with Dykes and they planned to deliver to the bunker additional  comfort items such as food, toys and medicine. They also said Dykes was making  the child as comfortable as possible.

Republican Rep. Steve Clouse, who represents the Midland City area, said he  visited the boy’s mother on Thursday and she was “hanging on by a  thread.”
“Everybody is praying with her for the boy,” he  said.
Clouse said the mother told him that the boy has Asperger’s  syndrome, an autism-like disorder, as well as attention deficit hyperactivity  disorder, or ADHD.

Along the red dirt road … A Google satellite image of Dykes’ property,  where a boy is being held in an underground bunker. Photo: CNN  screengrab

Government records and interviews with neighbours indicate that Dykes grew up  in the Dothan area and joined the navy, serving on active duty from 1964 to  1969. His record shows several awards, including the Vietnam Service Medal and  the Good Conduct Medal. During his service, Dykes was trained in aviation  maintenance.

Later, Dykes lived in Florida, where he worked as a surveyor and a long-haul  truck driver although it’s unclear for how long.

He had some scrapes with the law there, including a 1995 arrest for improper  exhibition of a weapon. The misdemeanour was dismissed. He also was arrested for  marijuana possession in 2000.

Tense … Authorities, including the FBI, wait at the scene. Photo:  AP

He returned to Alabama about two years ago, moving onto the rural tract about  90 metres from his nearest neighbours, Michael Creel and his father, Greg.

Dykes was known around the neighbourhood as a menacing figure who neighbours  said once beat a dog to death with a lead pipe, threatened to shoot children for  setting foot on his property and patrolled his yard at night with a flashlight  and a firearm.

Michael Creel said Dykes had an adult daughter, but the two lost touch years  ago.

Jim Lee Dykes, 65. Photo: Reuters

Another neighbour, Jimmy Davis Jnr, told CNN he had been shown around the  underground bunker by Dykes himself about nine months ago.

”He told me it was a storm shelter,” Mr Davis Jnr said.

“It actually had cinder blocks going down as steps and it was covered up with  two sheets of plywood nailed together with hinges and stuff as a door to open to  it.”

Mr Davis Jnr said Dykes had also buried a PVC pipe in the ground leading to  the bunker, so he could hear cars and people approaching from above.

The shelter was about a metre underground and negotiators were speaking to  Dykes through the pipe, James Arrington, police chief of the neighboring town of  Pinckard said.
“He will have to give up sooner or later because  (authorities) are not leaving,” Arrington said. “It’s pretty small, but he’s  been known to stay in there eight days.

Chief Arrington confirmed that Dykes held anti-government views, as described  by multiple neighbours: “He’s against the government – starting with Obama on  down.”
“He doesn’t like law enforcement or the government telling him  what to do,” he said. “He’s just a loner.”

AP, with theage.com.au

 

Related articles

• Boy in the bunker: new details emerge about ‘menacing’ captor Jimmy (smh.com.au)
• VIDEO: US child still hostage in bunker (bbc.co.uk)
• Details emerge about man at center of US standoff (kens5.com)
• Negotiators talking to Ala. captor through pipe (cnsnews.com)
• Top News: Alabama sheriff: 5-year-old hostage gets chips, toys as standoff enters 6th day (cnn.com)

Chris Wallace to LaPierre: You’re “ridiculous” (updated with video)

Chris Wallace to LaPierre: You’re “ridiculous” (updated with video)

Posted by coolelegans

Just to show how much LaPierre has been boxed into the fringe, Fox News host Chris Wallace destroys him on his show, watch the whole thing, it’s great!

Wallace pointed out that the president’s children face a larger threat than most.”Tell that to the people at Newtown,” LaPierre replied, referring to the town where an armed shooter killed 20 young children at an elementary school in December.

“Do you really think that the president’s children are the same kind of target as every schoolchild in America?” Wallace asked. “It’s ridiculous, and you know it, sir.”

For LaPierre to justify his abhorrent political ad by bringing up the children of Newtown is just despicable, and Chris Wallace rightly put him in his place.LaPierre also lies about gun registry and Chris Wallace smacks him down:

He predicted a universal gun registry is next — a measure that, as Wallace reminded him, has not been proposed.”Forgive me, sir, but you take something that is here and you say it’s going to go all the way over there,” Wallace said. “There’s no indication — I mean, I can understand your saying that’s the threat, but there’s nothing that anyone in the administration has said that indicates they’re going to have a universal registry.”

“And Obamacare wasn’t a tax until they needed it to be a tax,” he said.

The argument that Obamacare is a tax was made, primarily, by the conservative Justice John Roberts, so LaPierre is using a conservative argument to show that Obama is a liar. My mind is officially blown at this man’s insane logic. Many Kossacks have also pointed out that Obamacare has nothing to do with guns, so now he is just reduced to parroting Tea Party talking points. And look at how fast Wallace points out

“well it was the supreme court that said that [Obamacare is a tax]”.

Chris Wallace is not having this nonsense on his show! And all LaPierre can do, is ignore that statement, since he doesn’t have a retort, and say  “I don’t think you can trust these people.” He then tries to pivot to his talking points, but Wallace says “forgive me sir, I’m going to conduct this interview”. Wow. Brilliant stuff!When, Chris Wallace says that Obama “is not taking away shotguns”, LaPierre, lies and says that the Feinstein bill does include such a clause. NO ONE is taking away shot guns or hand guns. This man is LYING.

And finally, offered without comment, since it’s been beaten into the ground:

“If you limit the American public’s access to semi-automatic technology, you limit their ability to survive,” LaPierre said.

But I would also like to point out that with main stream conservatives like Chris Wallace distancing themselves from this nonsense, we may be winning the debate.

Related articles

• Chris Wallace To Wayne LaPierre: ‘That’s Ridiculous And You Know It, Sir’ (alan.com)
• Chris Wallace, the boss would like to see you now. (jaypinho.com)
• Watch Video of NRA’s LaPierre in Testy Exchange With Fox News Host (boiseweekly.com)
• NRA VP Wayne LaPierre is Taken Completely Off Guard in Heated Fox Interview (VIDEO) (tribuneofthepeople.com)
• Fox News’ Chris Wallace Explodes At NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre: ‘That’s Ridiculous, Sir, And You Know It’ (businessinsider.com)
• LaPierre: Ban assault weapons and ‘you limit the ability to survive’ (rawstory.com)
• Chris Wallace Owns NRA President: That’s Ridiculous and You Know it, Sir! (thehollywoodgossip.com)

The Truth Behind UFO Sightings and the U.S. Air Force

The Truth Behind UFO Sightings and the U.S. Air Force

‘Mirage Men’ author Mark Pilkington discusses how the military used UFO stories to keep aircraft projects secret

By   Alex Kingsbury

Are UFOs a mirage, conjured up by the Air Force to obscure classified flight projects? In part, argues Mark Pilkington, a British journalist and filmmaker who writes about society’s oddities. In Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs, he makes a persuasive case that much UFO-logy canon was started or encouraged by the government trying to conceal Cold War military projects. He recently chatted with U.S. News about the origins and effects of UFO mythology around the world. Excerpts:

How has the UFO story been shaped by the government?

These ideas do generate themselves to some extent, but there is evidence that they were specifically shaped in some instances. I don’t think this is some long-running grand conspiracy, I just think that the UFO story has been deployed and used at times when it was convenient. Just about everything that is popularly believed about UFOs has been exploited, shaped, and, at times, generated by people working for the U.S. Air Force and the intelligence community. The idea that UFOs crashed on U.S. soil, that the U.S. government was harboring and hiding UFO technology, that it was denying its citizens the right to know that aliens have come here and visited—all these things have been deliberately seeded into the culture.

[See who the defense aerospace industry gives the most in campaign contributions to.]

Why would the government “seed” these ideas?

UFO stories are used as a cover story for the flight-testing of experimental and clandestine aircraft. If you look at the places where UFO sightings are frequent, they are also the places where the military tests its experimental aircraft. For the first few years that UFOs circulated in popular culture after World War II, the public didn’t talk about UFOs as being alien. Rather, they were talked about as advanced U.S. or Russian aircraft.

How long has this been going on?

Much of it dates to the first flights of the U2 spy plane back in the 1950s. The CIA’s in-house journal had a story about 10 years ago that said that one of the functions of Project Blue Book [the official Air Force investigation into UFOs] was to monitor how visible the U2 was to people on the ground. Someone would see what they thought was a UFO and then the Air Force would send someone around to talk with them. Of course, the Air Force would have a schedule of the U2 flights and be able to tell if what the person saw was indeed a U2. By talking to all these supposed UFO witnesses, the CIA could assess how visible the U2 was.

Were the Soviets a target for this?

There are other, more subtle motivations from the U.S. side. One is the idea of a super weapon. If unfriendly nations believe that you harbor alien technology that you have integrated into your own weapons systems and aircraft, then they have good reason to be afraid.

[See photos of space missions.]

What happened in 1952 over Washington, D.C.?

The first incident took place early one morning in July. It was reported extensively in the newspapers that a number of unknown objects appeared on radar screens around Washington. Now, it looks very plausible to me that the Washington incident was a demonstration of a technology from the Defense Department, known as Project Palladium, which allowed the operator to project radar blips onto other radar screens. Later on, the technology became very sophisticated to the point where you could change the shape of the blip and its speed and so forth. We go on in the book at length about the evidence that suggests that the Washington radar incident was a planned operation.

Do UFO fanatics know it may be they’re duped?

Certainly. I’m not the first person to tell them this. UFO lore has transcended to what has become a religious matter for many of those involved. We talk to a man called Bill Moore, who in the 1980s was one of the most respected people in the UFO community. He was co-opted by Air Force intelligence to act as a mole passing information to the Air Force about what people were researching and to pass disinformation back into the UFO community. When he came clean about all this at a UFO convention in 1989, people ran out crying into the hallways. But what happened to the larger UFO lore? Nothing.

Is this a worldwide phenomenon?

The UFO story is a global one, but I think it has its origins in American culture. Not long ago there was a major UFO wave in Iran. Not surprisingly, all the UFO incidents happened near the country’s known nuclear sites. Initially it was odd lights in the sky, then over a few days, the stories started getting more dramatic. They were describing small robots hovering in the skies. I read an interesting article recently that described the impact of the drone use over Pakistan and Afghanistan. The villagers describe the drones as being spiritual beings with a life of their own that live in bedrooms in space and come to feed on women and children. It is fascinating to watch, because I feel like I’ve seen it all before. It will be different for every nation, as they develop. Perhaps every nation will get the aliens it deserves.

Related articles

• ‘Star Trek’ Prototype Tractor Beam Developed By Scientists (huffingtonpost.com)

Priests and Other Catholic Sadists | “Black-collar crime” — List of names

“Black-collar crime” — List of names
Here are some Catholic priests and religious brothers in Australian cases, researched by Broken Rites

