CIA Contractor Indicted for Murder in Pakistan
Jeff Neumann
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Ray Davis, the CIA and Blackwater contractor who shot dead two Pakistani men in what he claims was an attempted robbery, was indicted for murder today. A "blood money" deal is said to be in the works for his release.
Update: Blood money has been paid to the victims and Davis has been freed.
With No Water, Nothing To Stop Fuel Rods From Getting Hotter, Melting Down
NRC: No Water In Spent Fuel Pool Of Japan Plant
With No Water, Nothing To Stop Fuel Rods From Getting Hotter, Melting Down
[Liberal] Bill Maher Bashes Koran on TV Show: Where’s the Media Outrage?
Last week, U.S. Representative Keith Ellison, a devout Muslim, blew a gasket on HBO’s “Real Time” when host Bill Maher stated that the Koran demanded that Muslims despise non-believers. Maher backed up his statement by quoting from Sam Harris’s book “The End of Faith” which itself endlessly quotes the Koran’s passages which demand intolerance, death and damnation for all non-believers.
Ellison’s response was to sputter that Muslim fanatics are not inspired by the Koran to commit acts of violence but instead by “political teachings”.
Well, on hearing Ellison’s argument, Sam Harris begs to strongly differ with the Muslim Representative that the Koran doesn’t preach intolerance. Below is the link from Harris’s blog wherein he confronts head on the Koran’s “religious hatred (which) has become a problem for the entire world“.
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/honesty-the-muslim-worlds-scarcest-resource/
In the aftermath of the House hearing on American Muslims, Representative Keith Ellison appeared on HBO’s Real Time to further testify to the benign nature of Islam. Attempting to bring some glint of reality to the conversation, Bill Maher posed the following question:
Have you read Sam Harris’s book, The End of Faith?… [Harris] says, “On almost every page, the Qur’an instructs observant Muslims to despise non-believers.”
Massive online pedophile ring busted by cops
Five Americans among 184 people arrested; 230 abused children taken to safety
An Internet pedophile ring with up to 70,000 members — thought to be the world's largest —has been uncovered by police, a security official said Wednesday.
The European police agency Europol said in a statement that "Operation Rescue" had identified 670 suspects and that 230 abused children in 30 countries had been taken to safety. More children are expected to be found, Europol said.
It said that so far 184 people had been arrested and investigations in some countries were continuing. Most of those detained are suspected of direct involvement in sexually abusing children.
They include teachers, police officers and scout leaders, AP reported. One Spaniard who worked at summer youth camps is suspected of abusing some 100 children over five years.
Europol director Rob Wainwright said Wednesday the ring, which communicated using an Internet forum, was "probably the largest online pedophile network in the world."
Cori Bassett, a public affairs officer for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an email that there had been five arrests and four convictions in connection with Operation Rescue in the U.S.
"Arrests so far have been made in Georgia and Connecticut. ICE continues to pursue the leads provided by Europol," she added.
The website was shut down following the three-year investigation, Europol said.
"The website operated from a server based in the Netherlands and, at its height, boasted up to 70,000 members worldwide," it added.
"It attempted to operate as a 'discussion–only' forum where people could share their sexual interest in young boys without committing any specific offences, thus operating 'below the radar' of police attention," Europol said.
"Having made contact on the site, some members would move to more private channels, such as email, to exchange and share illegal images and films of children being abused. Computers seized from those arrested have harvested huge quantities of child abuse images and videos," it added.
Police infiltrated site
The Europol statement said U.K. and Australian police infiltrated the site to identify the members who posed the greatest danger to children. Police also sometimes posed as children online as part of the investigation.
Law enforcement authorities from 13 countries, including the United States, Australia, Canada, Italy, Spain and the U.K., were involved in the case, Europol said.
The statement said Europol analysts had cracked the security features of a key computer server at the center of the network which uncovered the identities of suspected child sex offenders.
And, after his arrest, the forum's Dutch administrator helped police break encryption measures that shielded users' identities, allowing police to begin their covert investigations.
"Europol subsequently issued over 4,000 intelligence reports to police authorities in over 30 countries in Europe and elsewhere, which has led to the arrests of suspects and the safeguarding of children," Europol said.
Wainwright said he was proud of the "exceptional work of our experts in helping police authorities around the world to record these groundbreaking results."
"The safeguarding of so many vulnerable children is particularly rewarding and demonstrates the commitment of our agency to make Europe a safer place for its citizens," he added.
The investigation was led by Britain's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center.
Peter Davies, of the center, said there would be more arrests as the investigations continue.
"Those who have been members of the site can expect a knock on the door in the very near future," he said.
In Britain, police said, the children involved were aged between 7 and 14.
Australian Federal Police commander Grant Edwards said suspects arrested in Australia ranged in age from 19 to 84 and used the Internet to "prey on children with anonymity, with subterfuge and with camouflage."
Children, Edwards said, "should be able to use the Internet safely, without fear of being approached or groomed by these online predators."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
H.A.A.R.P. High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program
Facebook Doesn't Kill Churches, Churches Kill Churches
Can social media redeem the church?
The short answer is of course, “no.” Maybe the long one is, too.
Indeed, experimental psychologist Richard Beck recently set the religion blogosphere—forgive me—atwitter with a post entitled, “How Facebook Killed the Church.” Beck, a professor at Abilene Christian University, argues that, rather than replacing face-to-face relationships with so many digital doppelgangers, “Facebook tends to reflect our social world,” extending and enriching established friendships rather than, by and large, inviting the development of new ones that take us away from longstanding networks of friends, family, and coworkers.
Beck draws on unpublished research on college retention that showed that freshmen with active Facebook engagement were more likely to return for their sophomore year precisely because their Facebook activity was closely correlated to meaningful face-to-face relationality. This echoes other findings about the more narrow scope of active Facebook affiliations, despite the number of “friends” a person’s profile page might boast.
With regard to churches, Beck reads the data as suggesting that Facebook and other social media are replacing what he believes is the “main draw of the traditional church: social connection and affiliation.”
It’s an engaging argument. Beck is certainly right that church is no longer a central gathering place for the majority of believers and seekers. And, it seems, too, that Facebook has taken up much of the chat about “football,… good schools,… local politics,” and other matters that Beck sees as the “main draw” of routine ecclesial practice in days gone by. Yet the sneak peek Beck offers of his own research appears to undermine the argument.
Not Enough Social to Go Around
The relationships among the undergraduates in Beck’s research were not formed on Facebook, they were enriched by students’ continued digital contact. The problem with regard to churches and other religious communities (and we see this over and over again with Facebook group pages whose only visitors are the minister and the technophile parishioner who championed the church’s foray into the digital domain) seems to be that there’s not enough social to go around.
That is, if church were, indeed, a robustly social experience, Facebook would enrich and extend that experience, enhancing week-to-week retention through ongoing conversation with valued friends—just as it appears to do with undergraduates moving from the first to the second year of college. Thin connections in face-to-face settings are not magically transformed by technology.
Other data suggests deeper reasons for believers and seekers’ abandonment of the institutional church, much of it linked to an understanding of the “social” that has more to do with involvement in practices of compassion, justice, and stewardship than it does with mere interpersonal entertainment. An extensive body of data on growing participation in volunteer activities, especially among young people, and the connection of this activity to religious organizations and spiritual values that are not nurtured in other settings suggests that people are not leaving the church merely because they can more easily connect socially with friends on Facebook. Social media participation does correlate positively to charitable and civic group participation. But here again, where people already have meaningful interpersonal affiliations, social media supports those relationships.
Beyond a growing distaste for the rancor around hot-button issues like human sexuality, gender equity, and reproductive choice, people seem to be put off church because they are able to do the kind of work—tending the sick, advocating for the oppressed, caring for the earth, comforting those in trouble or need—that was long the stock in trade of local churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples; but which, through the modern corporatizing of mainstream religions, was largely outsourced to separate agencies.
This is why you’ll probably find more people volunteering in any given week at Martha’s Kitchen food pantry in downtown San Jose, California than at Sunday services at the church across the street. If Facebook is killing the church, that is, it’s probably more accurate to call it an assisted suicide.