---

Main Page Contact Us Our top stories Black Collar Crime Current court cases What’s new Donations		This page of Catholic cases was compiled by Broken Rites Australia researchers and was last updated on 24 Janauary 2013. Broken Rites Australia helps victims of church-related sex abuse to obtain justice. Our complete database of Broken Rites cases is NOT available on the internet. On this web page, we give merely a few examples of Broken Rites cases. This webpage is divided into sections: A: Criminal court cases B: Out-of-court civil cases C: Currently before the criminal courts D: Church people failed to help the police E: Court cases ending with no conviction F: Lay teachers in church schools If a particular offender is not listed on this webpage, this does not mean that this person is not an offender. Many church-abuse victims remain silent for years or forever. Only a few victims have consulted the police; some victims eventually contact Broken Rites; and some victims (often unwisely) merely tip-off the church’s internal Professional Standards Office (also called “Towards Healing”), whose main purpose is to protect the church and the perpetrator. It is a wise move to contact Broken Rites first, for advice about options for obtaining justice. Section A: Criminal prosecutions, researched by Broken Rites Here are some examples of criminal prosecutions, researched by Broken Rites Australia (since 1993), involving Catholic priests and religious brothers. Broken Rites Australia gives support to victims, either before or after the prosecutions. The actual court proceedings are handled by specialist police from sex-crime investigation squads. This list is confined to Broken Rites cases. Fr Michael Aulsebrook In the Melbourne County Court on 22 August 2011, Father Michael Scott Aulsebrook (a member of the Catholic religious order Salesians of Don Bosco) was sentenced to two years’ jail (with 15 months suspended, serving nine months behind bars) for indecent assaults of a boy, aged 12, at Salesian College “Rupertswood” (a boarding school) in Sunbury, Victoria, in 1983. This boy was not Aulsebrook’s only victim. See more from Broken Rites here. Fr Wilfred Baker After action by Broken Rites, Father Wilfred James Baker (also known as Father Bill Baker or Fr Billy Baker), Melbourne archdiocese, was sentenced to 4 years jail (eligible for parole after 2 years) for offences against boys. See the Broken Rites story here. Fr Charlie Barnett Charles Alfred Barnett, who ministered for the Vincentian order in Catholic parishes around Australia for 20 years until the mid-1990s, was sentenced in South Australia in August 2010 to at least four years for sexual offences against boys in that state. He is also facing complaints in other Australian states. See more from Broken Rites here. Father Roger Michael Bellemore This Marist priest was sentenced in Tasmania in 2006 to five years’ jail (with parole after 3 years) for offences against schoolboys. After he had spent nine months in jail, the appeal court granted him a re-trial. In February 2008, another jury found Bellemore guilty and he was sentenced to four years’ jail.  See the Broken Rites story here. Br Robert Best Christian Brother Robert Charles Best (also known as Brother Bob Best) was convicted in Melbourne in 1996 for sexual offences committed against one of his schoolboy victims. On 8 August 2011, after being convicted again for multiple offences (including buggery) against some more of his victims, he was sentenced (at the age of 70) to 14 years and nine months (eligible for parole after serving 11 years and three months). See the Broken Rites story here. Warren Booth     Warren Douglas Booth was training to become a priest when he sexually assaulted a 12-year-old boy in the showers at a public pool in Campbelltown in Sydney’s south-west. Booth was sentenced in 1996 to 12 months jail. Fr Tom Brennan, Newcastle, NSW In August 2012, police charged Father Thomas Brennan (of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese) with 10 counts of sexually assaulting a young male while Brennan was the parish priest (in the early 1980s) at Waratah, in Newcastle, north of Sydney. He was also charged with having failed to report the sex-crimes (in the 1970s) of another priest who was under Brennan’s supervision. Brennan was ordered to appear in court on 25 September 2012 on all these charges but he failed to appear and he died five days later. See more from Broken Rites here. Fr Desmond Brown Father Desmond Joseph Brown, Redemptorist order, Victoria and NSW,  non-custodial sentence, for indecent assault of a female. Fr Rex Brown Father Paul Rex Brown (once a senior priest in the Lismore Catholic diocese in New South Wales) was convicted in Queensland in 1996 for possessing child pornography. Police could have charged Brown with serious child sexual-assault offences but he chose to plead guilty to the lesser charge of child pornography. See the Broken Rites full story here. Fr Neil Byrne In Brisbane on 7 March 2012, the Very Rev Dr Neil Joseph Byrne was sentenced to nine months in jail (suspended for two years) after he pleaded guilty to possessing and making child-exploitation material. As a lecturer in a seminary, Byrne has been involved in the training of Australian Catholic priests. See more from Broken Rites here. Gerard Vincent Byrnes Gerard Byrnes (born in 1948) originally trained as a Christian Brother before becoming a lay teacher in Catholic schools in Queensland and New South Wales. On 4 October 2010, he was jailed for 8-10 years after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting girls at a Catholic primary school in Toowoomba, Queensland. He was the school’s designated “child protection officer”. See more from Broken Rites here. Brian Cairns, former Christian Brother Brian Dennis Cairns taught primary students (as Brother Cairns) at Catholic schools in Brisbane until 1974. Then, after becoming a lay teacher, he taught at other Brisbane Catholic schools (as Mister Cairns) until 1984. In 1985, he was jailed for seven years for committing serious sexual offences against schoolboys over several years. Brian Dennis Cairns’s name has sometimes been mis-printed as “Brian David Cairns”. See more from Broken Rites here. Br Greg Carter, Marist Brother Gregory James Carter (born 4 July 1957) was sentenced in Queensland in 1997 to 18 months jail (with release after six months served) after pleading guilty to multiple charges of indecent treatment of a 15-year-old boy who was a boarder at St Augustine’s Marist Brothers’ College in Cairns, north Queensland. See our story here. Fr Richard Cattell Father Richard St John Cattell, of the Parramatta diocese, NSW, was sentenced in 1994 to 3 years jail (2 years minimum), after pleading guilty to five counts of indecently assaulting a boy. The boy had gone to Cattell to complain about having been molested by a teacher. Cattell, who was the vicar-general of the diocese, was the administrator whose role it was to receive  complaints about sexual abuse in the diocese. See more about Cattell in a Broken Rites story about the Parramatta diocese here. Fr Peter Chalk This priest (a member of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart religious order) ministered in Melbourne in the 1970s (around Croydon, Park Orchards and Warrandyte). Melbourne police later accumulated evidence which could enable them to prosecute Father Peter Gerard Chalk for sexually abusing children (as young as 12) in Melbourne. But Chalk’s religious superiors allowed him to stay out of Australia (and out of reach of the Australian police), working in Japan, where he changed his surname to a Japanese one. In 2010, Chalk suddenly died (in Japan), thus closing the Melbourne police file. See more here. Br Bob Chambers, Queensland The Brisbane Courier Mail has reported that in the Brisbane District Court on 10 October 2002, Christian Brother Robert George Chambers (then aged 60) pleaded guilty to assault occasioning bodily harm on a boy, aged 12, in 1968 while Chambers was teaching at  St Joseph’s Christian Brothers College in Rockhampton, central Queensland. Brother Chambers, who was standing at a window in the Brothers’ residence, fired an air rifle at the boy in the school yard, hitting him twice in the back of his legs as the boy drank from a water fountain. Judge Julie Dick placed Chambers on a $100, six-month good-behaviour bond. The prosecutor said that the Crown had elected not to proceed with another charge against Chambers. In the 1980s, Brother Chambers taught at Ignatius Park College in Townsville. Br David Christian Marist Brother David Austin Christian (born 3 December 1942), formerly principal of Marist Brothers’ Newman College, Perth, Western Australia, pleaded guilty to multiple counts of aggravated indecent assault against two boys (aged 10 and 11) in the principal’s office. When charged in 1994, Br Christian had been teaching at Port Hedland, W.A. In 1995, Christian was fined $10,500 ($1,500 per incident) but the Marist Order said it would pay the fine for him. Brother Christian moved to live with the Marist Brothers in Templestowe, Melbourne. According to Marist websites (accessed in 2011), Brother David Christian continued to be accepted by his superiors and colleagues as a member of the Marist order. Christian Brothers, Goulburn NSW. In the Goulburn Local Court in southern New South Wales in 1989, a Christian Brother was convicted (and was given a suspended jail sentence) for sexually abusing a boy at St Patrick’s College, Goulburn (this school later became Trinity College, Goulburn). Other victims of this Brother did not contact the police but they later demanded (and obtained) an apology from the Christian Brothers Order. Despite his offences. this Brother continued to be accepted as a member of the Christian Brothers (in an office position). See more here. Fr Bob Claffey Father Robert Claffey, Ballarat diocese, Victoria, was given a non-custodial  sentence after pleading guilty to offences involving boys. See our story here. Fr Patrick Cleary Father Patrick Joseph Cleary, Brisbane archdiocese, 5-15 months jail for offences against boys.  See our story here. Fr Bryan Coffey Father Bryan Desmond Coffey, Ballarat diocese, Victoria, was sentenced to 3 years jail (suspended) for offences against children, mostly boys. See our story here. Gregory Coffin (alias Coffey) Gregory Vincent Coffey (birth-name Coffin) was originally a priesthood trainee in the Salesian order. Brother Greg Coffin taught at Salesian College (“Rupertswood”), Sunbury, Victoria, in 1969-1970, and at St Mark’s College, Port Pirie, South Australia, in 1971. In February 1972, he was sentenced to 12 months jail (suspended) for sexual abuse of a boy at the Port Pirie school. Despite this, he was still accepted as a lay teacher (Mr “Coffey”) in Catholic schools. Coffey was sentenced to a 2-year good behaviour bond in Victoria in 1994, plus 30 months jail (suspended) in Victoria in 1997 for offences against boys at Redden College, Preston, Melbourne, in the 1970s.  See our story here. Fr Peter Colley Father Peter James Colley, of the Ballarat diocese in Victoria, pleaded guilty in the Moonee Ponds Magistrates Court, Melbourne, on 11 March 1993 to two charges — one indecent assault of an adult male in a public toilet at Moonee Ponds and one charge of escaping from legal custody. Court records gave Colley’s occupation as “priest”, living in at an address in Morriss Road, Warrnambool West, which is the address of the St Pius X Catholic presbytery. Colley was sentenced to a 12-months good behaviour bond. Peter Colley was born in Melbourne on 12 April 1948 and went to school at Parade Christian Brothers College, Melbourne. Originally he worked as a layman with the Pallottine religious order, including (he has said) among Aboriginals at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. In the early 1970s he was living at Pallotti College, Millgrove, Victoria, seeking to be accepted as a Pallotine lay Brother  but did not complete the training. Also in the 1970s, he is believed to have spent time at a Redemptorist seminary in Galong, south-western New South Wales. During the 1970s, Colley applied to Bishop Ronald Mulkearns of Ballarat to sponsor him as a Ballarat candidate for the priesthood. Thus, Colley was ordained at St Paul’s Seminary for Late Vocations in Sydney in 1979 and then joined the Ballarat diocese, where his parishes included Terang, Horsham, Bungaree (near Ballarat) and Warrnambool East. In early 2000, when his court appearance was becoming known, Colley left the Ballarat diocese and his name then disappeared from the annual Australian Catholic Directory. Fr Peter L. Comensoli In 1994, Father Peter Lewis Comensoli (then aged 55, of the Wollongong diocese, south of Sydney) was sentenced to a minimum of 18 months jail after pleading guilty to indecent assaulting altar boys. Comensoli’s abuse was reported to the Wollongong diocese in 1989 but the church authorities allowed him to continue ministering. Finally, two victims got him convicted. Despite this, Comensoli was not laicized or defrocked. As late as 2008, Father Peter L. Comensoli was still listed as a “supplementary priest” of the Wollongong diocese “on leave” or “retired”. See more from Broken Rites here. This Father Comensoli is not to be confused with another clergyman, Auxiliary Bishop Peter A. Comensoli. Fr Doug Conlan Father Douglas Conlan began ministering in Western Australia’s Bunbury diocese in the 1970s. In 1999, aged 52, he was sentenced to 3 years jail (suspended) after pleading guilty to offences of gross indecency committed (in 1976) against a 16-year-old male. The court was told that the boy’s family trusted the priest who took the boy on a trip for services in country parishes. The offences occurred during an overnight stay in church accommodation. Fr Paul Connolly Father Paul Anthony Connolly, Hobart archdiocese, was sentenced in 2001 to eight months jail (suspended after serving four months) for multiple indecent assaults of a girl aged about 14. After the jailing, the Hobart archdiocese continued to list Connolly as a “supplementary” priest of the archdiocese. See our story here. Fr Kevin Nicholas Cox A Sydney jury convicted  this priest of sexual crimes against a girl aged 11 to 13. Church leaders and priests then submitted “good-character” references for Cox, asking the court for a lenient sentence. A judge imposed a part-time jail sentence but church lawyers appealed to a higher court against the conviction and won the appeal on technical grounds. Privately, a church leader later apologised to the girl’s family for what Cox had done to her. See more from Broken Rites here. Fr Neville Creen Father Neville Joseph Creen molested young girls while he served as a priest at Mount Isa, north-west Queensland (in the Townsville diocese), from 1973 to 1981. In Brisbane District Court in 2003 and 2004, Creen admitted to  indecently dealing with 20 girls under the age of 13. One girl was aged just five when Creen abused her at a youth camp and later at the home of her grandparents. Creen was sentenced to three-and-half years’ jail (suspended after 14 months). Judge Ian Wylie said Creen had used his position as a priest and his standing in the community to intimidate the girls into remaining silent about their ordeals. See our story here. Fr David Daniel In July 2000, Melbourne Catholic priest Father David Daniel was sentenced to six years’ jail, with parole after 4.5 years, for offences against four boys, a girl and an adult male. This priest’s last parish was St Brigid’s, Healesville. See our story here. Chris D’Astoli, former priesthood trainee Press and radio and TV news reports in May 1994 stated that a former trainee Catholic priest, Christopher D’Astoli, appeared in Oakleigh Magistrates Court (Melbourne) on 25 May 1994. D’Astoli (aged 50 in 1994) pleaded guilty to gross indecency and indecent assault against a 13-year-old Catholic school boy in the Oakleigh area in 1969-70, when D’Astoli was completing six years as a trainee priest at the Melbourne Catholic seminary (Corpus Christi College in Glen Waverley). The court was told that the boy reported the assault to his school and D’Astoli left the seminary a few days before he was due to be ordained. However, the court was told, the boy’s school (Salesian College, Oakleigh) persuaded the boy not to tell his parents or the police, and the police did not learn about the matter until 23 years later. Magistrate Susan Blashki placed D’Astoli on a three-year good-behaviour bond, and ordered him to pay $750 into the court fund. The information for this case was prepared by Sergeant Brendan Harper of Oakleigh Criminal Investigation Branch. Father Albert Davis This Catholic priest (a member of the Dominican Fathers, the Order of Preachers) was charged in 2006 with 17 incidents of indecent assault involving seven boys at Blackfriars Priory School (conducted by the Dominican Fathers) in Prospect, Adelaide, between 1956 and 1960. A magistrate ruled that there was enough evidence for a jury to convict Davis. The magistrate committed him to stand trial in the Adelaide District Court. But Davis died in Canberra in March 2007 before the trial could be held. See our story here. Monsignor John Day, Victoria A detective gathered enough evidence to prosecute Monsignor John Day, who sexually abused many boys and girls in the Mildura parish in north-western Victoria. Influential church people blocked the prosecution. In 1997, after Broken Rites exposed the cover-up, the church authorities reluctantly admitted Day’s offences and apologised to his victims. See the Broken Rites story here. Father Adelrick D’Cruz This priest, aged 78, was convicted in the Victorian County Court at Shepparton on 22 May 2008 after pleading guilty to indecently assaulting a teenage girl in a north-eastern Victoria parish 24 years previously. D’Cruz had ministered in the Sandhurst diocese in northern Victoria and later did freelance ministry in the Anglo-Indian community in Melbourne. See our story here. Fr Ray Deal Father Raymond Deal, Melbourne archdiocese, was sentenced to four months jail (suspended) for an offence against a male who was under his supervision. See our story here. Fr John Denham On 2 July 2010 Father John Sidney Denham, of the Maitland-Newcastle Catholic diocese, was sentenced to a 19 years and 10 months in jail (with parole possible after 13 years and 10 months) for offences (including buggery) committed against boys in the 1970s and 1980s. See a comprehensive background article from Broken Rites here and the judge’s sentencing remarks here and another family’s complaint here. Fr Francis Derriman Francis Edward Derriman was sentenced in Brisbane in 1998 to 12 months jail (suspended after serving four months) after being found guilty of indecently dealing with a teenage girl while Father Derriman was a priest in Brisbane in 1968. The court was told that Derriman left the priesthood in 1970, became a social worker and moved interstate. In the 1990s, the victim went to the church’s “Towards Healing” program in Brisbane, expecting some “healing”, but she later told Broken Rites that church officials at “Towards Healing” in Brisbane were evasive and dismissive towards her. Br Gerard Dick In 1995, Christian Brother Gerard William Dick (then aged 67) was sentenced to three and a half years jail in  Perth, Western Australia, after pleading guilty to ten incidents of indecently dealing with boys aged eight to ten at a Christian Brothers orphanage, Castledare, in W.A. in the 1960s. Dick was just one of many Christian Brothers who abused boys in W.A. orphanages but most of the others were never brought to justice. Br Edward Dowlan Christian Brother Edward Vernon Dowlan (known as Ted Dowlan), Victoria, 1996, was jailed in 1996 with an eventual sentence (after appeal) of 6.5 yrs jail (with parole after 4 yrs) for offences against boys. See our story here. Br “David” Down Christian Brother Graeme James Down (known in the Christian Brothers as “Brother David Down”) indecently touched boys aged 10-12 from St Mark’s College in Bedford, Western Australia, in the 1980s; he left the Christian Brothers in 1999; was convicted in 2007 (pleaded guilty); received a 30-months jail sentence, with parole after one year. Later in 2007, Broken Rites received further complaints about Brother Down at the same school in the 1980s. This resulted in Down being given additional jail time in 2008. See our story here. Fr Reginald Durham Father Reginald Basil Durham, Rockhampton diocese, Queensland, 4-18  mths jail (for indecent assault of a girl at Neerkol orphanage). See our story here. Br John Dyson Marist Brother John Desmond Dyson (born 21 March 1950), who taught at Assumption College, Kilmore, Victoria, was sentenced to 12 months jail after pleading guilty to indecently assaulting three boys, aged 12 to 14. The sentence was served in community work. See our story here. Fr Anthony Eames Father Anthony Eames, Melbourne archdiocese, was sentenced to six months jail (suspended) for offences against girls. See our story here. Fr Michael Endicott On 25 June 2010 in Brisbane, Father Michael Ambrose Endicott was given a one-year jail sentence (suspended) after pleading guilty to indecent treatment of a schoolboy. See more from Broken Rites here. Br Rex Elmer Christian Brother Rex Ignatius Elmer, Victoria, was sentenced in 1998 to five years jail (with parole after 3 years 4 months) after pleading guilty to indecent assault of 12 boys at St Vincent’s Boys’ Home in South Melbourne. See the full Broken Rites story  here. Br Michael Evans, New South Wales By December 1994, New South Wales police had gathered sufficient evidence to charge Christian Brother Michael Evans with multiple sexual crimes against Catholic schoolboys. But Evans committed suicide, thereby evading the justice process. His victims included pupils at Edmund Rice College (Wollongong) and St Patrick’s College (Strathfield, Sydney). The Christian Brothers Order has apologised to Evans’s victims. Fr Paul Evans, Boys’ Town, NSW On 3 October 2008 Father Paul Raymond Evans (born 20 October 1951) was sentenced to 15 years’ jail (with parole possible after nine and a half years) after a Sydney jury found him guilty of multiple sex offences against boys in the 1970s and 1980s, while he was a dormitory master at Boys’ Town (a Catholic institution for troubled teenagers) in Engadine, south of Sydney. After 1988, Evans worked in parishes in the Broken Bay diocese in Sydney’s north. See our story here. Br Stephen Farrell, Christian Brother Brother Stephen Francis Farrell (a member of the Victoria-Tasmania province of the Christian Brothers) was a teacher at St Alipius Catholic primary school in Ballarat East, Victoria, in 1973-74 but later left the order. In the Ballarat Magistrates Court on 17 January 1997, Farrell (then aged 45) pleaded guilty to nine counts of indecently assaulting two boys at St Alipius. He was sentenced to two years’ jail, suspended for two years. After leaving the Christian Brothers, Farrell married three times. Jesuit Father Michael McGirr, who conducted Farrell’s third wedding, gave character evidence in court for Farrell. This Stephen Farrell is not to be confused with a Marist Brother of the same name. Fr Nazzareno Fasciale, Melbourne Victoria Police charged Father Nazzareno Fasciale (pronounced “Fah-SHAH-Lay”) with numerous indecent assaults of boys and girls. Fasciale admitted these crimes in a police interview which was to be tabled in court. He was absent from his first scheduled court appearance and died before the second scheduled court date. The Melbourne Catholic archdiocese has since apologised to Fasciale’s victims. See the Broken Rites story here. Fr Gregory Ferguson Father Gregory Laurence Ferguson, of the Marist Fathers, was sentenced on 15 May 2007 to two years jail (eligible for parole after 12 months), for offences in 1971 against two boys aged 13 at Marist College, Burnie, Tasmania.  On 13 December 2007, he was sentenced to an additional three years’ jail for offences against a third boy, making a total of five years’ jail (but he can apply for parole after two and half years). See our story here. Fr James Fletcher Father James Patrick Fletcher, Maitland-Newcastle diocese, NSW, 7.5 years to 10  years jail for sexual penetration of an altar boy. Fletcher died in jail.  See our story here. Br Michael Folli In the New South Wales District Court, after lengthy proceedings (including an appeal by the accused), Marist Brother Michael Anthony Folli (born 4 January 1945) has been sentenced to four and a half years’ jail for sexual offences against two boys during four years from 1980 to 1983 when the boys were aged 12 to 15. The prosecution said the two siblings met Brother Folli through their Marist Brothers school at Auburn, in Sydney’s west.  Folli befriended the family and became a frequent visitor to their house, where the alleged incidents occurred. Br Raymond Foster Marist Brother Raymond Sidney Foster (born 26 November 1931) was originally called “Brother Celestine“. He taught at Catholic schools in Queensland and New South Wales.  In 1999, police interviewed Foster (then aged 67) at a Marist Brothers retirement home in Mittagong, NSW) and charged him with indecent assaults against boys, committed at Chanel College, Gladstone, Queensland, in the 1970s. On 23 March 1999 he was found, hanged, just hours before he was due to appear in a New South Wales court to be extradited to Queensland. Fr Rob Fuller Father Robert Macgregor Fuller, 54, a priest of the Sydney Catholic archdiocese, was jailed in February 2010 for seeking to procure a child under the age of 16 via internet chat sites. See more from Broken Rites here. Fr Des Gannon Father Desmond Laurence Gannon, Melbourne archdiocese, was jailed in 1995 for 12 months, plus suspended sentences in 1997, 2000 and 2003, and was sentenced in 2009 to another 14 months behind bars, for offences against boys. See the full story from Broken Rites here. Br Terry Gilsenan, In 2001, Marist Brother Terence Joseph Gilsenan (born 18 October 1955) was sentenced to three years jail (with parole after 21 months) after pleading guilty to one incident of homosexual intercourse and three incidents of gross indecency, committed against a 12-year-old boarder, from a country area, at St Gregory’s College, Campbelltown, New South Wales. The offences occurred in 1987-89 when Gilsenan, then in his early thirties, was the assistant boarding supervisor, a trainee brother and a teacher at the college. Gilsenan is still a Marist Brother. He should not be confused with a Christian Brother who has a similar (but not identical) name. Brother J.G. Gladwin In 1998, Queensland detectives were ready to prosecute Gladwin for committing sexual crimes against schoolboys while he worked (as Christian Brother Gerard Gladwin) in Queensland in the 1960s and ’70s. But, before court proceedings could begin,  Gladwin (aged 65) was found dead, gassed in his car, near Brisbane. He left a suicide note. Thus, he avoided the justice process. Brother Gerard Gladwin’s schools included: a school in Gympie between 1957 and 1962; St Mary’s College, Toowoomba in the 1960s; St Joseph’s Nudgee College, Brisbane, in 1970-71; and St Columban’s College, Brisbane, in the mid 1970s.  See more from Broken Rites  here. Fr Michael Glennon Father Michael Charles Glennon, Melbourne archdiocese, was jailed in 1978, again  in 1991 and 2003, serving a total of 10.5 years minimum to 14.5 years  maximum for multiple offences (including rape and indecent assault), mostly against boys. He committed many of his crimes while on bail awaiting trial for other sex offences. See our story here. Paul Goldsmith Former trainee priest Paul Ronald Goldsmith, Tasmania, was jailed for six and a half years (with parole possible after four years) for  offences against 20 boys, aged 13 to 16.  See our story here. Fr Terence Goodall Father Terence Norman Goodall, Sydney archdiocese, pleaded guilty to indecent assault of a Catholic layman and was placed in custody until the rising of the court. See our story here. Br Brian Gordon Marist Brother Brian Robert Gordon (born 15 December 1942) sexually abused boys while teaching at a Marist Brothers primary school in Dundas, Sydney, in 1969-71. The Marists kept quiet about Gordon’s behaviour and he eventually became the Brisbane diocese’s deputy directory of Catholic Education. In 1998 he was sentenced to a minimum of  12 months jail for eight sexual offences committed in 1969-71 against four boys, aged about 11, at the Sydney school.  See our story here. Br Thomas Grealy Brother Thomas William Grealy, alias Brother “Augustine”, of the  Patrician Brothers order, was sentenced in 1997 to seven years jail (parole after four years) after pleading guilty to repeated indecent assaults of two young boys while he was the principal of the primary section of a Patrician Brothers school in Grimwood Street, Granville, in western Sydney, in the 1970s. Before molesting a boy in his office, Brother Augustine would cover a statue of the Virgin Mary with a raincoat to hide his shame. See more from Broken Rites here. Monsignor Philip Green Monsignor Philip Richard Green, Hobart archdiocese, was sentenced to three months jail (suspended) after pleading guilty to indecently assaulting a young man who was mourning the death of a sibling. See our story here. Fr Jack Gubbels On 18 August 1995, Victorian detectives went to Queensland to arrest Father Jack William Gubbels for sexual crimes crimes against Melbourne boys. But, expecting the arrest, Gubbels was found dead in bed. Thus he avoided the justice process. Gubbels had worked as a priest in the Melbourne and Townsville (Queensland) dioceses. See the Broken Rites story here. Fr Barry Gwillim Father John Barry Gwillim, Melbourne archdiocese, was sentenced to 32 months jail (suspended) after pleading guilty to offences against a boy. See our story here. Fr John Haines In the Victorian County Court on 4 November 2008, Father Edmund John Haines (of the Melbourne Catholic archdiocese, based in the Geelong district) was sentenced to four years and three months jail (with a non-parole period of two years six months) after he pleaded guilty to six counts of an indecent act with a boy under 16, procurement of a minor for child pornography and possessing child pornography. Haines was previously a priest in Papua New Guinea. See our story here. Br “Malcolm” Hall Marist Brother Philip Stanley Hall (born 12 November 1925, alias Brother Malcolm) worked in Catholic schools in Mount Gambier (Sth Aust.), Parkes and Forbes (NSW) and Warragul (Victoria). In 1998, police arrested him (and gave him a summons to appear in court) for sexual crimes against boys and girls in Victoria. But he died just before the scheduled court date, so the court case had to be cancelled. See more from Broken Rites here. Bede Hampton, Queensland, ex-Marist Brother In December 2010 a former Catholic Marist teaching brother, now living in Australia — Bede Hampton, aged 62 — was sentenced in New Zealand’s High Court to jail for two years and six months for indecent assaults committed against boys in a New Zealand Catholic boarding school (St Joseph’s College in Masterton) in the early 1970s. Hampton left the Marist Brothers when he was 29. He has become an interior decorator based in Queensland. One of his victims now also lives in Australia. See more from Broken Rites here. Phillip Hardy, trainee priest In 1990, Phillip John Hardy began training for the Catholic priesthood with the Divine Word Missionaries at Box Hill in Melbourne but he did not reach ordination. In Sydney District Court in 1995, aged 41, he was sentenced to 11 years’ jail (with a minimum of seven years before parole) for sexual offences committed against a boy during an eight-year period, in 1978-1986, when the boy was aged from 8 to 16. During the time of the offences, Hardy was teaching at Marist Brothers College, Eastwood, Sydney, where he was in charge of “religious studies”. Br Francis Hesford Marist Brother Hesford (born 1 February 1914), formerly of Assumption College, Kilmore, Victoria (later moved to  Western Australia), was given a non-custodial sentence in 1997 after pleading guilty to offences against two girls at Kilmore. The offences were committed in 1970, when Hesford was aged 56. See our story here and another story here. Fr Ted Hewitt Father Edward Patrick Hewitt, of the Perth diocese, Western Australia, pleaded guilty in a Perth court on 2 April 1996 to a charge of wilful exposure. The prosecution alleged that Hewitt (then aged 50) had stood naked in the back yard of his home, exposing himself to children as they walked past, through an adjoining park, on their way to school. At the sentencing, in May 1996, the court fined Fr Edward Hewitt $1,000. Br Bill Hocking 0n 31 October 1992 Christian Brother William Hocking was sentenced to 150 hours of community service  after being convicted of sexually assaulting a teenage boy at a Catholic Church youth refuge, “Eddy’s Place”, in Wollongong, New South Wales. Ronald Hopkins Ronald William Hopkins originally trained to be a Christian Brother but ended up as a lay teacher in Catholic schools. In 2005, Hopkins pleaded guilty to offences (five counts of unlawful sexual intercourse by a teacher, five of indecent assault and one of gross indecency) against  five schoolboys, aged 12 to 16, between 1975 and 1991 while he was a teacher at two Adelaide schools — St Bernadette’s in a suburb called St Mary’s and Blackfriars Priory School at Prospect. In the S.A. Supreme Court in 2006, Hopkins (then aged 70) was sentenced to ten years’ jail. See our story here. Fr Dan Hourigan, Victoria On 18 September 1995, Victoria Police charged Father Daniel Dominic Hourigan, (of the Sale diocese) with sexual crimes against boys. Three days later, he died unexpectedly, thereby avoiding a court appearance. Thus the court case had to be cancelled. See the Broken Rites story here. Fr John Houston, visiting New South Wales A Catholic priest, John Charles Houston (born 3 March 1955), has appeared in a court near Newcastle in New South Wales, accused of filming boys showering during a surf lifesaving carnival. The magistrate ordered that Houston be supervised by mental health workers, continue to take his medication and not loiter near public pools or beaches. See more here. Fr Kevin Howarth Father Kevin Howarth, Sandhurst diocese in north-eastern Victoria, sexually abused young girls and was sentenced to three months jail. The sentence was to be served in community work. See our story here. Fr Bill Irwin William Stanley Irwin was originally a Brother (and then a priest) in the Catholic Vincentian order. A Sydney court heard how the church authorities protected Irwin, concealing his criminal behaviour in a church file marked “Strictly Confidential”. In 2011 a jury found Irwin guilty of two incidents of gross indecency against a youth whom he was “counselling”. The judge imposed two six-months jail sentences, which were suspended upon Irwin undertaking a six-months good-behaviour bond. See more here. Br Fabian Jordan Christian Brother John Joseph Jordan (alias Brother “Fabian” Jordan, born 23 October 1927), worked at St Augustine’s boys home and St Vincent’s boys’ home in Victoria; he later left the Christian Brothers and retired to South Australia. In 1999 he was sentenced to a 12-months good behaviour bond for indecent assault (i.e, touching) of a 13-year-old boy at St Augustine’s in the early 1960s. This was not the only complaint about Jordan. Fr John Keane, western Victoria The Adelaide Advertiser reported on 6 January 1990 (page 2) from Melbourne: “A Catholic priest pleaded guilty in Melbourne Magistrates Court yesterday to offensive behaviour in a public toilet. John Keane, 52, who gave his address as St Michael’s Church, Wycheproof, was given a 12-month good behaviour bond. The prosecutor said plainclothes police saw Keane expose himself on April 13 last year.” Frank Keating De La Salle Brother Frank Terrence Keating (alias Brother “Ibar” Keating) was sentenced to 8 to 36 months jail in Victoria in 1998, plus 12 months jail (suspended) in Queensland in 2000, all for multiple indecent assaults of boys in Catholic schools. Keating also taught in Western Australia and South Australia. See our story here. Fr Terrence Keliher Father Terrence Thomas Keliher, aged 62, was sentenced in Brisbane in 2000 to 30 months jail (eligible for parole after 8 months) for indecently dealing with a girl, aged about 11. Keliher was friendly with the girls’ parents, who were intellectually impaired, and he had officiated at the parents’ wedding. In 1999 the victim phoned Broken Rites, which put her in contact with the Queensland Police child-protection unit. Fr Vincent Kiss Father Vincent Keiran Kiss belonged to the Wagga Wagga diocese (NSW) but also worked and played in other areas, including Melbourne and the Philippines. In Sydney in 2002, then aged 70, he  was sentenced to ten and a half years in jail (eligible for parole after seven years) for sex crimes against four teenage boys.  He pleaded guilty to three charges of buggery and ten of indecent assault. See our story here. Fr Frank Klep Father Frank Gerard Klep, of the Salesian order, Victoria, 5 years 10 months jail, with parole after 3 years 6 months (after an appeal by the prosecution on behalf of the victims, April 2006, replacing previous sentence in 2005 of 1-3 yrs jail); also had a 9-months jail sentence in 1994, which he served in community work.  See our story here. Marist Brother Kostka In the Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court on 23 June 2008, Marist Brother John William Chute (born 13 June 1932), whose religious name is “Brother Kostka” (in honour of a 16th Century saint), was jailed after pleading guilty to sexually molesting four students when they were aged 13 and 14 at Canberra’s Marist College in the 1980s. See our story here. Michael Lannen, ex-trainee priest Michael William Lannen spent two years in the 1980s as a trainee priest at the Catholic seminary in Banyo, Brisbane. He later became a senior psychologist for Queensland’s prison system. In 1996, aged 49, he was sentenced to four years jail after being found guilty of corruptly intimidating prisoners into engaging in oral sex with him in return for favourable reports regarding the prisoners’ future. The prosecution said that Lannen held considerable power over the prisoners, regarding their early release or whether they were given leave of absence or home detention or were accepted into work-release schemes. Lannen’s conviction relates to a period after he ceased being a trainee priest but the conviction is being included in this list, as a matter of public record, for the information of anybody who encountered Lannen in a church-related situation. Fr Leo Leunig, Father Leo St Clair Leunig, then aged 66, of the Perth diocese, Western Australia, was sentenced to six years jail in 1994 after pleading guilty to 46 offences against three young boys between 1965 and 1969; and he was sentenced in 1995 to another 12 months jail for offences against another boy. The offences included indecent touching, oral sex and sodomy. The church authorities had known since 1979 about Leunig’s criminal behaviour, but they retained him in the ministry and merely moved him from a one-parish appointment to a multi-parish role as a relieving priest. This meant that he had access to boys in the new parishes where he would be relieving. While he was relieving, Leunig lived for many years at the South Perth presbytery, which is adjacent to a primary school, but the church authorities did not warn the school’s principal or parents about him. While Leunig was serving his jail sentence (and also after he was released), the Perth diocese defiantly continued to list him for years in the annual Australian Catholic Directories as a “supplementary” (relieving) priest of the Perth diocese. Fr Bruce Little In the Southport District Court (Queensland) on 2 February 1996, Father Bruce Francis Little (then aged 50) was fined $750 after pleading guilty to engaging in an indecent act in a public place. Little admitted to having oral sex performed on him by a man in a public toilet block at Pizzey Park, Miami, on the Queensland Gold Coast. The court was told that police arrested Little one afternoon as they patrolled the park, a popular playground for children. (Case reported in the Brisbane Courier Mail, the Gold Coast Bulletin and the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin, 3 February 1996.) Little, who was then a priest of the Brisbane archdiocese, later transferred to the Rockhampton diocese. Br “Nestor” Littler Marist Brother John Aloysius Littler (alias Brother “Nestor”, born 17 June 1926) worked at St Vincent’s boys’ home, Westmead, in  Sydney’s west, from 1955 to 1964. In Sydney District Court in 1993, Littler pleaded guilty to three charges of indecently assaulting a boy, aged 15, at St Vincent’s in 1962. Judge Phelan sentenced Littler to a $500 five-year good behaviour bond. Judge Phelan said he was taking into account that, as a Marist Brother, Littler had a “high standing” in the community. In 1997, Littler (then aged 71) was committed for trial on 29 counts of sexual assault (including buggery) of five other boys at St Vincent’s in the 1950s and ’60s but he eventually managed to get the trial cancelled on health grounds. Brother “Nestor” is also believed to have taught at the Marist Brothers’ St Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill, Sydney, in 1965-70. The name “Nestor”, which was the religious alias adopted by Littler when he joined the Marist Brothers, was the name of an ancient “saint”. Br Ray Logan De La Salle Brother Raymond Logan (alias Brother Pius Bernard), NSW,  W.A. and Victoria, was sentenced in 2000 to three years jail (to be served as periodic weekend detention) for offences against boys. See our story here. Kevin Lynch Kevin John Lynch was originally a Christian Brother, teaching in Catholic schools in Queensland. One of these schools is believed to have been St Brendan’s College, Yeppoon. After leaving the Christian Brothers, he worked as a school counsellor at Brisbane Boys’ Grammar School (Anglican) in the 1980s and at St Paul’s School (Anglican), Bald Hills, Brisbane, in the early 1990s. In 1997, police charged him with committing sexual crimes against boys while working as a counsellor. During prosecution, he committed suicide, thereby failing to clear his name. Fr Daniel Lyne, CP In 2002, New South Wales police were about to prosecute Father Daniel Lyne in court for sexual offences against young males but suddenly he died and the court case could not proceed. Lyne (born 1937) was a Catholic priest in the Congregation of the Passion religious order (the Passionist Fathers). Originally, Father Lyne had taught in a Passionist “juniorate” at St Ives, Sydney (this was a secondary school for boys who were “aspiring” to become priests in the Passionist order). He later worked in Africa and India. See more from Broken Rites here. Br Edward Mamo, MSC religious order A Catholic former religious Brother, Edward Mamo (born in 1944), has pleaded guilty to having committed multiple sexual offences against boys at Monivae College, a Catholic secondary school, at Hamilton, Victoria, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Mamo also worked at Chevalier College (Bowral, NSW) and in accommodating Vietnamese refugees in Sydney. See more from Broken Rites here. Br William Marchant Christian Brother William Edwin Marchant, Tardun Boys’ Home, Western  Australia, non-custodial sentence. Fr Denis McAlinden This Irish-born priest belonged to the Maitland-Newcastle diocese in New South Wales, where he molested girls and women. This diocese then lent him to other dioceses around Australia (and in New Zealand and Papua New Guinea), keeping him out of the reach of the police as he committed to commit offences. Police accumulated evidence to prosecute McAlinden in court but when they finally caught up with him in 2005, he was in a church-run aged-care centre in Western Australia, where he died one month later. Since then, the Maitland-Newcastle diocese has been paying compensation to some of McAlinden’s victims. See the Broken Rites story here. Fr Michael McArdle, Father Michael Joseph McArdle, of the Rockhampton diocese in Queensland, was sentenced in 2003 to six years jail (with parole possible after two years) after pleading guilty to 62 incidents of indecent dealings against 14 boys and two girls between 1965 and 1987. McArdle told a journalist that the church was aware of his offences but it never alerted police or parishioners. Fr Charles McCann A young woman made a sworn statement to Victoria Police in 1993 that Fr Charles McCann, of St Kevin’s parish, Templestowe, in Melbourne’s north-east, had invasively mauled her breasts while she was asleep in bed in her family home when she was a teenager in 1983. McCann, who was a friend of the girl’s family, was making a “home visit”. Police interviewed McCann in 1993 and, as a result, of this interview, they gave him a summons to appear in court in March 1994 to answer a charge of indecent assault. However, the girl’s parents and grandparents feared that the case would embarrass the church, so they pressured the young woman to withdraw the charge, threatening to disinherit her if she proceeded. Feeling defeated, the young woman withdrew the charge two days before the court hearing. The church authorities then felt justified in retaining McCann in the priesthood until he retired nine years later, in 2003. Br Bernard McGrath St John of God Brother Bernard Kevin McGrath was jailed in New Zealand in 1993, was jailed in Sydney in 1997, and was in jail again in New Zealand from 2006 to 2008. Any Australian victims of McGrath should have a chat with the Lake Macquarie detectives office in New South Wales, telephone 02-49429909. See the Broken Rites story about McGrath and the St John of God Brothers here. Fr Ron McKeirnan Father Ronald McKeirnan, of the Brisbane archdiocese, was sentenced to three years jail (one year minimum) in 1998, plus 3 yrs jail (suspended) in 2003, for offences against boys. See our story here. Fr Paul McLachlan Father Paul McLachlan, of the Brisbane archdiocese, was sentenced to 3 yrs 8 months jail in 2000, plus 18 months jail in 2001, for offences against boys. McLachlan was formerly the head of Brisbane’s Catholic Media Office for 19 years and appeared on television religious programs. See our story here. Br Gerard McNamara Marist Brother Gerard Joseph McNamara (born 9 March 1938) was sentenced in Melbourne to three years jail (suspended) after pleading guilty to indecently assaulting six boys. McNamara, who taught mainly in Victoria, was originally known as “Brother Camillus” (not to be confused with another Marist Brother “Camillus” in Sydney). See the Broken Rites report here. Br “Ossie” McNamara Marist Brother Hugh Michael McNamara (born 7 March 1933) taught at St Joseph’s College in Hunters Hill in Sydney as Brother “Oswald” McNamara until about 1978. He ceased being a Brother and then taught as a lay teacher at the Marist Brothers college at Ashgrove in Brisbane, where he  was jailed in 1995 for indecently dealing with a boy. In Sydney in 1999, he was convicted of physical assault of a boy at St Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill in 1970; and a charge of indecently assaulting the same boy was dismissed because of lack of witnesses. Rick McPhillamy, cathedral acolyte In 2011, Richard John McPhillamy (who has been an acolyte at the Bathurst Catholic Cathedral and who is a former assistant dormitory master at St Stanislaus College, Bathurst) was sentenced to a minimum of 12 months jail after he was found guilty of sexual crimes against two boys while he was working as an assistant housemaster at St Stanislaus College, Bathurst in the mid-1980s. See more from Broken Rites here. Fr Terence Merivale Father Terence Michael Merivale was a priest in the Melbourne Catholic archdiocese but left the priesthood. Later, in 2000, he was sentenced to six months jail after pleading guilty to seven charges of indecent assault (including one of digital penetration) on three young  girls when he was ministering in St Bernard’s parish, Belmont, Geelong, between 1969 and 1975. Fr Murray Moffat In August 2010, Father Murray Alexander Moffat, of Brisbane, was sentenced to 18 months jail, with the first three months to be spent behind bars and the remainder suspended for three years. He pleaded guilty to indecent treatment of a 12-year-old girl between 1977 and 1981. See the Broken Rites story here. Br Rodger Moloney This member of the St John of God Brothers has worked in Australia and New Zealand. In August 2008 in New Zealand, Rodger William Moloney, 73, was jailed for sexually abusing educationally-disadvantaged boys in Christchurch, N.Z., in the 1970s. He was released from jail in September 2009. The court was told that, after completing his sentence, he would be deported to Australia.  Any Australian victims of Moloney should have a chat with the police sexual offences units in Australia. See our Moloney story here. And see our background story about the St John of God Brothers in Australia here. Br Terry Mulligan Marist Brother Terence Mulligan was sentenced in Sydney in 2000 to 6 months periodic detention for indecent assaults against two boys. Mulligan met the two siblings through their Marist Brothers school at Auburn, in Sydney’s west. He assaulted the boys in the family’s house. One of the victims, “Ricky” (aged 32 in 2000), said outside the court that the sexual abuse devastated his personal development. His life became a blur of drugs, alcohol and rage. Ricky’s wife said the effect of the abuse was being felt by her and the whole family. Fr Gerard Mulvale Father Gerard Joseph Mulvale, born 17 July 1948, from Western Australia, jailed 18-36 mths in Melbourne 1995 while he was a priest in the Pallottine order.  See our story here. Br Lawrence Murphy Christian Brother Lawrence Denis Murphy worked in Catholic boys’ orphanages at Tardun, Castledare and Clontarf in Western Australia in the 1940s and ’50s. In May 1997, he was arrested in Adelaide and extradited to Western Australia on charges of unlawful carnal knowledge and indecent dealing at the orphanages. In 1998 a West Australian magistrate ruled that there was indeed sufficient evidence for a jury to convict Murphy (then aged 80) but Murphy died before the the trial could be held. Monsignor James Murray In June 2000, Monsignor James William Murray, Geelong, Victoria (Melbourne archdiocese), was convicted and fined $500 after pleading guilty to having indecently assaulted a 25-year-old woman who had requested his pastoral care. See our story here. Fr “Max” Murray After Father Magnus William Murray committed child-sex offences in New Zealand, he was transferred to Sydney, where he was allowed to minister in the Woollahra parish in 1972-76. His past was concealed from Sydney parishioners. He later returned to New Zealand, where he was sentenced in 2003 to five years jail after pleading guilty to ten representative charges of committing indecent assaults and indecent acts on four boys in New Zealand between 1962 and 1972. The Sydney archdiocese now denies that it breached its duty of care in allowing Murray to minister in Australia because (it claims) Murray was New Zealand’s responsibility, not Sydney’s. Br Ross Murrin On 10 March 2008, Marist Brother Ross Francis Murrin (born 10 June 1955) was sentenced to 39 months’ jail, with a non-parole period of 18 months, after pleading guilty to indecently assaulting Catholic primary school boys in the 1970s. In February 2010, he received additional jail time after pleading guilty to sexually abusing another boy at a later school. See our story here. Brother Robert John N***** This former De La Salle Brother, received a ten-year jail sentence in NSW in February 2002 (when aged 55), eligible for parole after 6 yrs (the judge granted the offender a name-suppression order). See our story here. Fr Ross O’Brien In Glen Innes Local Court in New South Wales in May 1993, Father Thomas Ross O’Brien (then aged 57) was charged with indecent assault of a hitch-hiker, whom he had picked up between Lismore and Casino on 22 October 1992. Magistrate Chris Bone found the offence proved and placed Father O’Brien on a $100 good-behaviour bond for 18 months. (Reported in the Glen Innes Examiner  28 May 1993 and mentioned again in the Sydney Sunday Sun-Herald 19 March 2000.) Father O’Brien belongs to the Armidale diocese. When in court in 1993, he was ministering at the Glen Innes parish. He was later located at the Armidale Cathedral and then in the Quirindi parish. In several editions of the annual Australian Catholic Directory (e.g., the editions from 1997 to 2004), he was listed as the contact person for the “Continuing Education of Clergy” in the Armidale diocese — that is, he has been involved in the training of priests. Br Damien O’Dempsey In Brisbane in 1994, Christian Brother Damien John O’Dempsey (then aged 46) was sentenced to 18 months’ jail (with parole after four months) after pleading guilty to six counts of indecently dealing with a 15-year-old boy at St Mary’s Christian Brothers College, Toowoomba, Queensland, in 1987. In 1998, O’Dempsey was summoned to a magistrates’ court again, facing 22 charges (indecent dealing and carnal knowledge) involving another boy at a Townsville school in 1981-84. The magistrate ordered O’Dempsey to stand trial, which was listed for 1999. However, a tragedy occurred in the family of the alleged victim and the trial was abandoned. See the Broken Rites report here. Fr Kevin O’Donnell Father John Kevin O’Donnell, Melbourne archdiocese, was sentenced to 15 months jail for offences against children, mainly boys. Broken Rites helped O’Donnell’s victims to obtain justice. See our story here. Fr John O’Regan This priest ministered with the Catholic order of Oblate Fathers, in Queensland and Western Australia and possibly elsewhere. In September 1998, Queensland detectives began investigating O’Regan regarding indecent assaults of girls at Nazareth House girls’ home, Wynnum North, Brisbane, in the 1950s and ’60s. But O’Regan died during this prosecution process. See the Broken Rites story here. Fr Paul Pavlou On 29 June 2009, Melbourne diocesan priest Father Paul Pavlou (then aged 50) pleaded guilty to committing an indecent act with a 14-year-old boy and another charge of possessing child pornography. He was given an 18-months jail sentence (suspended) plus a two year community-based sentence (to be served by doing community work). See the full Broken Rites report here. Pending. Matter appealed – further investigation. Fr Dave Perrett Father David Perrett, who was a “chaplain” to Aborigines in the Armidale diocese in northern New South Wales, pleaded guilty in Orange District Court to indecent assault of two young Aboriginal boys at the Walgett parish and another Aboriginal boy at the Guyra parish. On 1 November 1996, Judge Shillington sentenced Perrett, then aged 59, to a three-year good-behaviour bond.  