Clicking the Church Catholic
Rather than “killing the church,” available data suggest that social media can be a part of revitalizing religious practice. Hence the loopy zeal with which Pope Benedict XVI and sundry Vatican agencies are taking to the digital mission fields. Earlier this year, the Pope offered a second helping of encouragement to the faithful on participation in social media spaces. This time around, Benedict moved beyond his ham-fisted 2010 call to clergy with a yet unseen “competence in current digital technology” to “invite Christians… to join the network of relationships which the digital era has made possible.”
Okay, that’s kind of like welcoming everyone to a party that started hours ago, but you’ve got to at least applaud the Vatican’s effort to be digitally magisterial. Along the same lines, Rome recently announced a new Facebook page that promotes the beatification of Pope John Paul II. Monsignor Paul Tighe tells USA Today that the page is a move in the direction of greater interactivity: “What we found is that Facebook doesn’t just share information, it creates community. People begin talking to each other and sharing ideas.” He’s right! Just probably not on the John Paul II Facebook page.
The page, which offers videos highlights from the life of John Paul II, has garnered an impressive amount of global traffic. Alas, the fact that more than 13,000 around the world “liked” the page in the first days it was up does not mean that it is enriching or extending relationships. It’s cool to see people offering shout-outs to the late pope in just about every language you can think of, and that certainly shows the global diversity of the Roman Catholic Church. But it doesn’t exactly enact the church catholic. Indeed, the page tends to illustrate the spoke-to-hub separateness of believers rather than any essential unity. They come to the page, after all, to venerate John Paul, not to act together on his teachings or any other shared beliefs. Nothing there encourages interactivity in the digital environment nor invites face-to-face engagement at a church or anywhere else. Thus, the John Paul II Facebook page might well be experienced by believers as standing in for local church participation. Again, this has nothing to do with technology. Nor does it reflect a displacement of the social from the local church to its digital presence. Rather, it expresses a flawed understanding of contemporary relationality and spirituality that extends from local to digital locales.
Bible in one Hand, Entertainment Weekly in the Other
Where does it work better? In these early days of the Digital Reformation, especially rich examples are thin on the ground. But one is the social media-infused ministry of Nadia Bolz-Weber, founding pastor of the Church of All Sinners and Saints, a Lutheran mission church in Denver. Bolz-Weber doesn’t quite have the megawatt celebrity of John Paul II, but she is well-known in the mainline Protestant emerging church movement. Her Facebook wall is routinely abuzz with conversation with and among members of the All Sinners and Saints community as well as digital “friends” from the wider Facebook domain.
Bolz-Weber’s general philosophy and practice of ministry is pretty much summed up in a tweet that appeared on her Facebook wall:
“you have to preach with the Bible in one hand and Entertainment Weekly in the other” —@rosaleeharden
The short post reveals more than Episcopal priest and social entrepreneur Rosa Lee Harden’s riff on a quote attributed to Karl Barth—“We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” It also shares a distributed, de-centered practice of ministry that values the contributions of others. It expresses a practice of social and spiritual interactivity that is woefully absent from most of the Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and other online locales established by religious institutions, including the way-more-numerically-popular John Paul II Facebook page. And, it notices that believers draw on their faith to negotiate a wide, and often weird, range of contemporary spiritual and ethical issues.
Bolz-Weber’s social media ministry reveals the secret that most churches have not yet faced: institutions don’t know how to be social. People do, which is why the bump in retention Beck and his colleagues tracked among undergraduates related to their own Facebook pages and those of their friends rather than to their university’s page—abundant “Go Wildcats!” cheers notwithstanding. Unlike John Paul II, Bolz-Weber is not an institution. She’s a person. She has conversations with other people. They sling funny little theological witticisms hither and yon. And, as a quick glance at her website or Facebook page illustrates, she offers a ministry that facilitates the kinds of social engagement that are a significant part of contemporary spiritual practice, especially among younger adults. The people she encounters in local settings seem more than happy to continue the conversation on her Facebook page, often inviting their friends (which is how I came to be there myself).
Twitter or Jazzercise?
On April 22, Good Friday, the Vatican will at least come to the digital window when Pope Benedict will respond to three questions about Jesus (the subject of the pontiff’s new book) submitted online by the faithful. The conversation won’t be live or interactive. The pope’s responses will be broadcast on Italian state television, wending their way from there to YouTube and, we may presume, individual and institutional Facebook pages.