The Catholic directories continued to list Perrett as a priest of the Armidale diocese (“on leave”) until his name was removed in 2001. Another complaint against Perrett was aired on ABC-TV’s “Four Corners” on 11 November 2002. The program featured a statutory declaration by a young Aboriginal named Edward, who said he was raped by Perrett at Walgett; however, this complaint never reached a court. Edward, who had an intellectual disability and was partially deaf, had a traumatic adolescence. He ended up in jail, where he committed suicide. Fr Kevin Phillips In Sydney on 21 April 2011, Fr Kevin Francis Phillips (of Mackay in the Rockhampton diocese in Queensland) was jailed after pleading guilty to offences against a boy at St Stanislaus College (a boys’ boarding school) in Bathurst, New South Wales, in 1990. See the Broken Rites story here. Fr Ron Pickering For years, Father Ronald Dennis Pickering was protected by the Melbourne Catholic hierarchy. In late 1993 he suddenly fled from Australia to England, fearing that one of his victims would talk to police. The police eventually obtained enough evidence for a prosecution but were discouraged by the problem of locating Pickering in England (although the Melbourne archdiocese secretly knew his England address) and also the problem of extraditing him to Australia for the court proceedings. The Melbourne Catholic Archdiocese, which had long known about Pickering’s liking for boys, admitted that Pickering was an offender and it made civil settlements with some of his victims, so as to limit the church’s financial liability. See the full Broken Rites article here. Fr Terry Pidoto On 17 September 2007, Father Terrence Pidoto, of the Melbourne archdiocese, was sentenced to seven years and three months’ jail (with a minimum of five years before becoming eligible for parole) on charges of buggery and indecent assault against boys. See our story here. Priest #1, Adelaide In Adelaide in 1989, Catholic Church authorities tried to conceal a priest’s court case. In Holden Hill Magistrates Court, Adelaide, on 21 July 1989, this diocesan priest and another man were found guilty of indecent behaviour and were each fined $100. Late on a summer’s night, police had found the pair lying under bushes near Walkerville oval, engaging in sexual activity. The priest also was originally charged with giving a false name and address. Church lawyers persuaded the court to prohibit the media from publishing the priest’s name but media lawyers contested this application. The Supreme Court lifted the suppression order and the case was reported fully, with names, in the Adelaide “Advertiser” and “Sunday Mail” during July 26-30, 1989. Archbishop Leonard Faulkner wrote in a letter to all priests on 7 June 1989: “In reflecting my decision that [this priest] continue his ministry at [his parish], I remembered my own shortcomings and those of a number of our brother priests.” The priest is still in charge of an Adelaide parish. Priest #2, Adelaide and northern Sydney This priest was a mature-age entrant to the priesthood. He was recruited by (and was trained for) the Adelaide diocese, where he worked in parishes in the 1970s and ’80s. While visiting Cairns, Queensland, he was caught wilfully exposing himself on a beach. In a Cairns court on 27 July 1987, he pleaded guilty and was fined $100. After this, the church authorities transferred him to the Broken Bay diocese, in the northern suburbs and outskirts of Sydney, where he was put in charge of parishes, including parish schools. In February 1995, the Cairns court case was revealed in the “Manly Daily”, Sydney (circulating in the Broken Bay diocese), in an article headed “Shock of priest’s past: Parents stunned at exposure case”. The priest verified this report. Fr “Joseph” Pritchard Father Peter Harold Pritchard (alias Fr “Joseph” Pritchard), of the St Gerard  Majella religious order in the Parramatta diocese, NSW, was sentenced in 1997 to 6 years jail (four years minimum) after pleading guilty to charges of buggery, intent to commit buggery, and indecent assault involving seven trainee Brothers and another young male, all aged 16 to 21, over a 19-year period. See our story here. Fr David Rapson Father David Edwin Rapson (born 30 July 1953), who was then a member of the Salesians of Don Bosco, was sentenced in 1992 to two years jail after pleading guilty to five incidents of indecently assaulting a 15-year-old boy at Salesian College, “Rupertswood”, in Sunbury (in Melbourne’s north-west), where Rapson was a vice-principal. In a newspaper report in 1992, Rapson’s name was given (apparently wrongly) as David Edward Rapson. See more here. Fr Michael Reis, MSC religious order Father Michael Francis Reis (known as Mick Reis), who has taught at Monivae College in Victoria and Downlands College in Queensland, was sentenced in Brisbane on 6 November 2008 to 18 months jail (with a minimum of six months) for offences against two young girls in the 1980s and 1990s. See our story here. Fr Gerry Ridsdale Father Gerald Francis Ridsdale, Ballarat diocese, Victoria, has pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting a total of 40 children (comprising 39 boys and one girl). He is serving a jail sentence of 19 years (minimum), with parole possible in the year 2013. See our story here. Br Gregory Riley Christian Brother Francis Riley (known as Brother Greg Riley), New South Wales, was sentenced in 1999 to three years jail after pleading guilty to 17 counts of indecent assault against boys. Fr Stephen Robinson In 1998, Father Stephen Joseph Robinson (then aged 51), who was then a Catholic priest in the St Gerard Majella order in the Parramatta  diocese, NSW, was sentenced to a minimum of 18 months’ jail for acts of indecency on two trainee Brothers.  See our story here. Fr Victor Rubeo Father Victor Gabriel Rubeo, Melbourne archdiocese, pleaded guilty in 1996 to having indecently assaulted two boys in a previous parish (Laverton in the 1960s). On 28 October 2011, Rubeo appeared in court again, charged with additional incidents from the 1960s and was ordered to re-appear on 16 December 2011 for a full hearing but he died (aged 78) before this next hearing date. See the Broken Rites story here. Fr Paul-David Ryan Father Paul David Carl Ryan, Ballarat diocese, Victoria, was sentenced in 2006 to 18 months jail (12 months minimum) for offences against boys. See our story here. Fr Vince Ryan Father Vincent Gerard Ryan, of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese, NSW, was sentenced in 1996-97 to 16 years (minimum of 11) for offences against boys. See the Broken Rites story here. Fr Peter Searson This Melbourne diocesan priest pleaded guilty in a magistrates’ court in 1997 to physically assaulting a 12-year-old altar boy. The police also had evidence of sexual abuse committed by Searson, but Searson chose to plead guilty to the physical abuse, thereby ensuring a more lenient sentence. The court ordered Searson to observe a good-behaviour bond. Also in 1997, the Melbourne archdiocese’s Commissioner on Sexual Abuse investigated certain other allegations about Fr Searson, involving a number of women, boys and girls. See the Broken Rites report here. Fr Kelvin Sharkey On 29 April 2010, Father Kelvin Gerald Sharkey (a priest of the Wollongong Catholic Diocese in New South Wales) was sentenced to a minimum 15 months in jail after pleading guilty to buggery and indecent assault of an altar boy. See the Broken Rites story here here. Jack Shea John Rowan Shea was originally a priesthood trainee in Melbourne archdiocese and was later a prominent layman in Melbourne parish affairs and in the St Vincent de Paul Society. In 1996, aged 73, he was sentenced to three years jail (minimum of one year) for offences against boys in his “care” in the 1970s. Shea’s conviction relates to a period after he ceased being a trainee priest but the conviction is being included in this list, as a matter of public record, for the information of anybody who encountered Jack Shea in a church-related situation. Br Terence Simpson, former Christian Brother Terence Simpson, Brisbane, was sentenced to two years jail (suspended) for offences against boys. See our story here. Fr Michael Slattery On 9 August 2007 a Catholic priest from Western Australia, Father Michael Slattery, was sentenced in Sydney District Court to an 18-months jail sentence (suspended, with a good-behaviour bond) after he pleaded guilty to committing three acts of indecency (masturbation) in the presence of a schoolgirl, who was aged 14 to 15. The offences occurred in 1981-82 while Slattery was a lay teacher at a North Sydney Catholic girls school before becoming ordained as a priest for Western Australia. See more from Broken Rites here. Fr Brian Spillane On 19 April 2012, a Sydney court sentenced Brian Joseph Spillane to nine years jail (with parole after five years) for indecently assaulting three young girls when he was working as a Catholic priest (in the Vincentian religious order) in New South Wales in the 1970s and ’80s. He is awaiting  further court proceedings for alleged sexual offences against boys. See the Broken Rites story here. Br Peter Spratt Marist Brother Peter Richard Spratt (born 2 August 1937) used to work at Marist College in Canberra. In 1996 he pleaded guilty to two acts of indecency against a 14-year-old boy from the school. The incidents occurred in 1979 at a Marist Brothers’ residence at Wategoes Beach, Byron Bay, NSW, and at a holiday centre in Jindabyne, NSW. A magistrate at Cooma Local Court placed Spratt on a $2,000, two-year good-behaviour bond. Brother Spratt also taught at Marist Brothers, Pagewood, Sydney. It is believed that in the 1960s he taught with the Marist Brothers at Lismore, NSW. In those years he was probably known by a “religious” name, rather than his real name. It was common for Marist Brothers to adopt a “religious” name such as Bartholomew, Ignatius, Aloysius, Xaverius, etcetera. Br Gregory Sutton Marist Brother Gregory Joseph Sutton (born 19 March 1951) taught in the 1980s at Catholic primary schools in New South Wales, where he has admitted committing numerous serious offences, including rapes of young girls and indecent assaults of young boys. He fled to the USA, where he became  principal of a Catholic school. He was extradited back to Australia, where he was jailed in 1996 for a maximum of 18 years (with parole possible after 12 years). See our story here. Fr John Sweeney Father John Gerard Patrick Sweeney, St Gerard Majella order, Parramatta  diocese, NSW, 18-27 months jail.  See our story here. Fr Tadeusz Swiatkowski Father Tadeusz Swiatkowski, of the Society of Christ (a Polish religious order in Australia), appeared in a Brisbane court in 1994 for soliciting a prostitute (he later moved to Mayfield West, Newcastle, NSW). Alan Swingler Alan Edward Swingler (born in September 1941) was originally a Marist Brother but left the Marist order and became a lay teacher of religious studies at St Joseph’s Christian Brothers’ College, Geelong, Victoria, where he stayed for 18 years. In 1996 Swingler, aged 54, was sentenced to seven years jail (minimum of five years) on one incident of buggery, three incidents of gross indecency and nine of indecent assault of boys. Outside the court, the mother of one victim said that, even after the family complained to the school about the crimes, the school kept Swingler on its staff. Br Colgan Taylor In Brisbane District Court on 29 November 2002, Marist Brother Colgan Taylor (then aged 80 and living in Sydney) was sentenced to 18 months’ jail after pleading guilty to four counts of indecent dealing with two young girls in central Queensland between 1979 and 1983. One girl was aged five or six when abused. The second victim was intellectually disabled and aged between eight and 11 when abused. The abuse was not reported until the youngest victim came forward in May 2002. Taylor was ordered to serve four months of the sentence, with the remainder suspended. Br George Taylor, De La Salle After one of his victims finally contacted the police, Albert Matthew Taylor (known as “Brother George“) pleaded guilty in the Sydney District Court on 8 August 1995 to two incidents of indecently assaulting an 11-year-old boy. The assaults occurred in 1967 at De La Salle College, Revesby, Sydney. Taylor, aged 79 in 1995, was placed on a three-year good behaviour bond. Taylor’s other schools included De La Salle College, Orange, NSW. See the Broken Rites story here. Br Peter Toomey Christian Brother Peter John Toomey pleaded guilty in 2005 to offences against 10 boys at Trinity Regional College in Brunswick, Melbourne, in the 1970s. He was finally sentenced to  4 years 3 months jail, with parole after 2 years 6 months. Originally the sentence was 27 months jail (with parole after six months) but this was increased after an appeal by the prosecution, on behalf of the victims. See our story here. Fr John Treacy Father John Leslie Treacy (born 30 October 1943) was ordained on 19 May 1972 and belongs to the Sandhurst diocese in northern Victoria, where his original parishes included Tatura, Beechworth, Tallangatta, Wodonga and Rushworth. In 1993 he pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting a boy from one of his parishes and was given a non-custodial sentence (good-behaviour bond). The Sandhurst diocese later arranged for Treacy to move to Queensland, where Queensland bishops accepted him to minister in parishes and as a hospital chaplain, while he continued to be officially listed as a priest of the Sandhurst diocese. Fr Adrian Van Klooster Father Adrian Richard Van Klooster, Western Australia and NSW, was sentenced in 2003 in W.A. to 8 yrs jail for offences against boys and girls. He is eligible for parole but no minimum period was specified. See our story here. Paul Van Ruth, a former Brother On 4 March 2011 Peter Paul VAN RUTH, of Adelaide, was jailed after he pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting two boys in 1969 while he was a religious Brother at Salesian College, “Rupertswood”, Sunbury, Victoria. See the Broken Rites story here. Br Geoffrey Veness Marist Brother Geoffrey Sydney Veness (born 30 September 1953) was sentenced to 12 months  jail (suspended) after pleading guilty to offences against a boy who was a pupil at St Augustine’s College, Cairns, Queensland. Br Keith William Weston Christian Brother Keith William Weston, Melbourne, was sentenced to 30 months jail (suspended) for offences against boys. See our court story here. Also, see an article by a Weston victim here. Fr Leo Wright Father Leo Daniel Wright, Brisbane archdiocese, was jailed for 3 yrs (1995) and 18 months (1997) for offences against girls and a boy. See our story here. The above list is confined to Broken Rites cases — that is, criminal prosecutions in which Broken Rites Australia gives support to victims either before or after the court proceedings. For civil out-of-court cases, see Section B, below. And Sections A and B are confined to priests and religious brothers (including trainees). For lay teachers in church schools, see some examples in Section F, at the bottom of this page.Section B: Out-of-court civil cases, researched by Broken Rites As well as the above-listed criminal prosecutions (conducted by the police), a victim can take out-of-court civil action against the Catholic Church authorities for having inflicted the offender upon the victim. This can force the church to acknowledge the harm that has been done to the victim’s life (including harm done by the church’s tradition of cover-up). This can give the victim a sense of empowerment. Sometimes this action can force the church to give a written apology to the victim. Perhaps, the church might even offer to reach a private settlement with the victim, as the church often regards this as a cheap way of protecting the church’s public image and its assets. Here are a few examples of cases (researched by Broken Rites), in which victims could tackle the church authorities for justice. Fr Bert Adderley In February 2005, the Bunbury diocese in Western Australia admitted that it was dealing with complaints that Reverend Dr Bertram Richard Adderley, Ph.D., B.A, sexually abused boys in the 1960s and ’70s. According to Broken Rites research, Bertram Adderley had been a lay teacher at the Christian Brothers’ Aquinas College in Perth in the 1950s before entering the priesthood. He served as a priest in the Bunbury diocese from 1959 to 1974. In the early 1960s (after working as a priest at the Narrogin parish), Dr Adderley oversaw Catholic education in the Bunbury diocese but in 1965, following complaints about sexual abuse, he was relegated, out-of-sight, to parishes at Mannup and Manjimup. In 1975, he left parish ministry, “on leave”. One alleged victim from Manjimup says that Adderlely persisted in seeing him after 1975, visiting him at his Catholic high school and taking him on excursions (including nude bathing) until 1979. Brother Pascal Alford Christian Brother Donald Paschal Alford worked at St Augustine’s orphanage, Geelong Victoria. See our story here. Fr David Anderson After action by Broken Rites, the Lismore Catholic diocese in northern New South Wales has apologized to two families who complained about sexual abuse committed by Father Clarence David Anderson (also known as Fr David Anderson). One complaint concerned two brothers, aged 14 and 9, who encountered Anderson while he was ministering in Macksville, including Nambucca Heads (on the mid-north coast), in 1966-68. The boys’ father had died, so their mother allowed this priest to “befriend” the boys, because the boys “needed a father”. Another complaint concerned two brothers, aged 9 and 15, who encountered Anderson when he ministered in the Tweed Heads parish (near the Queensland border) in 1969. These latter two brothers, likewise, were from a fatherless family; and they, too, were “befriended” by Anderson. Fr John Ayers, Salesian order The Catholic religious order of Salesian Fathers has  made an out-of-court settlement with a former schoolboy who encountered Father Jack Ayers while attending Salesian College, “Rupertswood”, near Melbourne, when aged 12 to 13. See more here. Fr Herbert Balding In 1997, after consulting Broken Rites, a Melbourne woman (Noreen) complained to the Melbourne Catholic archdiocese about a hospital chaplain (Father Herbert Balding, a member of the Jesuit order). In 1978, when she was a married woman aged in her thirties, Father Balding targeted Noreen sexually while she was in a vulnerable state, seriously ill, as a in-patient at Melbourne’s Mercy Hospital. The abuse disrupted her recovery and her later life. The archdiocese complaints commissioner (Peter O’Callaghan, QC) accepted the complaint and ruled that Noreen had indeed been sexually abused by Balding. Br Bede (St John of God order) Former inmates of four homes operated by the Hospitaller Order of St John of God have complained to police or the Catholic Church and/or Broken Rites that they were sexually assaulted by Brother Bede Donnellan (real name John Joseph Donnellan). Separate complaints came from four locations — Chelthenham, Greensborough and Lilydale (all in Melbourne) and the Granada Hostel in Ashgrove (Brisbane). Bede Donnellan died in 1995. See more about the St John of God order here. Br. C. Beedon, Melbourne Broken Rites is researching Christian Brother C. Beedon, who taught in the late 1960s and early 1970s at St Mary’s boys’ parish primary school (next-door to Christian Brothers College) in East St Kilda, Melbourne. Br Luke Beltram, De La Salle Two families (one in Victoria and one in New South Wales) have complained about Brother Luke Beltram, a religious teacher in the Catholic order of De La Salle Brothers. Luke Francis Beltram was born about 1947. His teaching appointments included De La Salle schools at Dandenong VIC, Dubbo NSW, Malvern VIC, East Bentleigh VIC and (finally) Castle Hill NSW. He died on 10 March 2000, aged 53. See our story here. Br Benildus, De La Salle order The Catholic order of De La Salle Brothers has accepted and settled  complaints by former students (now elderly) who were sexually abused by “Brother Benildus” at De La Salle’s Oakhill College in Castle Hill (north-west of Sydney) in the 1950s. This senior Brother was born as Laurence de Moulin but adopted the religious name “Brother Benildus Joseph” in emulation of a 19th century “Saint Benildus”. At Oakhill (a boarding school), he taught primary-school boys at Year Six level or thereabouts, and he supervised the boarders, including in their dormitory. Benildus later worked at St Bernard’s Junior College, “Clairvaux” (which was then a boarding school in Katoomba NSW), where (according to former pupils) he was again sexually intrusive. Br “Bertinus” In 2010, Australian Marist Brothers held a ceremony to “praise and congratulate” six long-serving Brothers — including a one who was formerly known as Brother “Bertinus”.  A few months earlier, the Marists’ Australian administration had apologised to three ex-pupils for an encounter which each of them allegedly had with Brother “Bertinus” many years ago in their school days. See the Broken Rites report here. Fr Tony Bongiorno The Melbourne Catholic archdiocese commissioner on sexual abuse, Mr Peter O’Callagahan, QC, has upheld complaints that Father Anthony Salvatore Bongiorno sexually abused boys who were under his supervision. Fr Anthony Bongiorno was the Parish Priest in charge of St Ambrose’s parish, Brunswick, Melbourne, in the 1980s and early ’90s. See our story here. Fr Glenn Boyd, Wagga Wagga diocese In 2004, Father Glenn Boyd left the priesthood of  the Wagga Wagga Catholic diocese in southern  New South Wales after issues had been raised  about aspects of his youth work. See more here. BoysTown (De La Salle Brothers, Queensland) In 2011 the Catholic religious order of De La Salle Brothers agreed to offer an out-of-court settlement to a former pupil, who lived in the 1960s at BoysTown (a Catholic institution for disadvantaged boys) in Beaudesert, Queensland. Similar complaints have come from others who were there in later decades. See more here. Fr John  Byrne, S.J. The Catholic Jesuit order in Australia has acknowledged that a Jesuit priest, Fr John Byrne, engaged in “problematic behaviour” against pupils while he was teaching  at Xavier College, Melbourne, in 1971. See more from Broken Rites here. Fr Joseph Caldwell Two women, who do not know each other, have complained in Western Australia about being molested by Father Joseph Caldwell. He was a member of the Salvatorian order of Catholic priests, which is also known as the Society of the Divine Saviour. One complainant said she was abused in 1977, aged 8, and the other said she was abused in 1984 and 1985, aged 9 and 10. Both women told Broken Rites that the abuse (and the secrecy about it) adversely affected their personal development into their adolescence and adulthood. Born in Ireland, Caldwell had worked as a priest in many countries before coming to  Australia. His parishes in Western Australia in the 1970s and ’80s included Greenmount, Dampier, Wickham and Midland. In 1980-81 he served in Western Australia’s Bunbury diocese. West Australian police have ascertained that Caldwell left Australia in the late 1980s and later died in Ireland. Br Brendan Carroll In 2005 and 2006, after action by Broken Rites, the Australian head of the De La Salle Brothers apologized to two women for sexual abuse by Brother Brendan George Carroll when they were young girls. See our story here. Fr Tom Carroll, Melbourne Broken Rites is researching Father Thomas Carroll, of the Melbourne archdiocese, after complaints by former altar boys who were at Caulfield South (Holy Cross parish) in the 1960s. Carroll’s earlier parishes included Mansfield and Epping, etc. He died in 1975. Fr Dermot Casey, Brisbane Broken Rites is researching Father Dermot Casey, who has ministered in the Brisbane archdiocese. His parishes included Cannon Hill, Beenleigh and Salisbury. See more from Broken Rites here. Chevalier College, Bowral, NSW Some ex-pupils of Chevalier College (a Catholic high school near Bowral in southern New South Wales) are still recalling allegations that a Catholic priest behaved indecently towards young boys at the school in the late 1980s. This school is owned by a religious order, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. See more here. Br Cleophas Broken Rites is researching Marist Brother Cleophas Simmons (born on 26 March 1926), whose real name was John Edward Simmons (known to his family as Eddie). He became a trainee Brother at age 16 and spent his whole working life as a Marist Brother: at North Fitzroy, Bulleen, Templestowe and Sale in Victoria; Mount Gambier in South Australia; and Forbes, Leeton and Griffith in New South Wales. Br Colmcille, Trappist monk, Melbourne Born in Ireland as Thomas Clifford, he adopted the Gaelic “religious” name Colmcille (pronounced Kollum-Kill) in honour of an ancient Irish missionary, Saint Columba (in Gaelic, also spelt as Colum Cille). Until 1974, Colmcille lived at Tarrawarra Abbey in Yarra Glen, east of Melbourne. This is the Australian address of the Cistercian  Monks — also known as the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (O.C.S.O.) or the order of Trappist monks. Two women, who do not know each other, have complained (separately) that they were digitally raped, at the age of nine, by Brother Colmcille when their families (and others) used to visit this monastery about 1969-1970. Brother Colmcille later returned to Ireland, leaving damaged victims in Australia. The Cistercian order has apologised for harm done by   Colmcille. Fr Ernie Conlan, MSC order A Tasmanian family has recently learned that three of its daughters were sexually abused by Father Ernest Conlan, a member of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSC), when they were young girls between 1958 and 1963. Conlan was then the parish priest at Kings Meadows, near Launceston. As Conlan was a “friend” of the family, the young girls felt that they could not tell their parents about the abuse at the time, but they have disclosed the abuse in recent years, five decades after the events. In 1965, Conlan went to Adelaide (at the Sacred Heart parish, Hindmarsh). In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a chaplain at St Vincent’s Boys’ Home, Westmead, in western Sydney. Monsignor Joseph Conway The Port Pirie Catholic diocese, which includes the northern parts of South Australia, has acknowledged that Monsignor Arthur Joseph Conway sexually abused boys. Conway, who was evidently called by his middle name (Joseph), died in 1975 but victims are still feeling the hurt. Conway was given an elaborate grave and victims protested about this. Monsignor A.J. Conway’s later years were spent around Quorn, Orroroo and Carrieton (all east of Port Augusta). Ronald Conway, Catholic psychologist This Melbourne therapist was highly regarded by Catholic Church leaders and he received many of his clients through Catholic hospitals and other Catholic agencies. He allegedly touched some of his young male clients sexually. These clients have grounds for demanding, at least, an apology from the church authorities. Ron Conway also acted for the church authorities in “screening” men who wished to become trainee priests in Victoria. See more from Broken Rites here. Fr Peter Creede, CM Broken Rites Australia is investigating Father Peter Philip Creede, of the Catholic Vincentian order (the “Congregation of the Mission”). Born in Ireland (with seven siblings who became nuns or priests), he was ordained in Sydney. He worked at St Stanislaus College, Bathurst (New South Wales), followed by parishes in Southport and Wandal (Queensland), Ashfield (NSW) and Malvern (Victoria). Fr Pat Cusack, Canberra After action by Broken Rites, the Canberra-Goulburn archdiocese admitted that Father Patrick Cusack sexually assaulted primary school girls in St Matthew’s parish in Page, a Canberra suburb, in the 1970s. See our story here. Fr Denis Daly This Irish-born priest belonged to the Sydney archdiocese, but after he got into trouble with Sydney police, the church transferred him to Western Australia and then allowed him to roam the world, thereby putting more children at risk. One boy victim in Ireland died by suicide. See our story here. Fr Bernard Day Father Bernard Maxwell Day, of the Melbourne Catholic archdiocese, lived in 1961-63 in a flat at St Catherine’s girls’ orphanage (conducted by the Sisters of Mercy) in Geelong, where he acted as the “chaplain”, giving the girls “sex education”. Some of these women are still trying to repair their damaged lives. See our story here. Br Wilfred De Cruz The Catholic religious order of De La Salle Brothers has made amends with two former pupils of a De La Salle secondary school at Scarborough, Queensland (now called Southern Cross Catholic College). The ex-pupils have complained about being indecently assaulted by Brother Wilfred D’Cruz. See our story here. Fr Mark Devoy A number of women, now in mature age, have provided evidence that Fr Mark Devoy SM (from the Society of Mary religious order) committed sexual assaults on them when they were young school girls in the 1950s and 1960s. These victims lived in different parts of Australia; they did not know each other; and the attacks happened in various parishes. Devoy was protected by the Society of Mary while he worked in their parishes in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth (and also, previously,  in New Zealand). One woman says some of the assaults occurred during Confession. Br Richard Doheny, Sydney Broken Rites Australia is investigating this member of the Catholic order of Patrician Brothers in New South Wales. He was born (real name John Doheny) on 3 September 1935 in Ireland (at Balingarry, Thurles, County Tipperary), the third youngest of twelve children. He became a Patrician Brother in Ireland (becoming “Brother Richard”) and arrived in Australia in 1956, aged 21. He lived and worked (at primary and junior secondary levels) in Patrician Brothers schools in western Sydney (at Fairfield, Blacktown and Granville) until 2009. Fr Patrick Doherty, Armidale Diocese, NSW The Catholic Church’s professional standards office in New South Wales has received a complaint from an elderly man who says he is still upset about having been sexually abused by Father P.G. Doherty when the complainant was a schoolboy in the Armidale diocese (in north-western NSW) in 1944-49. The boy was attending a Catholic parish primary school (aged seven to twelve) in Bundeera (between Armidale and Inverell). This school is closed now and the Bundeera parish (St Mary of the Angels) is administered now from Uralla. In 2008, when this complaint was being considered by the Armidale diocese, the diocese was acting evasively, which is a frequent response from church authorities. Father Patrick Doherty’s other parishes included Walcha, Bingara, and Warialda.  This priest died in the 1950s and is said to be buried in the Armidale cemetery. It is common for a church victim to be still upset by childhood abuse many decades many years after the original cover-up, as shown by a similar case here. Fr Frank Donovan, Redemptorist priest The Catholic Church’s Professional Standards Office in New South Wales has “accepted the veracity” of two complaints about Father Francis Donovan, a priest of the Redemptorist Fathers (also called the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer). Two women, acting separately, had complained that Donovan molested them when they were young girls in the late 1970s in buildings attached to  the Sacred Heart parish church in Campbell’s Hill, Maitland. See our story here. Fr Rex Donohoe In 2007, after action by Broken Rites, Archbishop Adrian Doyle of Hobart gave a written apology to a former altar boy of Fr Rex Donohoe. The archdiocese accepted a complaint that Donohue abused this victim in the Kingston parish in Tasmania in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Donohue specialised in the “training” of altar boys and this victim says that he was not the only altar boy who was abused by Donohoe. Donohoe established the Australian “Guild of St Stephen”, an organisation for altar boys. Donohue was later at Tasmania’s Lenah Valley parish and was also the Hobart diocesan master of ceremonies. Fr Bob Drake Broken Rites is researching Father Robert Drake, of the Sandhurst diocese in northern Victoria. In the 1970s his parishes included Wangaratta and Wodonga in Victoria’s north-east. After that, he worked outside the diocese — at a seminary in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s and at the Banyo seminary in Brisbane, Queensland, in the 1990s. Back in Victoria again, he was at the Chiltern parish in 1998 and at St Joseph’s parish, Quarry Hill (in Bendigo) from 1999 to 2006. Br K.E. Duckworth, Melbourne Broken Rites is researching Christian Brother Keith Evin Duckworth, who touched boys inappropriately at the  Parade College junior campus  (for years 7 and 8) in Alphington, Melbourne, in the 1970s. Fr Aidan Duggan A Sydney man (“John”) contacted Broken Rites and also lodged a formal complaint with the Catholic Church’s “Towards Healing” office in 2002. He was a 14-year-old altar boy in the Bass Hill parish (near Bankstown) in Sydney in 1975, when he became a victim of Fr Aidan Duggan. Duggan, a priest of the Benedictine order, had previously been in Scotland. He was recruited by the Sydney archdiocese to work in Sydney parishes. John said Duggan sexually abused him (including oral and anal incidents) frequently throughout his adolescence. The abuse convinced John that he (John) was naturally homosexual and it was many years before he realized that he was really heterosexual. This confusion, he said, disrupted his adolescent development and adversely affected his two marriages. This led to a psychological crisis and the loss of his high-profile job. In 2002, through Towards Healing, the archdiocese offered John an out-of-court settlement of $30,000. John decided, instead, to sue the archdiocese in the New South Wales Supreme Court for a much larger sum for damages to cover his loss of his considerable professional earnings. In 2006 the Supreme Court granted permission for John’s case to proceed in court, but the archdiocese successfully appealed to the NSW Court Appeal. In May 2007 the Appeal Court stopped John’s legal action and ordered him to pay the church’s legal costs. The church paid massive fees to its lawyers to win this legal victory over John but the church regarded these fees as money well spent, expecting that this precedent would help to demoralise other church-abuse victims. According to Broken Rites research, Fr Aidan Duggan’s later parishes in Sydney included Gymea, Camperdown and Drummoyne before he retired in 1995. He died in 2004. John believes that he was not Duggan’s only victim. Archbishop James Duhig Three women, who do not know each other, have complained to Broken Rites that they were sexually abused in Queensland by Archbishop James Duhig when they were young. For example, one woman said she was assaulted by Duhig when she was living in the Brisbane Cathedral parish in 1941 aged six. James Duhig was Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane for 50 years until 1965. Br Wayne Duncan After action by Broken Rites, the Marist Brothers in New South Wales have apologised to a victim of Brother Wayne Duncan. The victim, then aged 12, was a border at St Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill, in Sydney. Duncan (born in 1956) taught there from 1982 to 1989. Duncan targeted this boy while knowing that the boy was estranged from difficult parents. Duncan’s abuse seriously disrupted the victim’s later life. Duncan taught previously at Marist Brothers in Parramatta and later at Ashgrove (Brisbane), Canberra and Lidcombe (Sydney). Br Wilfred Eastmure Christian Brother Wilfred Eastmure worked at St Augustine’s orphanage and St Vincent’s orphanage in Victoria. See our story here. Br M.J. Esler Broken Rites is researching Brother Maurice Esler, from the Victoria-Tasmania province of the Christian Brothers. Brother Eunan or “Union” The Catholic order of De La Salle Brothers has settled with some victims of Brother John McHugh, whose religious name was “Brother Eunan“, which some of his ex-pupils pronounce as yoon-yon as in “trade union”. (There was once a Saint Eunan in Ireland.) Born in Ireland, Eunan McHugh was one of a significant number of Irish-born religious personnel who surfaced in Australia. In the early 1950s, Eunan McHugh taught and supervised boys at two schools in Katoomba, west of Sydney: “Clairvaux”” (the junior school of St Bernard’s College, Katoomba); and St Canice’s parish primary school, Katoomba. At Clairvaux, a  boarding school, Brother “Union”  was in charge of a dormitory and he himself slept next to the dormitory. Later in the 1950s, he taught at De La Salle College in Cronulla, in Sydney’s south (and this school, too, had boarders). Br P.T. Farrell, St Virgil’s College, Hobart In 2006, the Christian Brothers made a civil  settlement with a former student of St Virgil’s College in Hobart, Tasmania. This ex-student had told Broken Rites in 1993 that, when he was a boarder at St Virgil’s (aged seven to eight) in the mid-1950s, he was sexually assaulted by Brother Patrick Timothy Farrell. This Brother, who was nicknamed “Jacky” Farrell at St Virgil’s, was in charge of the junior dormitory for several years until mid-1957. After that, he worked in various Christian Brothers institutions in Sydney. Marist Brother Stephen Farrell The Marist Brothers head office in Sydney has settled complaints about child-abuse involving Marist Brother Stephen Farrell who died in 2004, aged 81. He taught for many years in New South Wales and Queensland. See more here. “Father F“, New South Wales The church authorities covered up for “Father F” in the Armidale diocese (in northern New South Wales) from the early 1980s onwards after receiving complaints about him abusing children, and in 1989 the church authorised him to transfer to parishes in the Parramatta diocese (near Sydney), giving him access to more children. According to a church document, Father F has admitted that he committed sexual acts upon children. The church has paid compensation to two of these complainants for their damaged lives but the victims’ families are still feeling the hurt. The cover-up continued for 30 years until it was exposed by the media in 2012. Read more here. Br Fintan, De La Salle schools Brother Fintan Dwyer worked in De La Salle schools around Australia. Various ex-pupils have complained that Brother Fintan touched them sexually. His birth name was Louis Victor Dwyer. “Brother Fintan” was his “religious” name. Brother Fintan (not to be confused with a colleague, Brother Finian Allman) toured De La Salle schools, recruiting boys as future Brothers. He died in 1990. See our story here. Fr Gerry Fitzgerald, Melbourne Broken Rites Australia is researching Father Gerard Fitzgerald, who spent 51 years as a priest in the Melbourne Archdiocese before retiring in 2006. In one of his early parishes (Coburg in 1964), there was a police investigation into sexual offences against children. See more here. Fr Dominic Fitzmaurice After action by Broken Rites, the Australian head of the Dominican Fathers apologised to a woman for sexual assaults committed by Father Dominic Fitzmaurice in Our Lady of Graces parish at Carina in Brisbane in 1972, when she was aged 12. See our story here. Fr Bill Fleming, Boys Town, NSW, 1979 During the trial of Father Paul Raymond Evans in Sydney District Court in July 2008, one of Evans’s victims (from Boys Town school near Sydney) told the court that, after he was molested by Evans in 1979, the assault was reported to the school administration. The boy said he was later told by the school’s head, Father William Fleming (a member of the Salesian order) to forget about the incident because “men have urges”. The court heard that Father Fleming allegedly assaulted another boy, who had also made allegations against Evans. Fleming was the rector of Boys Town during the 1970s. Fr Leo Flynn The Melbourne archdiocese has apologized to a woman for sexual abuse committed by Fr Leo Flynn, a priest of the Jesuit order. At the time of the abuse, Flynn was working in a parish which the Jesuit Fathers were staffing on behalf of the Melbourne archdiocese. At first, the woman complained to the Jesuit order (the Society of Jesus) but the Jesuit administration ignored her.  Broken Rites then helped the woman to present her case to the Melbourne archdiocese. The archdiocese accepted the woman’s account and apologised (this was reported in the Melbourne “Herald Sun” on 8 May 2000). Br Greg Fogarty Broken Rites is researching Christian Brother Leo Gregory Fogarty (known as Brother GREG Fogarty) who worked at St Augustine’s boys’ orphanage (in Geelong, Victoria) from 1978 to 1985 inclusive; he became the superintendent there in 1979. See some background about St Augustine’s orphanage here. Fr Julian Fox In 2000, a Catholic order of priests in Australia (the Salesians of Don Bosco) made a  settlement with a Melbourne man (Luke, born in 1964). According to the settlement deed (of which Broken Rites has a copy), Luke alleged that “over a period of time between 1978 and 1979, whilst a student at Salesian College, Rupertswood, Sunbury [Melbourne], he was unlawfully sexually and/or physically assaulted by Fr Fox”. In 2006, six years after the settlement, Luke died, aged 42. Father Fox now has a position at the Salesian headquarters in Rome. See our story here. Fr Laurie Gallagher, Marist Fathers Broken Rites is researching Father Lawrence Gallagher, S.M. (a member of a religious order, the Society of Mary), who taught at Marist College in Burnie, Tasmania, in the 1970s and early 1980s. In the late 1980s he was at St John’s College, Woodlawn, in Lismore New South Wales. He was also a relieving minister in parishes around Australia. For example, in 1991, he was the Parish Priest in charge of St Thomas More’s parish at Margaret River (in the Bunbury diocese) in Western Australia. It is believed that he formerly served as a missionary in Japan. This Laurie Gallagher is not to be confused with a former diocesan priest of the same name in Victoria. Fr Kevin Glover, Western Australia Broken Rites is researching Father William Kevin Glover (known as Kevin Glover) who worked in the Bunbury diocese in Western Australia from 1959 to 1979 (including parishes at Esperance in the 1970s and Margaret River in the 1980s). In the 1990s, he worked at a Catholic Mission on the Pacific Island of Niue, situated to the north of New Zealand. Fr Gerald Goss Women in several parts of Australia have complained to Broken Rites that they were indecently assaulted by this priest, who was a member of the itinerant Redemptorist order, visiting countless parishes throughout Australia. His victims included housekeepers in parish presbyteries, as well as women parishioners. Br Julian Hackett Christian Brother Vincent Julian Hackett was the superintendent of St Augustine’s orphanage, Geelong, Victoria. See more from Broken Rites  here. Br “Anselm” Hallam This member of the De La Salle Brothers was born as Tom Hallam and adopted the “religious” name Anselm (sometimes also spelt Anselem), which was the name of a medieval “saint”. “Brother Anselm” Hallam taught in the late 1960s at St Joseph’s parish primary school, Malvern, in Melbourne, and also taught middle-school students at the neighbouring De La Salle College. According to numerous victims, he was a notorious molester.  He invasively mauled the genitals of his pupils. He gave “sex lessons” (really just “dirty talk”), while masturbating under his clerical frock. A female teacher, who knew what Anselm Hallam was doing, complained to the school’s head Brothers but they were not interested. Anselm Hallam died in the early 1990s, aged 92. One of his victims, who became a successful professional, has contributed an interview to the oral history collection at the National Library of Australia about his own professional career, and he included an account of his experiences at the hands of Brother Anselm Hallam. Fr John Harcombe Broken Rites is researching Father John J. Harcombe, who was ordained, about 1972, from St Paul’s Seminary for Late Vocations, in Kensington, Sydney. He ministered in the Sydney archdiocese (and also in the Broken Bay diocese, north of Sydney) at parishes in Lewisham, Gosford, Auburn South, Lakemba, Epping, Asquith and Kincumber. Fr Guy Hartcher In March 1994, the Catholic order of Vincentian Fathers (officially called the Congregation of the Mission) signed a civil settlement with a former student of St Stanislaus College in Bathurst, New South Wales. This student was at the school in 1971, when he was aged 14. In the settlement Deed of Release, the Trustees of the Vincentian Fathers state that this agreement is “in full and final settlement” of all or any rights and actions that the ex-student may have “against the Trustees, Father Guy Hartcher or any servant or agent of the Trustees.” See our story here. Br Bernard Hartman A member of the Marianist religious order, Brother Bernard Hartman (born about 1939), has written an apology to an Australian woman (born 1964) who alleged that he sexually abused her when she was a child in Melbourne in the 1970s. In 1985 Hartman moved to the USA, where the Marianists have allowed him to remain in this religious order. Br Bernard Hayes A man, “Roger”, contacted Broken Rites in 2004, stating that he had been sexually abused by Brother Bernard Robert Hayes at the Christian Brothers College preparatory school in Alphington, Melbourne, in 1969. Roger described how the abuse had damaged his psychological development and wrecked his marriage. Broken Rites advised Roger about how to deal with the Catholic Church professional standards office (“Towards Healing”). After much evasiveness, the Christian Brothers’ Melbourne headquarters accepted a report by a church psychologist and  gave Roger a letter of apology and eventually (in 2006) signed a civil settlement with Roger. Brother Hayes’s previous schools were: St Monica’s Boys’ School, Moonee Ponds VIC, 1942-44; St Kevin’s College, Toorak VIC, 1944-55; Rostrevor College, Adelaide, 1955-60; and St Joseph’s College, Pascoe Vale VIC, 1960-66. When Roger was abused at Alphington in 1969, Brother Hayes was aged 47.  The Alphington campus, which comprised Grades 7 and 8, was a preparatory school for Parade College, Bundoora, Melbourne. Br P.R. Heslin, Melbourne The Christian Brothers have acknowledged sexual offences that were committed against boys by Brother Robert Heslin in Melbourne. Heslin’s various schools included: Our Lady of Mount Carmel College, Middle Park; St Joseph’s, Pascoe Vale; and St Bernard’s College, Essendon. Br “Callixtus” Hogan Broken Rites has helped three former schoolchildren (two males and one female)   to extract a settlement from the Marist Brothers regarding incidents that allegedly occurred in New South Wales in the 1960s while Brother Kevin “Calixtus” Hogan was the principal of St Francis de Sales College (in Leeton) and Red Bend Catholic College (in Forbes). See more here. Marist Br. “Crispin” Hopson Broken Rites is investigating Marist Brother Kevin Nicholas Hopson (religious name Brother “Crispin”, called after Saint Crispin). Born on 6 February 1933, he worked at Marist Brothers schools in Sydney (Mosman, Daceyville, Lidcombe, Hunters Hill and Kogarah), as well as at Marist College, Canberra. Marist Brother Edward Hosey at Coogee NSW The Marist Brothers in New South Wales have made a small civil settlement with a former pupil (“Max“), who was at Marcellin Junior College (a primary school for boys in years 5 and 6) in 1973. This campus, which was then at 160 Coogee Bay Road, Coogee (Sydney), was a feeder school for the secondary-level Marcellin College at Randwick. Max made a formal, signed statement to the NSW police on 24 June 2003, alleging that he was mauled sexually by Brother Edward (his mathematics teacher) almost daily during 5th Grade, when he was aged 10. Brother Edward John Hosey (born 4 February 1911) has died and therefore the police cannot charge him. Max says the corrupt circumstances of this church-abuse disrupted his education and his adolescence, leaving him with serious difficulties in adulthood.  In August 2003 the Marist Brothers promptly accepted Max’s complaint and arranged  a civil settlement, although this does not make up for the disruption to Max’s life. Other victims of Hosey have contacted Broken Rites. Fr Cuthbert Hoy, MSC In early 2002, a woman (“Anne”) contacted Broken Rites, complaining that, when she was aged six in 1963, she was sexually assaulted on several occasions by Father Cuthbert Hoy, in the sacristy of “Our Lady of the Sacred Heart” church at Henley Beach in Adelaide. Hoy was a priest of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart order, which conducted the Henley Beach parish, plus some other parishes around Australia. By 1966, Hoy had moved to a Hobart parish, also conducted by the MSC order. Broken Rites advised Anne about preparing a case for the Catholic Church’s “Towards Healing” process. The MSC order gave Anne a written apology and, in 2003, it made a settlement with her. Fr James Hughes This priest (also known as Fr Jamie Hughes or Fr Jim Hughes) was born in Ireland on 15 May 1920 and was ordained in 1946. Father James Hughes ministered briefly in Hobart in 1947-49 and then in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese in New South Wales from 1949 until 1990. In 1977-81, he was a chaplain at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital, Waratah (a suburb of Newcastle, NSW). In August 2002, a woman notified the New South Wales police that she had been indecently assaulted by Hughes while she was a patient at this hospital in March 1981. After beginning an investigation, detectives found that Hughes had died in 1996 and he therefore could not be prosecuted. Backed by Broken Rites, the woman then approached the Catholic Church’s “Towards Healing” office. A private investigator, hired by the church, confirmed to Towards Healing that evidence “exists to support the complaint.” See our story here. Fr Kevin Johnston, Western Australia Born in Ireland, Father Kevin Daniel Johnston served as a priest in Western Australia’s Bunbury diocese from 1959 until 1997, when he retired to Ireland. The West Australian newspaper (February 16 and 26, 2005) revealed that Johnston was facing child-sex allegations. A man (Alan) alleged that at the age of nine or 10 in the early 1970s, when he was serving as an altar boy in morning Masses at Bunbury’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, the cathedral parish priest Kevin Johnston indecently mauled him on several occasions  in a dressing room. The priest also allegedly forced the boy to indecently touch the priest. Unable to tell his devout parents, the boy became a grumpy and rebellious teenager, ending up with a hard-drug addiction. In his thirties, trying to mend his life, Alan finally complained to the Bunbury diocese. Fr Johnston then gave Alan a written apology, dated 26 August 1997, and soon retired to Ireland.  In November 2004, the Bunbury diocese offered Alan a small payout to settle the complaint but Alan rejected this amount as insufficient to help his recovery. After the February 2005 publicity about Johnston, two more men reported that they were molested by Father Johnston, one during confession and the other more than 20 times as he served as an altar boy at the Bunbury cathedral. Broken Rites research indicates that during the last stages of his career, from the mid-1970s to 1997, Johnston ministered in parishes at Boyup Brook, Manjimup, Narrogin and Leschenhault/Australind. Monsignor Penn Jones After action by Broken Rites, the Melbourne archdiocese apologised in 2005 to two men who were sexually abused by Monsignor Penn Harold Jones (of the Melbourne cathedral parish) while they were schoolboys in the 1960s. Jones, who was an accountant before entering the priesthood, became the Chancellor of the Melbourne archdiocese. See our story here. Fr Charles Joyce, OFM Broken Rites is researching Father Charles Joyce, a member of the Order of Friars Minor (Franciscans), who was working  at Padua College (a secondary school conducted by the Franciscan order) in Kedron, Brisbane, in the late 1960s. Fr Clem Kilby, Tasmania The Hobart Archdiocese has accepted and settled a complaint from a woman who said that she was sexually assaulted by Fr Clement Kilby. This priest had enjoyed a prestigious ranking in Tasmania. In the late 1970s, he worked in St Mary’s Cathedral parish in Hobart (where the priest in charge at the time was Rev. Geoffrey Hylton Jarrett, who eventually became the bishop of Lismore, New South Wales). Later, Kilby was given the rank of Episcopal Vicar for Welfare and was director of the Catholic Church’s Centacare Family Services in Hobart during the 1980s and 1990s. Ironically, Kilby also participated in a church committee that dealt with professional standards, including issues of sexual abuse — an obvious conflict of interest. He died in early 2009. Br Clim Kissane The Victoria-Tasmania province of the Christian Brothers has signed a civil settlement with a male former pupil of Brother Clim Kissane. Brother Kissane taught at various schools including: St Joseph’s College in Geelong;  St Virgil’s College in Hobart; St Joseph’s College in Pascoe Vale (Melbourne); Warrnambool Christian Brothers College (now called Emmanuel College) in Victoria; and St Joseph’s Technical College, South Melbourne. Br P.N. Lennox, Sydney In June 2012 the Christian Brothers organisation in Australia signed a settlement with a former pupil of Christian Brothers College, Manly (in Sydney), who attended this school as a 13-year-old boy about 1973.  