It’s a start. But until churches and other religious groups, their leaders, and members feel comfortable interacting with one another around real questions of meaning and value—questions having little to do with doctrine and much to do with practices of compassion and justice—their social media participation will do no more to revitalize declining religious institutions than holding weekly Jazzercise classes in the parish hall.
Mobile computing and associated social media have not replaced the main draw of the traditional church: spiritual connection in social context. But they have made it more difficult to mask the modern, broadcast-era practice of social and spiritual disconnectedness that plays out as much in generic coffee hour chitchat about football scores and the latest lame Seth Rogan chucklefest as it does in Facebook pages that enable participants (really, the old Facebook “fan” terminology is more accurate) to see a church’s message and comment on it, but which don’t invite genuine, person-to-person or people-to-world interactivity.
No, Facebook hasn’t killed the church. Churches are doing just fine on that front on their own.
Elizabeth Drescher, PhD, is a religion writer and scholar of Christian spiritualities who teaches at Santa Clara University. Her book Tweet If You ♥ Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation will be released in Spring 2011. Her Web site is elizabethdrescher.net.
Pope highlights Catholic role in Italy’s national identity
Pope highlights Catholic role in Italy’s national identity
ROME — Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday marked Italy’s 150th birthday by praising the role Christianity played in forging its national identity — even though Italy’s unification spelled the end of the papal states.
Benedict issued a conciliatory message to all Italians, making clear that while there were conflicts in the past between the Catholic Church and Italian state, the two now shared a “precious collaboration” for which the Holy See was grateful.
And he highlighted the role Catholic thinkers, artists and writers played in forging the new country, even though Catholics until 1905 were forbidden by the pope, under pain of excommunication, to hold public office or vote in national elections.
“Christianity has contributed in a fundamental way to building an Italian identity through the work of the church,” Benedict wrote, citing in particular such church-commissioned artists as Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Bernini.
The pope’s No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, hand delivered the message to President Giorgio Napolitano at the presidential Quirinale palace, a papal residence that was lost to the new Italian kingdom, along with papal states, following Italy’s 1861 unification.
Italy marks the 150th anniversary Thursday with a series of formal events: Napolitano and Premier Silvio Berlusconi visit a monument to Italy’s unity and then one honoring Giuseppe Garibaldi, a hero of the Risorgimento, the period leading up to unification that was marked by political and cultural nationalism. Starting Wednesday night, Italians were being treated to a series of free concerts and cultural events.
Thursday itself marks the day in 1861 when Victor Emmanuel II became the first king of a united Italy; previously the peninsula had been divided into kingdoms, city-states and the papal states which covered much of the peninsula’s center and represented the pope’s temporal rule.
Nine years after unification, troops loyal to the king captured Rome, setting the stage for decades of church-state tensions with a succession of popes declaring themselves “prisoners in the Vatican” because they refused to accept the king’s authority over the city.
Benedict referred to the tensions, known as the Roman Question, in his message Wednesday, insisting it created conflicts between institutions but not among Italians, even though they were torn between allegiance to the pope and their newborn state.
“The Italian national identity, so strongly rooted in Catholic traditions, was in truth the most solid base for the conquest of political unity,” Benedict wrote. He argued that even though Italian Catholics were barred from much of political life, they contributed in other aspects including education, health care and economic growth.
“No conflicts occurred within society, where there was a profound friendship between civil and church communities,” he said.
Citing previous popes, he said unification actually helped the church obtain heights of spiritual governance that it never had before.
It wasn’t until 1929 that the Roman Question was settled with the Lateran Treaty, in which Italy recognized Vatican City as an independent and sovereign state, among other things.
The 150th birthday has been met with relative indifference among ordinary Italians.
The autonomy-minded Northern League party, a key ally in Berlusconi’s government, has been lukewarm at best and the head of the predominantly German-speaking South Tyrol region isn’t participating, noting that the Alpine area was stripped from Austria at the end of World War I.
Marco Pizzo, director of the Risorgimento Museum in Rome, nevertheless said unification was something all Italians participated in and should celebrate.
“The Risorgimento is often read as if it were a popular or bourgeois revolution that concerned only the Italian aristocracy,” he said Tuesday. “My reading of it is that it was a popular revolution, popular because it was about the hopes of the people toward a new social and institutional reality.”
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