According to the settlement deed, this ex-pupil alleges that he was “unlawfully assaulted by Brother Peter Norman Lennox, the principal of the school” and that consequently  he “has sustained loss, damage and injuries that may require specialist counselling and/or other therapy”. [The former CBC Manly is now called St Paul’s Catholic College, Manly.] Marist Br. Leon Mackey The Marist Brothers harboured “Brother Leon” (real name Noel Mackey, born on 31 July 1922) while he was sexually abusing Catholic schoolboys in Sydney and Newcastle until he suddenly left the Marist Order in 1955. He then went to Queensland and changed his surname. By 2012, the Marist Brothers had issued private apologies (plus financial settlements) to five of Brother Leon’s victims. Fr Bernard Mackin After action by Broken Rites, the Melbourne archdiocese has apologized to a female victim of this priest. She encountered the priest in the 1970s when she was 16. Marist Brothers Hamilton, Newcastle, NSW In 2011 the Marist Brothers signed a settlement with a former pupil who complained about sexual abuse by  Brother Leon in the junior classes at Marist Brothers Hamilton, Newcastle, NSW, in the early 1950s. Brother Leon (real name Noel Mackey, born 31 July 1922) left the Marist Order in late 1955, changed his name to Noel Desmond Dowling and worked in administration for Mount Isa Mines, Queensland, until 1983. Br “Norbert” Mathieson This Marist Brother (real name Joseph Eric Mathieson), who last taught at Marist schools in Parramatta and Eastwood (in Sydney), died in 1954 but, half a century later, former students still remember him as a sex-abuser. His victims were intimidated into silence but some of the victims (now elderly) have finally told their sons and daughters about this abuse. Thus, these sons and daughters are dismayed and angry that their fathers were secretly harmed in this way. See our story here. Fr Patrick Maye The Melbourne Catholic archdiocese promised to ban this priest after accepting sexual-abuse complaints from several women but it failed to enforce the ban on him completely. See more from Broken Rites here. Br L.C. McAllen Former pupils, now advancing in age, still feel the injustice of having been abused by Christian Brother L.C. McAllen at St Patrick’s College, Strathfield, Sydney, in the early 1960s. See more from Broken Rites here here. Fr Patrick McCarthy, Wollongong NSW, 1960s Broken Rites Australia is researching Fr Patrick Thomas McCarthy, who ministered in  the Wollongong diocese in New South Wales until the early 1970s. He was one of a significant number of Irish-born clergy who have surfaced, often unaccountably, in Australia. McCarthy’s parishes included: Corrimal (St Columbkille’s parish); Thirroul (St Michael’s parish), West Wollongong (St Teresa’s); and Helensburgh (Holy Cross parish). Fr John McCulloch, Sydney region Broken Rites is researching Fr John McCulloch, who ministered around Sydney (e.g., Katoomba parish in the 1980s). At Toukley and Gwandalan (on the coast, north of Sydney) he conducted “family camps for families in need.” Br Thomas McGee After action by Broken Rites, the Victorian province of the Christian Brothers has apologised to victims of Brother William Thomas McGee. Brother McGee worked at several Christian Brothers’ orphanages: in Bindoon and Castledare in Western Australia; St Augustine’s orphanage, Geelong, Victoria; and St Vincent’s boys’ home, South Melbourne. He also worked at St Vincent’s hostel, South Melbourne. See our story here. Daniel McMahon (Christian Brother, later a priest) Broken Rites has learned that the Catholic Church has made settlements with several former pupils who encountered Brother Daniel John Virgil McMahon while he was working with the Christian Brothers in Catholic boys’ schools in Western Australia (from the 1960s to the 1980s). In the early 1990s, Brother Dan McMahon was elevated to the rank of “Father” Dan McMahon and was allowed to minister as a priest in parishes in Tasmania. See more here. Br “Laetus” Mennie Former residents of St Vincent’s Boys’ Home at Westmead (in western Sydney), which was operated by the Marist Brothers, have complained about this Marist Brother (his birth name was Joseph Michael Mennie). Brother Laetus worked at this home in 1947-49 and was the director there in 1965-67. Fr Gerard Monaghan The Canberra-Goulburn Catholic diocese has been forced to apologise to a woman who was sexually abused by a priest (Fr Gerard Monaghan) immediately after the death of her husband. See the Broken Rites story here. Fr Peter Moore, Wollongong NSW Broken Rites is researching Father Peter Moore, who was the vicar-general of the Wollongong Catholic diocese in New South Wales in the 1980s and 1990s, while he was also in charge of St John Vianney’s parish in Fairy Meadow. In the 1970s he had been at St Paul’s parish, Albion Park. Fr Brian Moran, Toowoomba diocese Two women, who do not know each other, have complained that, when they were young girls in the early 1960s, they were sexually abused by Father Brian Anthony Moran, of the Toowoomba diocese, which covers an extensive region in western Queensland. Father Brian Moran, who was born about 1929, was sometimes nicknamed Mick Moran. He ministered until 1995 throughout an area bounded by Toowoomba city, Dalby, St George, Cunnamulla, Mitchell and Miles. Fr John F. Moran, Rockkhampton & Sydney A man (“Tom”) reported to Broken Rites in 1994 that, as a 15-year-old in 1981, he was indecently assaulted by Father John Fabian Moran in the Sacred Heart parish at Yeppoon, in the Rockhampton diocese, in central Queensland. The boy’s parents were away from home and they understood that Father Moran would be supervising him. The parents had been led to believe that their child would be safe under the supervision of a Catholic priest. Father Moran visited the boy and took him on outings. After beginning with playful “wrestling”, Father Moran allegedly mauled the boy’s genitalia on several occasions, and Tom allegedly was required to masturbate the priest. The boy felt intimidated into silence and was not able to tell his Catholic parents about the assaults until he was aged 26 (he contacted Broken Rites at age 27). According to the Crimes Act, an adult who sexually mauls a young person is committing “indecent assault of a child” and the perpetrator is not allowed to claim, as a defence, that the child consented. This crime is regarded as being particularly aggravated when it is perpetrated by a person supposedly in a position of trust, such as a priest. Later in the 1980s and early 1990s, Fr John Moran was a chaplain at Rockhampton’s Emmaus College (a secondary school). About 1994-95, he was on the staff at St Paul’s Seminary for Late Vocations in Sydney and was a part-time school chaplain in Sydney. Fr Syd Morey Father Sydney Morey, a priest in the Ballarat diocese in western Victoria, sexually abused young boys in the 1960s and ’70s, including in the Horsham and Terang districts. However, the police are unable to do anything about Sid Morey now because he has died. Morey (born 9 August 1913) was originally a Marist Brother (in New South Wales) before becoming a priest. See our story here. Br. “Organ” Morgan, Monivae College, Victoria Leaders of a Catholic religious order — the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart — have apologised for sexual acts committed by Brother G.M. Morgan on boys at Monivae College at Hamilton in western Victoria in the 1960s. Students nicknamed this Brother as “Organ” Morgan because of his indecent assaults on boys’ genitals. Broken Rites possesses a written apology , which the MSC leadership gave to one ex-student, dated 22 February 1994. Morgan was not the only such offender on the Monivae College staff. Fr Gerald Moylan, northern Victoria Women have complained that Father Gerald Leo Moylan (of the Sandhurst diocese in northern Victoria) harassed them verbally about “sex” when they were schoolgirls in Wodonga, Victoria, in the 1960s (or when  women were interviewed by Moylan before a church wedding ceremony). In the 1970s and ‘80s, Moylan was in charge of the Numurkah parish and was appointed as the “spiritual director” of the Catholic Women’s League in the diocese. He was promoted to the rank of monsignor. Br Berchmans Moynahan Brother Martin Joseph Moynahan (alias Brother Berchmans), St John of  God order, died during prosecution (indecent assault at an institution  in Melbourne for boys with intellectual disabilities). See our story about the St John of God Brothers here. Fr Noel Murphy, Sydney The Sydney archdiocese has accepted a complaint from a woman about being indecently assaulted in 1974 by Father Nolan Joseph Murphy (known as Fr “Noel” Murphy), a Sydney-born priest, who was the parish priest in charge of St Augustine’s parish, Balmain, in inner-Sydney. Murphy was in that parish from the 1960s until 1988. Murrumburrah parish, NSW A man (“Peter”), born in 1961, made a lengthy, detailed written statement to a clinic of the  New South Wales Health Department in 2002, stating that in 1968-69 he was sexually assaulted by a senior parish priest (a Monsignor) in the “Our Lady of Mercy” parish at Murrumburrah, near Cootamundra, southern New South Wales (within the Canberra-Goulburn diocese). Shortly after the period of alleged abuse, the monsignor died in a road accident. Peter says his devout parents would not let him tell them that this Catholic clergyman had assaulted him. Forced into silence, Peter became estranged from his family. His later life was seriously affected. Peter is wondering if there were other victims in this parish in the late 1960s. Fr “Jerome” Myszkowski A South Australian woman (“Mandy”, born in 1945) says she is still feeling upset about having been sexually assaulted repeatedly by a Polish-born priest, Father Hieronim Myszkowski, when she was a young child in the St Francis Assisi parish in Newton, Adelaide, in 1950-54. This priest, who was known in Australia as Fr Jerome Myszkowski, was a member of the Capuchin Franciscan Friars (the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin). He befriended Mandy’s family and, from when the girl was aged 5, he made weekly visits for meals at their home, where (Mandy says) he would secretly touch Mandy’s genitalia (i.e., the crime of indecent assault). Mandy was unable to tell her parents because they believed that priests could do no wrong. Father Jerome also molested Mandy inside the church (while parishioners, including her father, were attending choir practice) and in his bedroom in the  presbytery. On the church premises, the sexual assaults of Mandy became more invasive and more criminally serious. The attacks continued for four years until Mandy was aged nine, in 1954, when Myszkowski left Adelaide to become a chaplain for the Brisbane Polish community, which was based at “Our Lady of Victories” parish in Bowen Hills, Brisbane. Mandy contacted Broken Rites in October 1993. She had written to the church authorities about Myszkowski but, she said, they were evasive. Broken Rites does not know if Mandy has achieved a successful outcome since then. Fr Martin Newbold Women in Western Australia and Victoria have complained that they were indecently assaulted by this diocesan priest when they were young girls. Newbold began in the Perth diocese but, strangely, was transferred to Melbourne, then to the Bunbury diocese in W.A., leaving victims in various parishes. Br Nicholas, Marist Brothers, 1948-50 A man (“Brian”, born in 1938) complained to the Catholic Church “Towards Healing” process in 2003 that he was sexually abused by a Brother “Nicholas” at a Marist Brothers school in Rosewater, South Australia, about 1948 when he was aged 10. Brian said he was forced to remain silent about the abuse at the time but he now realises that this code of silence was unfair, putting more children at risk. The Marist Brothers administration in Melbourne acknowledged to Brian that Brother Nicholas (real name Kevin Stanton, born 6 September 1922) taught at the Rosewater school in 1948, and he transferred to a Marist Brothers school in Thebarton (Adelaide) in 1949. In 2005, the Marist administration in Melbourne apologised to Brian for his unhappy experiences at the Rosewater school, and it made a relatively modest “ex gratia” payment to Brian to settle his complaint. Brian was not Nicholas’s only victim — in 1994 Broken Rites received a complaint from another man (“Daryl”, born 1942), saying that he was sexually abused by Brother Nicholas at the Marists’ Thebarton school, before Nicholas left there in 1950. The Marists say that Brother Nicholas left the Marist order in the early 1950s and has since died. Br Peter E. Noonan, Victoria The Christian Brothers Order has acknowledged that Brother Peter Eymard Noonan (born about 1949) used to sexually abuse young schoolboys who were in his custody. Despite this, it allowed Noonan to remain a Brother until he died in 2004, aged 55. This Noonan (not to be confused with other Noonans in the Order) was offending from the very start of his teaching career — at St Mary’s boys’ school, St Kilda (in inner-Melbourne) in the late 1960s. He later taught at St Kevin’s College (Toorak). In 1985 he went to CBC  St Kilda, where he became the headmaster in 1987. Fr John O’Callaghan, Adelaide After action by Broken Rites, the Adelaide Catholic diocese has made civil settlements with former altar boys of this priest. The incidents occurred in 1969-71 at St Monica’s parish, Walkerville, where O’Callaghan ministered from the mid-1960s till about 1981. Previously, O’Callaghan had been at Adelaide’s Salisbury parish. Fr John O’Callaghan, Melbourne Several people have complained about being abused (when they were youngsters) by Father John Ignatius O’Callaghan, of the Melbourne archdiocese. See more here. O’Callaghan was once a chaplain for the girls’ section of the Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement. He later worked in Melbourne suburban parishes and was a military chaplain.  Father O’Callaghan observed the church’s rule of priestly “celibacy” (that is, he did not get married to anybody); instead, in the 1980s, he had a private relationship with a woman, who gave birth to Father O’Callaghan’s two children. Fr Bill O’Connor, Parramatta diocese, NSW A woman (“Kerry”), born in the 1940s, has complained that she was sexually assaulted, aged 13, by Father William G. O’Connor (then an assistant priest in the Sydney archdiocese) in the presbytery at Springwood (St Thomas Aquinas parish) in the Blue Mountains in the late 1950s. The Catholic culture prevented the girl from telling her mother about having been sexually abused by a Catholic priest. All this disrupted the girl’s development, and Kerry is still suffering the damage today. Subsequently, O’Connor was the Parish Priest in charge of the Seven Hills parish (Our Lady of Lourdes) for thirty years to 1989. Springwood and Seven Hills were originally in the Sydney diocese but by 1989 they became a part of the new Parramatta diocese. William O’Connor rose in the church ranks in the 1970s and was given the title “Very Reverend”. Kerry went through the church’s Towards Healing process. At first the church officials behaved evasively but eventually they signed a settlement with her. Fr Thomas O’Keeffe After action by Broken Rites, the Melbourne archdiocese has apologized to former altar boys of Fr Thomas O’Keeffe (sometimes spelt as O’Keefe). He ministered at parishes in Sandringham (early 1960s), Preston East, St Kilda West and Brighton (late 1960s),  Doveton and Thornbury (1970s). See the Broken Rites story here. Br J. A. O’Neill The Catholic Church’s “Towards Healing” office has accepted some complaints about Christian Brother John Anselm O’Neill, who taught at Catholic schools including: St Gabriel’s school for the deaf, Castle Hill, NSW, in the 1950s; St Joseph’s primary school, Rozelle, Sydney, in the 1960s; and St Patrick’s primary school, Launceston, Tasmania, in the 1970s and 1980s. Br Theodore O’Shannessy The De La Salle Brothers have apologised to (and signed a settlement with) a victim of Brother Theodore O’Shannessy. This Brother, who was born about 1940 (real name Patrick O’Shannessy ), taught in De La Salle schools at Haberfield, Bankstown, Dubbo and Cootamundra (all in New South Wales) and Scarborough (in Queensland). Padua College, Kedron, Brisbane A former pupil of Padua College (a Catholic boys’ school at Kedron, Brisbane) has complained that he was sexually abused in the 1960s by a priest from the Franciscan order (the Order of Friars Minor — OFM). Brother Paschal, a Franciscan This Brother was in charge of the altar boys at the Mary Immaculate Catholic parish in Waverley, Sydney, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The parish, conducted by the Franciscans (the Order of Friars Minor), had a large number of altar boys, some of whom were pupils at the Christian Brothers’ Waverley College. In 2002 a former altar boy, “Pierre” (not his real name), notified the Catholic Church’s professional standards office (“Towards Healing”) in New South Wales that Brother Paschal used to touch Pierre’s genitals when he was aged from 8 to 13; and Brother Paschal used to make Pierre touch Brother Paschal’s genitals. Pierre said that he finally revealed the molestation to his parents when he was 22. Pierre said that three other young male relatives of his were also molested by Brother Pascal. Pierre said he was concerned that this child-abuse had occurred and that it had been hidden from parents and the public. The Franciscans’ Australian headquarters agreed to hold a mediation meeting with Pierre (who was then in his forties) to address his concerns. Brother Paschal’s real name was Ernest Joseph Bartlett. Paschal was his religious name (there was a “Saint Paschal” in the Franciscans in Spain in the 16th century). Paschal Bartlett died in Sydney on 27 April 1994. Br Mark Payne, a Marist Former pupils have complained about sexually abusive behaviour by Marist Brother Mark Donald Payne (born 5 December 1957) who taught at St Augustine’s College in Cairns, Queensland, about 1985. Fr Leo Perry Broken Rites is researching this priest in Australia and New Zealand. Originally, from 1948 to 1956, he was a member of the Jesuit religious order in New Zealand, where he taught young boys at high-school level in the Holy Name minor seminary (staffed by Australian Jesuits) at Riccarton, Christchurch. At this seminary, he invasively mauled the genitals of boys in their dormitory, in his private room and during car trips. In 1957 the church authorities covered up this problem by transferring Perry to the Townsville diocese in north Queensland, where he ministered (as a diocesan priest, not a Jesuit) in unsuspecting parishes: Mundingburra parish in the late 1950s; Ayr parish about 1960-61; and Townsville cathedral parish until 1967. Fr Dominic Phillips, Vincentian priest Some Australian adult women are still complaining about having been abused (when they were children) by Father Dominic Phillips, of the Vincentian Fathers order. See more from Broken Rites here. Br J.M. Podger, Sydney, 1953 Broken Rites is researching Brother Ronald John Podger (this surname rhymes with “Roger” or “lodger”) who taught at Christian Brothers Lewisham in 1952-53, using the religious name “John Maximus” Podger (called after an ancient “Saint” Maximus). Podger later left this religious order. A pupil (“Basil”, who was aged eleven in 1953) is still deeply concerned about Br Podger half a century later. The Christian Brothers have accepted (and settled) a complaint from Basil. Fr Peter Quirk, Maitland-Newcastle diocese Broken Rites is researching this priest (born 1 April 1957), who ministered from 1986 to 1991 at: Maitland cathedral; Toronto parish; and Taree parish. He targeted teenage boys. He died on 27 September 1991, aged 34. This Father Peter Quirk is not to be confused with any other priest of the same name in another diocese. Fr Graham Redfern The Melbourne Catholic archdiocese’s Independent Commission into Sexual Abuse found in November, 1997, that Father Graham Redfern had sexually abused a youth in 1976, after conducting the funeral of the youth’s mother. The then archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell, formally apologised in a letter to the complainant in May, 1998, for the “wrongs and hurt you have suffered at the hands of Father Redfern”. The archdiocese then signed a civil settlement with the complainant. See more here. Br Neil Richards, New South Wales After action by Broken Rites, the New South Wales province of the Christian Brothers has made a settlement with a former student, who had lodged a complaint about a Brother Richards.  The settlement deed identified the Brother as “Desmond Eric Richards“, but he was known in the Christian Brothers as Br Neil Richards. He taught in Catholic primary schools in Sydney and country New South Wales until he retired. Br Bernie Ring Broken Rites is researching Christian Brother Bernard Ring (born 22 May 1934). As a child, he lived at St Vincent’s boys’ home in South Melbourne (until 1951) and then, like some other orphanage boys, he became a Christian Brother. Brother B.A. Ring worked in schools at Geelong, Ballarat (St Patrick’s College), East Melbourne and Fiji, and at St Vincent’s boys’ home, South Melbourne. Fr Robert Rippin Broken Rites is researching Father Robert Frederick Rippin, a priest in the  Missionaries of the Sacred Heart order, who taught at MSC secondary schools around Australia: Chevalier College (Bowral, NSW), Downlands College (Toowoomba, Queensland) and Monivae College (Hamilton, Victoria). Fr A. Kevin Ryan, Melbourne In 2003, following action by Broken Rites, the Melbourne archdiocese’s commissioner on sexual abuse (Mr Peter O’Callaghan, QC) accepted a complaint by “James” (born in 1954) that Father Arthur Kevin Ryan (known as Fr Kevin Ryan) sexually abused him as an 11-year-old pupil at St Matthew’s parish school, Fawkner North, about 1965. Ryan’s other Melbourne parishes included Yarraville, Thornbury and Glenhuntly. Mr O’Callaghan ruled that “James” was also sexually abused by a prominent Catholic layman, Robert Charles Blunden (known as Bert Blunden), who lived at Fr Ryan’s Fawkner North presbytery. Br Innocent Schofield The Australian Christian Brothers have accepted a complaint from a man, now elderly, that he was sexually abused by Brother Aloysius Innocent Schofield at St  Augustine’s boys’ orphanage in Geelong, Victoria, in the late 1940s. Schofield adopted the “religious” name Aloysius Innocent when he joined the order (there have been “saints” with those names). Brother A.I. Schofield rose to become the principal of Christian Brothers schools in Queensland: Christian Brothers College in Warwick (1952-57); St Mary’s College in Toowoomba (1964-69); and St Edmund’s College in Ipswich (1972-77). Fr Peter Searson In 1997 the Melbourne Catholic archdiocese finally removed Father Peter Lloyd Searson from parish work, following years of complaints about him touching and sexually harassing boys, girls and women. See more from Broken Rites here. Fr Bill Shanahan, Victoria, 1960s Broken Rites is researching Fr William Shanahan regarding one of his earliest parishes — St Joseph’s parish, Warragul (100km east of Melbourne), in the 1960s, when this priest was aged in his thirties. Fr Manny Spiteri, Sale diocese, Victoria The Catholic Church has settled a sex-abuse complaint involving a Maltese-born priest, Father Emanuel Joseph Spiteri, who spent 35 years ministering in the Sale diocese in the state of Victoria.  See more from Broken Rites here. Fr Patrick Stephenson, Jesuit Broken Rites is researching this priest, who worked at Xavier College, a Jesuit school for boys in Melbourne, in the 1970s and 1980s. Fr John Stockdale, Victoria Father John Peregrine Stockdale used to molest young boys in his parishes in the Sandhurst diocese in northern Victoria. On 31 December 1995, Stockdale died while celebrating New Year’s Eve in a sex-cubicle at a males-only club in Melbourne. See the Broken Rites story here. Br Loyola Sullivan, Sydney Broken Rtes is researching Marist Brother “Loyola” Sullivan, who worked at St Vincent’s Boys Home in Westmead, Sydney, in 1943-1948. He is still remembered by former residents of this institution. This Brother Loyola also taught at Marcellin College, Randwick. Fr Terence L. Sullivan, Sydney, 1960s This Father Terry Sullivan (not to be confused with other priests with a similar name) had numerous victims among boys in their early teens. Many have complained to Broken Rites and to the Catholic Church’s Professional Standards Office in New South Wales. The church has made civil settlements with a number of these victims who demonstrated that Sullivan (and the church’s harbouring of him) had disrupted their adolescent and adult development. Fr Terence Sullivan’s parishes included: Kingsgrove (Our Lady of Fatima parish) in the early 1960s; Penrith (St Nicholas’s parish) and Asquith (St Patrick’s parish) in the mid-1960s and Gosford (St Patrick’s) in 1967.  Sullivan targeted boys at Catholic schools, including De La Salle College at Kingsgrove, St Leo’s College at Wahroonga (this was then was a Christian Brothers boys’ school) and St Edward’s Christian Brothers school at Gosford. He left the ministry “on leave” about 1968 and never returned. Fr Joseph Sultana, Queensland A former altar boy has launched a civil lawsuit against the Catholic Church, alleging years of abuse by a priest, Father Joseph Emmanuel Sultana, in the Australian Catholic diocese of Cairns. See more here. Br Laurie Sweeney An order of Catholic priests, the Salesians of Don Bosco, confirmed in 2004 that it has made a civil settlement with two victims of Salesian Brother Laurence Sweeney — a boy and his sister, who have complained about being sexually abused by Sweeney at a Salesian club in Oakleigh, Melbourne in 1975. Br Brian Mark Thomas The Christian Brothers have settled a complaint about Brother Brian Thomas. This Brother (born 1938) adopted the religious name “Brother Mark Thomas” when he joined the order. He worked in various Catholic institutions including: at St Augustine’s orphanage in Geelong VIC in 1969; at schools in Box Hill VIC, Albury NSW and Balmain NSW in the 1970s; at Chatswood NSW, Strathfield NSW, Toorak VIC and Canberra in the 1980s; and at Waverley NSW in the 1990s. Br Aubrey Tobin In separate incidents, two men committed suicide in the year 2000 after complaining that their lives had been damaged after sexual abuse by Brother Aubrey Tobin while they were pupils at the Marists’ Assumption College in Kilmore, Victoria, in the mid-1980s. The Marist Brothers head office has confirmed that the two complaints were made. See the Broken Rites story here. Monsignor Maurice Tully Broken Rites is investigating this priest who had a long career (until 1975) in the Armidale diocese in northern New South Wales. While working in a parish, he also acted as the diocese’s vicar-general (chief administrator) and this high status protected him from complaints. See more from Broken Rites here. Br Frank Webster The Christian Brothers Australian administration has accepted complaints from victims who were abused, when they were young boys, by Christian Brother Aloysius Francis Webster (also known as Frank Webster or “Lou” Webster) while he was  the superintendent (principal) at St Augustine’s orphanage, Geelong, Victoria, from 1954 to 1959. See the Broken Rites story here. Fr Adrian Wenting A number of ex-students have complained that Father Adrian Wenting committed offences of indecency against them at the Salesian College boarding school in Brooklyn Park, South Australia, where he was the principal until 1979. Wenting also worked at the Boys Town residential institution in Engadine NSW and at Salesian College Chadstone in Melbourne. Westmead Boys’ Home, NSW Broken Rites is investigating complaints from former inmates of St Vincent’s Boys’ Home, Westmead, in Sydney’s west. This orphanage was operated by the Marist Brothers until it closed in 1991. Broken Rites possesses a printed list, compiled by the Marists, of all Brothers who worked at this institution. The Westmead site is now a campus of the University of Western Sydney. Fr Dennis Whelan, NSW Broken Rites is researching Father Dennis R. Whelan, who ministered in the Bathurst Catholic diocese in north-western New South Wales, notably St Brigid’s parish in Dubbo and St Mary’s in Dubbo North. Dennis Whelan’s middle name was either Redmond or Raymond. Fr Ray Whitehouse After action by Broken Rites, the Melbourne Catholic archdiocese has apologised to (and signed a settlement with) a man who complained that, as an altar boy, he was sexually assaulted by Father Raymond Whitehouse on several Sundays after Mass. See more here. Fr John Whiting Broken Rites is researching Father John Thomas Larmer Whiting. Originally a member of the Redemptorist order, he founded a small Australian society of priests and brothers called the “Confraternity of Christ the Priest”. He established a small seminary at Scoresby, in Melbourne’s east. A man who inquired about joining the order in 1981 (aged 19) says that, during the interview, Father John Whiting inspected the young man’s genitals. Another young aspirant says that he was required to bathe naked, with Fr Jack  Whiting, in a pool. In later years, Whiting’s society also provided seminary training in Wagga Wagga in southern New South Wales. Fr Murray Wilson In 2006, after action by Broken Rites, the Vincentian Fathers’ Australian office apologized to a Victorian man for a serious sexual assault committed by Fr Murray Joseph Wilson in the 1970s, when the victim was aged 13. See our story here. Bert Zeelen, sacristan, Adelaide cathedral Broken Rites is researching Hubertus Zeelen (a Dutch name), who was the full-time sacristan, caretaker and chief altar-server at St Francis Xavier Cathedral, Adelaide, in the 1960s and 1970s. He was in charge of altar-boys. He lived in a dwelling at the cathedral. Section C: Current court cases Here are some examples of cases that are currently scheduled to come up in the courts: Armidale court, NSW, re an ex-priest A former Catholic priest (now aged 59), who used to work in parishes in north-western New South Wales (comprising the Armidale Diocese), appeared in Armidale Local Court on 18 October 2012 on multiple child-sex charges dating back to two or three decades ago. The case will come up in court again in early 2013 for a further mention in the next step in the prosecution process. For legal reasons, the court prohibited any publishing of the man’s name. See more from Broken Rites here. Brian Dennis Cairns After beginning in the early 1970s as a Christian Brother, Brian Cairns worked as a lay teacher (“Mister” Cairns) in Catholic schools in Queensland. In 1985 he was jailed for sex-crimes against boys. In October 2012, after more of his former male pupils contacted police, the Brisbane Magistrates Court ordered that Brian Cairns must face a judge in the Brisbane District Court (in 2013) on multiple charges involving alleged offences against these additional boys. Fr John Denham Father John Sidney Denham (of the Maitland-Newcastle Catholic diocese, New South Wales), who is in jail for  child-sex crimes, is scheduled to be charged again in Newcastle  Court in early 2013 with offences against more boys. See a background article by Broken Rites here. Fr Finian Egan This Catholic priest, who belongs to the Broken Bay diocese in Sydney’s north, appeared in court in 2012, charged with multiple sexual offences against young persons, allegedly committed in the 1970s and 1980s. Further court proceedings are sheduled for 2013. See more here. Fr Lewis Fenton A  retired priest, Father Lewis Fenton, aged 81 (from the Maitland-Newcastle diocese, New South Wales), has become the second Catholic clergyman in Australia charged with concealing someone else’s child-sex crimes. On 4 January 2013, Fr Fenton was ordered to appear in a magistrates court on a later date. See more here. Br John Gaven Brother John Gaven, of the Vincentian religious order, is awaiting court proceedings in Sydney in 2013 regarding sexual offences that were allegedly committed when he worked at St Stanislaus College, Bathurst, NSW. See more here. Br Bill Houston, Victoria In the 1960s, Christian Brother William Stuart Houston worked at St Augustine’s orphanage, Geelong, Victoria. In 2010, he appeared in the Geelong Magistrates Court and was ordered to stand trial at the Victorian County Court regarding incidents of buggery and indecent assault, allegedly committed while he was at St Augustine’s in the 1960s. The  County Court process (indictment number Y.03305021) has not yet been completed. See more from Broken Rites here. Fr Jim Jennings James Patrick Jennings was once a Catholic priest in the Vincentian order. In 2012 a Victorian magistrate ordered Jennings to stand trial in the Victorian County Court (in 2013) on child-sex charges relating to when Jennings was a priest working at St Vincent’s College (a boys’ boarding school) in Bendigo, Victoria, in the 1960s. Police investigations (under Senior Sergeant Grant Morris, of Bendigo Police) are continuing. See more Victorian material from Broken Rites here, plus some New South Wales background  here. Ex-Brother Edward Mamo In 2013 the Victorian  County Court is scheduled to announce the details of its sentence for former religious Brother, Edward Mamo, who has pleaded guilty to sexual  offences, which he committed in the late 1970s and early 1980s against boys at Monivae College, a Catholic secondary school in Hamilton, western Victoria. The investigation is continuing, by detectives at the Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Unit in Warrnambool, telephone 03 5560 1333. See more from Broken Rites here. A Marist Brother in Newcastle  court New South Wales detectives have charged a retired Marist Brother with having indecently assaulted two students at a school in the Hunter Valley, north of Sydney, during the 1960s and 1970s. He has been ordered to appear in Newcastle Local Court in 2013.  The detectives (from Strike Force Georgiana, at Charlestown police station, Lake Macquarie) are continuing their investigations and expect to lay further charges. Fr David O’Hearn Legal proceedings are scheduled in the New South Wales District Court for Father David Anthony O’Hearn, of the Maitland-Newcastle Catholic diocese in New South Wales, who is charged with child-sex offences. See more from Broken Rites here. Fr David Rapson, Salesian Fathers David Edwin Rapson (born 30 July 1953), who used to be a Catholic priest (in the Salesian religious order), appeared in the Melbourne Magistrates Court in November 2012, charged with child-sex offences allegedly committed when Fr Rapson was a teacher at Salesian College “Rupertswood”, in Sunbury (in Melbourne’s north-west). A magistrate ordered Rapson to face a trial in the Victorian County Court (in 2013). The Victoria Police investigation is continuing (being conducted by detectives of the Sexual Crimes Squad, Flinders Street, Melbourne). See more from Broken Rites here. Fr Brian Spillane In the 1970s and 1980s Father Brian Joseph Spillane was a priest in the Vincentian Fathers religious order in New South Wales and Queensland. In the Sydney District Court in 2012, Spillane (then aged 69) was sentenced to nine years jail (with a non-parole period of five years) for indecently assaulting three girls aged between six and seventeen. He is also facing future court proceedings regarding alleged offences against boys. See more here. Section D: Cases where church people failed to help the police Here are some examples, researched by Broken Rites: Fr Tom Brennan, Newcastle, NSW In August 2012, in what is believed to be the first such prosecution in Australia, Father Thomas Brennan (former vicar-general of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese) was charged with failing to report the alleged child-sex crimes of another priest who was under Brennan’s supervision. Brennan was ordered to appear in court on 25 September 2012 but he failed to appear and he died five days later. See more from Broken Rites here. Also see an earlier conviction of Brennan here. Monsignor Patrick Cotter Cotter was formerly the vicar-general (chief administrator) of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese in New South Wales. In 1995, detectives discovered that, 20 years earlier, Cotter knew that one of his priests, Father Vincent Gerard Ryan, was sexually assaulting boys in parishes. According to a letter written by Cotter in 1974, Cotter admitted covering up the crimes. Cotter wrote: “I decided to do nothing [about Ryan’s crimes].” This meant that Cotter became complicit in Vince Ryan’s continuing crimes. In 1995-6, police investigated Cotter with a view to charging him with the crime of misprision of a felony — that is, wilfully concealing a serious crime committed by another person. However, as Cotter was aged 82 when police found this letter in 1995, the prosecution did not proceed. See our Cotter story here. The Monsignor John Day case Church people, including a police sergeant, discouraged the Victoria Police from prosecuting Monsignor John Day, who sexually abused many boys and girls in the Mildura parish. See the Broken Rites story here. The “Father F” cover-up Bishop Henry Joseph Kennedy administered the Armidale diocese in northern New South Wales in the 1980s, assisted by his deputy, Monsignor Francis Joseph (Frank) Ryan. This pair protected a certain priest (Father F) after receiving complaints about him committing child-sex offences. Furthermore, Kennedy and Ryan later arranged for Father F to transfer to parishes in the Parramatta diocese in western Sydney, thereby giving him access to additional children. According to a church document, Father F has admitted that he indeed committed sexual acts upon children. The cover-up continued for 30 years until it was exposed by the media in 2012. Read more here. The Father Ridsdale case Catholic church authorities in western Victoria knew that Father Gerald Francis Ridsdale was indecently assaulting children but the church continued giving him access to more victims, until victims (not the church) finally brought him to justice. See the Broken Rites story here. Section E: Court cases ending with no conviction Sometimes, for various legal reasons, a court case might fail to result in a conviction. For example: Fr Bernie Connell In November 1995, news media outlets in southern New South Wales reported  that a Local Court magistrate committed Father Bernard Connell to stand trial on charges of sexual offences allegedly committed against boys. However, the subsequent trial proceedings did not result in a conviction. Born in 1938, Father Connell was ordained in 1963 as a priest of the Wagga Wagga diocese in southern New South Wales. His postings from early 1964 to late 1991 included: parishes at Junee and Albury in the 1960s; South Wagga Wagga parish in the early 1970s; working as a chaplain at army bases in Puckapunyal (Victoria) and Holdsworthy (NSW) in the 1970s; Lockhart parish in 1978; Albury and Tocumwal parishes in the 1980s; and Leeton parish in 1990-91. In early 1992, he left the Wagga Wagga diocese to minister in the Pacific nation of Kiribati for several years, after which he returned to New South Wales to live at a private address, with no further parish postings. Fr Dennis Corrigan On 9 February 2012 Father Dennis John Corrigan, 68, who worked in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese, north of Sydney, was acquitted in the New South Wales District Court on charges of indecent assault on a boy. See more from Broken Rites here. Br John Coswello Christian Brother John Francis Coswello, then 70, was sentenced to jail on 22 June 2009 after a jury found him guilty of committing sexual offences against a 12-year-old boy in a Melbourne orphanage. Later, the Victorian Court of Appeal granted him a re-trial, at which another jury (in October 2010) found him not guilty.  See more here. Br Brendan Crawford, Passionist Order A Catholic religious brother, Vincent Crawford (a.k.a. Brother “Brendan” Crawford), of the Passionist Order, appeared in court in 2009, charged with sexual offences against a girl in the late 1970s. The charges were withdrawn after the court was told that Crawford (aged 77 when charged) was medically unfit to undergo the court proceedings. See more here. Fr Peter Dwyer In the New South Wales District Court on 9 May 2011, a jury found Father Peter William Dwyer not guilty of alleged sexual offences, between 1977 and 1992, against four students who attended St Stanislaus College, Bathurst NSW (where Fr Dwyer had been a music teacher and later a headmaster). Fr Ray Garchow Raymond Garchow became a religious brother in the St John of God order in 1964, aged 17, and was upgraded to a priest in 1987, aged 40. In New South Wales in the early 1980s, he worked at “Kendall Grange” boarding institution for educationally disabled boys in Morisset, north of Sydney. In 2006, after he had been living and ministering around Sydney for several years, the Federal Court of Australia ordered that Garchow be extradited to face charges of child-sex abuse in New Zealand, where he had worked at an institution (Marylands special school for educationally disabled boys) in Christchurch in the 1970s. A trial was scheduled for Garchow in Christchurch. On 23 July 2008, the New Zealand prosecutors decided not to proceed with the trial for several reasons: Garchow, aged 61, was too ill; furthermore, one of the two complainants was also unwell; and the second complainant had trouble with a disability, which made the prospect of a trial difficult. The prosecutors entered a permanent stay of proceedings. Garchow’s counsel said afterwards that Garchow maintains his innocence. See our story about the extradition proceedings here. Br Bill Houston On 17 June 1997, a magistrate ordered that Christian Brother William Stuart Houston, then aged 58, should stand trial in the Victorian County Court on charges relating to a twelve-year-old boy at St Augustine’s orphanage, Geelong, in 1969-70 (reported in the Melbourne Herald Sun, 18 June 1997). This trial has not yet been held.  See more here. Fr Jim Jennings James Patrick Jennings was once a Catholic priest in the Vincentian order. In  the Sydney District Court, in July 2010, he was charged with indecent assault on four boys (aged about 12) at St Stanislaus College, Bathurst NSW, during 1961. On 5 August 2010 the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty” on all charges See more here. Br Bill Lebler In 1951, aged 29, William John Lebler became among the first Australian-born recruits to join the St John of God Brothers, taking his vows at the order’s “Kendall Grange” institution for intellectually handicapped boys at Morisset, north of Sydney. He later worked with SJOG in New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. In 2003, prosecutors sought to extradite him from Australia to face trial in New Zealand on child-abuse charges there, dating back as far as 1955. However, a Sydney magistrate released William Lebler because of his age (82 years) and health and because of the delay in reporting his alleged offences. See our story about the extradition proceedings here. Br John Maguire By July 2004, Marist Brother John Dennis Maguire had faced eight jury trials in the New South Wales District Court, charged with multiple sexual offences involving six boys at St Joseph’s College in Hunters Hill, Sydney.  In all, he faced 17 counts of assaulting boys aged between 11 and 13 while he was the year 7 dormitory and form master (in charge of fifty boarders) in the early 1980s. Maguire had a bedroom adjoining the dormitory. The alleged offences ranged from indecently touching the boys through to anal and oral penetration. Unlike in many other similar cases, Brother John Maguire (born 13 December 1943) was not required to face his accusers jointly in a single trial. The church lawyers succeeded in obtaining a separate jury for each complainant, so that each jury was unaware of the other charges. Two juries failed to agree on a verdict and were discharged. The other six juries each returned a verdict of “Not Guilty”. Despite this, any complainants are still able to take civil action against the Marist Brothers regarding Brother Maguire. See “We saw it coming, say ex-students” article in the 2 July 2004 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. Br Eddie Mamo, Sacred Heart order A Sydney newspaper reported that the Bankstown Local Court on 23 August 1994 dismissed two charges of aggravated indecent assault that had been laid against Edward Mamo, then aged 49. Mamo had been a religious Brother in the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart order, and was associated with the Nguon Song Group Homes, which provided accommodation for Indo-Chinese teenage males in Sydney’s Canterbury-Bankstown area. (In the 1970s and 1980s, Brothers in the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart worked as support staff — such as dormitory supervisors — at prominent Australian boarding schools operated by the MSC order, including Chevalier College in Bowral, New South Wales, and Monivae College in Hamilton, Victoria.) See more here. Fr Hugh Edward Murray This Catholic priest (from the Vincentian order) appeared in court in Sydney in 2010, charged with indecently assaulting boys in the 1960s and ’70s. In July 2011, a judge granted Murray a permanent stay because of his advanced age (81 years) and health problems. See more here. Br John Parker Various news media outlets reported that Christian Brother John David Parker appeared in the Melbourne Magistrates Court on 22 March 1995, charged with sexual assault of a nine-year-old boy in Grade 4 at Parade Christian Brothers College junior school in Alphington (in Melbourne’s inner north-east) in 1958. Brother Parker contested the charge. Magistrate Phillip Goldberg committed Brother Parker (then aged 60) for trial and listed the matter to go to a judge in the Melbourne County Court for 19 June 1995. However, the County Court case did not proceed. The complainant was satisfied with having succeeded in getting his allegation aired in the Magistrates Court. In the Christian Brothers, Parker adopted the religious name John “Neri” Parker (there was once a Saint Neri) and was listed as Brother J.N. Parker. Brother Parker has also taught at other Catholic schools in Victoria, including Ballarat (St Patrick’s primary school, Drummond Street) in the 1970s and Mill Park (St Francis of Assisi primary school) in Melbourne’s north in the 1990s. He also taught with the Christian Brothers in Tasmania. Fr Phil Robson In early 2010, a Sydney magistrate ordered Father Philip John Robson (a member of the Vincentian order of Catholic priests) to stand trial at the Sydney District Court, charged with five sex offences against a 15-year-old boy who was a pupil at St Stanislaus College, Bathurst, New South Wales, in 1991. Robson was accused of one count of attempting to have sexual intercourse with the boy in circumstances of aggravation, and four counts of aggravated indecent assault. On 14 September 2010, a District Court jury found Robson not guilty of all charges. See more here. Br Lambert Wise, Adelaide A South Australian court ruled in 2008 that an elderly former Christian Brother, Francis Lambert Wise, was medically unfit to stand trial on alleged incidents of child-sexual abuse, dating back to 1964 and 1965. However, in 2009 a judge held special hearings, enabling two of Wise’s former pupils to have their allegations aired in court. Thus, the South Australian public was able to learn of the allegations. See more from Broken Rites here. Section F: Lay teachers in church schools The above lists (Sections A to E) on this website all relate to priests or religious brothers, as distinct from lay teachers. Many victims have contacted Broken Rites about offences committed by lay teachers in Catholic schools or school youth camps. The teachers’ cases are too numerous to be all listed on this website. Here are just a few examples to demonstrate the range of cases: Yvo Gulien Cleyman, at Gosford, NSW, 1970s In the New South Wales District Court at Gosford (New South Wales) on 20 April 2004, Yvo Gulien Cleyman (then aged 59) was sentenced to a maximum of six years’ jail over a series of sex offences against two schoolboys in the late 1970s. The case was reported next day in the Central Coast Herald (and the preliminary proceedings had been reported in the Central Coast Express on 26 February 2003). The boys, aged 13 and 14, were attending  St Edward’s Christian Brothers School in East Gosford (north of Sydney), where Yvo Gulien Cleyman was a lay teacher of languages and social studies in the late 1970s. The court was told that, on school camps, on drives to isolated places and out fishing, he forced anal intercourse on the boys as well as forcing them to give and receive oral sex. Cleyman pleaded guilty to six counts of buggery and two counts of indecent assault on the two victims. When charged in 2003, Yvo Gulien Cleyman’s address was given in court as Buccan, Queensland. He was extradited to New South Wales for the court proceedings. After the conviction, the Christian Brothers headquarters in New South Wales began having mediation meetings with victims of Cleyman. John Coogan, teacher, Geelong, Victoria John Patrick Coogan, then aged 61, was sentenced in 1994 to five years jail (minimum of three years) after pleading guilty to seventeen charges of indent assault of boys while he was a lay teacher at St Joseph’s College (Christian Brothers) in Geelong. Outside the court, one of the victims said the St Joseph’s College administration had known that Coogan  was a child-molester but it did nothing about him. Mark Dean, northern Victoria Mark Christopher Dean, a Catholic lay teacher, pretended to be a priest during role-playing sessions with children while he sexually abused them, the Bendigo Magistrates Court was told in July 1992. Dean, then aged 33, of Rochester and Bendigo, who taught in north Victorian Catholic schools, pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting eight schoolboys in three towns during the 1980s. Dean was sentenced to a six-months suspended jail term. The victims’ families told police that Dean had been protected by the church authorities. John Gahan, lay teacher, NSW On 30 October 2007 in the New South Wales District Court, John Stephen Gahan was sentenced to 13 months jail (with a non-parole period of six months), on  three charges of indecent assault of a boy, aged 11 to 13, while Gahan was a lay teacher at St Mary’s Catholic parish primary school in Scone (in the Maitland-Newcastle Catholic diocese), in the late 1970s. Gahan befriended the boy’s family. Gahan admitted that the abuse (masturbating the boy) occurred on a number of occasions during two years — in Gahan’s car and on overnight trips. The victim said in his impact statement that, as a child, he did not understand what was happening — “only that here was a man that took an interest in my future and this was a small sacrifice to maintain his friendship”. The victim said that the abuse caused problems in his adult life, including in his marriage. Mato Karapandzk, cathedral caretaker On 11 March 2008 in the South Australian District Court, a 37-year-old woman gained justice for sexual abuse that she experienced while she was a pupil at Adelaide’s St Aloysius Catholic girls’ school.  At age 12 in the early 1980s, the girl was told to wheel a disabled elderly nun over to the Adelaide cathedral (opposite the school) for church services. There, the girl was befriended by Mato Karapandzk (then over 50), a Croatian-born caretaker at the cathedral. Over the next five years, he sexually abused the girl in and around the cathedral building, “under the noses of the cathedral staff and the school”, sometimes giving her $20 after the abuse, the court was told. He continued as the cathedral caretaker until the victim came forward with her complaint in 2004. Karapandzk, aged 77 at sentencing, was given a nine-year jail sentence (with four years behind bars before parole). Willi Kovac, sports teacher In Melbourne County Court in December 2005, Kovac (then aged 73) was jailed for a maximum of  nine and half years’ jail, with a non-parole period of 5½ years, after pleading guilty to indecently assaulting three  boys (aged between nine and fourteen) in the 1960s and 1970s. German-born Kovac was an athletics coach at Melbourne’s Xavier College and Marcellin College and other Catholic schools and worked as a co-ordinator at summer camps for Catholic school children. Judge Pamela Jenkins said that, since the offences, Kovac’s three victims had struggled with life, including drug and alcohol abuse and relationship breakdowns, and had under-achieved in their work-life. These three boys were not Kovac’s only victims. He also had victims from other Catholic schools. Some victims have contacted Broken Rites. According to information given in court in 2005, Kovac was also jailed in 1970 for indecent assault. One prominent Catholic school sacked Kovac for his behaviour but it then breached its duty of care by allowing him to work at other Catholic schools, putting more boys in danger. Paul John Lyons, Canberra In 2006 and 2007, Daramalan College, a Catholic co-educational school in Canberra (run by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart), finally began making civil settlements with victims of a former teacher, Paul John Lyons. Lyons taught at Daramalan from 1989 to 2000. He took dozens of students to his home overnight or away on sporting trips. In 2000, police caught up with Lyons who admitted indecently assaulting a 15-year-old schoolboy. Police charged Lyons but, a few days later, he committed suicide. His police interview indicated that Lyons had many other victims, meaning that more charges would have been likely. John Marsden, solicitor, school sports coach John Marsden was originally a trainee for the Catholic priesthood but he left the seminary and later became a prominent lawyer and president of the New South Wales Law Society.  In a crimes compensation case on 6 July 2001, NSW District Court judge Ken Taylor found that, “on the balance of probabilities”, Marsden had sexually abused an eight-year-old schoolboy in the late 1960s when Marsden was a swimming and football coach at a Catholic school, St John’s, Campbelltown, in Sydney’s south-west. The court was told that, on three occasions, the boy was forced to engage in mutual genital fondling with Marsden and on the third occasion he was forced to perform oral sex on Marsden. The boy then complained to school authorities but was not believed over the respected local solicitor and former trainee priest, the victim told the court. The victim took his allegations against Marsden to Mr Justice Wood’s royal commission into corruption in 1996, but Marsden was never charged by police. The victim then began a civil action in the NSW Supreme Court, but said he was “threatened with financial ruin” by the rich and powerful lawyer.  On legal advice, he sought victim’s compensation instead.  Judge Taylor awarded the plaintiff the then maximum amount of $40,000 in victim’s compensation, plus $5078 for psychiatrists’ fees and $8000 in legal costs. This finding could not be revealed in 2001 because it was subject to a court suppression order.  Marsden died in May 2006, aged 64, and the Weekend Australian published the court documents on 3 June 2006. Former Test cricket umpire Steve Randell He was jailed in 1999 for sexual offences against young girls while he taught at Marist College in Burnie, Tasmania, in the early 1980s (after the school became co-educational). Randell also taught at St Virgil’s College in Hobart. He also allegedly had male victims.  See our article about a different offender at Marist College here. St Mark’s College, South Australia Jenny Christall, who was an education support officer at St Mark’s College in Port Pirie (South Australia) in 2001, learned that a male religious education teacher, Sunil Francis Clark, was sexually abusing female students. Mrs Christall alerted the school administration and the Port Pirie Catholic diocese but, she says, these authorities failed to contact police. Ms Christall contacted the police herself but this meant losing her job because of a workplace confidentiality agreement.  After this, she says, she was banned from working at more than 100 Catholic schools in South Australia. The male teacher, Sunil Clark, was charged in the South Australian District Court in 2006 with sexual offences against two schoolgirls, including two charges of unlawful sexual intercourse by a teacher. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison, with a non-parole period of three years. Stephen Stockdale-Hall, Adelaide In the South Australian Supreme Court in December 2005, Stephen John Stockdale-Hall (aged 56) was sentenced to 10 years’ jail (with parole after eight years) after admitting that he sexually abused nine boys, aged between eight and 16 years, between 1977 and 1989, while he was a Catholic schools lay teacher. His crimes started while he was a teacher at Adelaide’s Blackfriars Priory School and went on for a decade after he resigned when he continued to take students on camping expeditions. Stockdale-Hall also encouraged some of his Catholic school victims to drink alcohol and take drugs. See our story here. Darren Tector, former lay teacher In 1994, Darren John Tector was jailed for sexual offences against boys while he was a teacher at a Catholic primary school (Our Lady of Lourdes) at Seven Hills, near Parramatta, west of Sydney. He was jailed again in 2007 (aged 41) for using the internet and a telephone to procure a child (a 12-year-old boy) for sexual activity. See our story here. The Broken Rites database contains many similar cases of teachers in church schools. Some of these are teachers of “religion”, which indicates hypocrisy as well as a crime.

Kentucky Neo-Nazis Charged in Gruesome Murder, Dismemberment

Kentucky Neo-Nazis Charged in Gruesome Murder, Dismemberment

Posted by Don Terry

The 25-point manifesto of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) makes several hyperbolic “demands,” such as “all non-Whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force.’’

But it appears that two Kentucky members of the neo-Nazi group and an accomplice took at least one of the over-the-top mission statements deadly serious.

Point 17 says, “We demand the ruthless prosecution of those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Murderers, rapists, pedophiles, drug dealers, usurers, profiteers, race traitors, etc. must be severely punished, whatever creed or race.”

On Jan. 9, according to the authorities, the men lured a white, 19-year-old alleged small-time drug dealer into the back seat of their car, choked him, beat him with fists and a metal pipe, dragged him out of the car, slit his throat, stabbed him in the chest, rolled his body down a hill and left him dead in the bushes, covered in brambles, in a field in Boone County, Ky., essentially a suburb of nearby Cincinnati.

The next day, the men returned to the field and began dismembering the body with knives and a hatchet, apparently scattering the body parts in the field and a landfill. “The head, hands, feet and legs,” Detective Jeremy Rosing of the Boone County Sheriff’s Office testified at a court hearing last week.

The accused killers – Anthony Baumgartner, 23, Stephen Harkness, 22, and Jeffrey Allen, 21 – are being held without bail on charges of kidnapping, murder, tampering with physical evidence and abuse of a corpse.

The men told investigators that they disliked drug dealers and that is why they targeted their victim, who was identified by a tattoo of a cartoon character on his severed torso as Daniel Delfin, of Walton, Ky.

“Their thing was, we know he deals drugs, we’re against that,” Deputy Tom Scheben, a spokesman for the Boone County sheriff, told Hatewatch today. “They said he was a drug dealer and, in essence, a blight on society.’’

Both Baumgartner and Harkness are admitted members of NSM and can be found on the group’s social media forum discussing their interests and dislikes.

“Stormtrooper First Class Baumgartner NMS Kentucky” wrote on the forum that he dislikes “race traders [sic], greed, ignorance, drugs, jews, niggers, spikes, gooks and chinks and anybody that hates National Socialism.”

In the “About Me” section, he says that he was part of the Ku Klux Klan but left a long time ago on good terms and now wants “to get back in the race war so me and a few other boys in my area are starting to clean up area of drugs and so called street gangs.”

Harkness’s dislikes include: “Drugs, Gangs, Hippies, Faggots, All other races, People who think Jews deserve our pity.” As hobbies, he listed farming and gardening, and re-reading the works of “Herr Hitler and Commander Rockwell,” as in George Lincoln Rockwell, the former Navy commander who founded the American Nazi Party in 1959.

It is unclear if Allen is a neo-Nazi. But, “they’re all pretty tatted up with that stuff,” Scheben said.

The deputy said Allen told investigators that he had planned the attack on Delfin a week before. “I’m sure he’s not the only drug dealer they’re familiar with,” Scheben said. “But he wore the real baggy pants, the baggy clothes. In a small town like Walton, Kentucky, you stand out dressing like that.’’

Scheben said the men lured Delfin into their car on Jan. 9 by saying they wanted to buy heroin. Delfin was arrested last May for trafficking heroin in the area. “I would say we have a very definite heroin problem,” Scheben said. “It is the drug of choice in the tri-state region. It’s much cheaper than your pain killer pills.”

Harkness was driving. Baumgartner was in the passenger seat. Allen was in the back, sitting next to Delfin, who he “proceeded to physically assault” with his fists and a pipe, Rosing told a Boone County courtroom.

Rosing said Delfin suffered “severe head trauma” during the attack and apparently slipped into unconsciousness or death. The men drove to a field next to Allen’s home where Allen slit Delfin’s throat and stabbed him, the detective said, “underneath the ribcage, up into the heart and twisted the knife and then pulled it out.”

The next day, the men returned to dismember the body.

On Jan. 13, Delfin’s sister reported him missing. On Jan. 14, authorities got a tip, leading them to the three men, who were arrested on Jan. 15.

“Allen was the first to admit it,” Scheben said. “The others followed suit. Allen walked us to where the torso was.”

The authorities found Delfin’s torso and legs in the field. They searched a nearby landfill, using four pieces of heavy equipment for six hours before calling the search off without finding the rest of the teenager.

The owners of the landfill “told us up front, you’re pretty much looking for a needle in a haystack,” Scheben said.

The three men are being held in the Boone County Jail without bail, waiting to go before a grand jury in the next few weeks. “Their story now is that they were just going to assault him and work their way up the chain until they found the drug kingpin,” Scheben said.

Calls today to the men’s public defenders were not returned.

On Thursday in Verona, Ky., nearly 100 people attended Delfin’s closed-casket funeral. Two songs were played at the service: “Amazing Grace” and “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.”

Related articles

• Daniel Delfin, Heroin Dealer, Killed And Cut Up Allegedly By 3 Men In Watson, Ohio (huffingtonpost.com)
• 3 Ky. men charged with dismembering man, 19 (usatoday.com)
• 3 Men Charged in Dismemberment of Ky. Drug Dealer (abcnews.go.com)
• 3 men charged in dismemberment of Ky. drug dealer (seattletimes.com)

America’s War on Children Abroad

America’s War on Children Abroad

Ed Krayewski|

Der Spiegel has an illuminating profile of a drone pilot for the United States Air Force, Brandon Bryant, and what the work entails:

When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.
With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.
Second zero was the moment in which Bryant’s digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif [in Afghanistan]. Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
“Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him.
“Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied. “Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote.
They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

“I saw men, women and children die during that time,” Bryant told Der Spiegel. “I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn’t kill anyone at all.”

At least 176 children have been killed in U.S. drone strikes in nearby Pakistan alone, with more than twenty more in Yemen and at least one in Somalia, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

In Afghanistan, though, children can apparently be legitimate targets. After NATO called a 12 year old, a 10 year old and an 8 year old killed in a Marine airstrike “innocent Afghan civilians,” the Marines took umbrage. The children were digging a hole, which could’ve been used to place a roadside bomb. “In addition to looking for military-age males, it’s looking for children with potential hostile intent,” a Marine general explained. “Military-age male” is already pretty much the only requirement to label someone killed in a drone strike a militant so including children is just a matter of revising the meaning of “military age” downward. Forward!

h/t to db for the link

Related articles

• Newtown kids v Yemenis and Pakistanis: what explains the disparate reactions? | Glenn Greenwald (guardian.co.uk)
• “Did We Just Kill a Kid?”: Drone Operator Who Killed Afghan Child Can’t Sleep After Waging War Miles Away (alternet.org)
• Meet Brandon Bryant: The Drone Operator Who Quit After Killing a Child (libertyblitzkrieg.com)
• America’s War on Children Abroad (reason.com)
• The trauma suffered by an American drone operator (antonyloewenstein.com)
• ‘Did We Just Kill A Kid?’ – Six Words That Ended A US Drone Pilot’s Career (businessinsider.com)

Russia Plans to Launch Moon Probe in 2015

Russia plans to launch Moon probe in 2015

---

Artist’s concept of Luna-Glob mission (NASA)

Back to the Moon Russia will resume a long-dormant quest to explore the Moon by sending an unmanned probe there in 2015; the head of the space agency was quoted as saying.

The craft, called Luna-Glob, or Moon-Globe, will be carried by the first rocket to blast off from a new facility that Russia is building in its far eastern Amur region, says Roskosmos director Vladimir Popovkin, according to the Interfax news agency.

“We will begin our exploration of the Moon from there,” he says of the new space centre that will decrease Russia’s reliance of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the ex-Soviet nation Kazakhstan, which it leases.

Russian space officials have said Luna-Glob would consist of an orbital module and a probe that would land on the Moon and beam back information about samples it takes from the surface.

The Soviet Union got a jump on the United States in the Cold War space race, sending a probe to the Moon in 1959 and putting the first person into space in 1961. But the United States first put a man on the Moon in 1969 and Russia has not done so.

The last successful Soviet launch of an unmanned probe to the Moon was in the 1970s, and Russia has suffered setbacks in its space program in recent years, including bungled satellite launches and the failure of a Mars probe in 2011.

A successful rocket launch on Tuesday put three military satellites in orbit, the Defence Ministry said.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a plan last month to spend 2.1 trillion roubles ($70 billion) on space industry development in 2013-2020, to pursue projects to explore the Moon and Mars, among other things.

Related articles

• Russia again plans to shoot for the moon (msnbc.msn.com)
• Russia to Launch New Moon Probe in 2015 (space.com)
• Russia sets its sights on the moon – again (csmonitor.com)
• Russia to Launch New Moon Probe in 2015 (livescience.com)
• Russia plans to launch Moon probe in 2015 (abc.net.au)

Over 1,000 Killed Since Sandy Hook

Over 1,000 Killed Since Sandy Hook

By mcallisterbryant

The odometer turned today…over 1,000 murders by gun violence since Sandy Hook Elementary School 33 days ago. In the time it took for those 1,000 adults and children to die the country has begun a process of solving some of the causes of the deaths. It will be a long process.

We have, as a country done two very predictable things. First we separated into political corners…many proponents of both sides of the very hard discussion intractable in their views, unable to move forward, toward common ground in order to prevent at least some of the deaths. But this seems different. The energy and anger are coming from the very large middle of this country, those neither pro-gun nor pro-regulation, having little or no opinion on the 2^nd Amendment or gun control. This shift in public opinion is fueled by the anger that in the past year our restaurants, workplaces, malls, churches, theaters, and schools are not as safe as they were…as they can be.

Second to that, we have seen a media frenzy take over much of the flow of information on gun violence, gun control and the 2^nd Amendment. The good of it is that we have at our fingertips hundreds if not thousands of facts to present our case…the bad is that the frenzy has contributed to the division that will impede success in slowing down deaths.  Politicians have, for the most part had to stand up and defend their long held position…many funded with tens of millions of dollars spent by the lobbyists at the NRA or Gun Owners of America.

And yesterday, the last day of sub-1,000 murders President Obama released the results of VP Biden’s month long research group to look at options. And so, we look to the next step…Presidential Executive Actions designed to spur research, to define privacy within the Affordable Care Act to allow mental health considerations to be shared with those who now approve purchases of guns for buyers at gun shops across America, to streamline and strengthen the on-line NICS system that verifies buyers, to provide a mechanism to pay for security in schools that request them, to refocus law enforcement to enforce the myriad of laws that are currently on the books.

And further, submitting proposals for legislation to Congress so that they may consider new laws for returning the Assault Weapons Ban, regulating the capacity of magazines, and closing of loopholes in the current way firearms buying and selling is administered.

One month, 1,000 murders, a plan…the journey down the long road to finding and executing a successful set of solutions to the national problem of gun violence has begun. In the next year America will either reach out a hand to help save some of those who will die from gun violence or they will simply turn away because it is against their beliefs. The 12,000 who will die and 250,000 injured in this next year are watching.

Everyone is watching.

Related articles

• Over 1,000 Killed By Guns Since Sandy Hook (addictinginfo.org)