Saturday, Dec 20th
Last update10:11:42 AM GMT
Special Interest Glance
The Catholic Church child abuse scandal in Belgium just got a whole lot worse. Belgian newspaper Het Laaste Niews is reporting that when authorities searched the home of the former archbishop of Brussels, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, they discovered a hidden cache of documents and photographs on notorious child sex killer Marc Dutroux — documents that Danneels was not supposed to have. Here’s a Google translation of one of their reports:
In an effort to rein in the sexual abuse crisis threatening the church, the Vatican is inching toward introducing changes to canon law to make it easier to discipline pedophile priests, Vatican officials say.
The changes are not expected to include adoption of the “zero tolerance” policy used by bishops in the United States and elsewhere, which remove a priest from ministry at the first credible accusation of abuse, as some victims’ groups and critics had hoped.
A controversial covert surveillance system that records the public's conversations is being used in Britain.
The technology, called Sigard, monitors movements and speech to detect signs of threatening behaviour.
Its designers claim the system can anticipate anti-social behaviour and violence by analysing the information picked up its sensors.
Police investigating claims of child abuse by Belgian clergy have told the BBC they are probing death threats against witnesses and magistrates.
"There are some threats against certain people around the case, and the prosecutors office is investigating that," he told the BBC.
John Sidney Denham, 67, was sentenced to 19 years and 10 months after pleading guilty to a range of charges, including multiple counts of indecent assault against boys aged five to 16.
Denham was found guilty of abusing 39 boys at schools in Sydney and elsewhere in New South Wales between 1968 and 1986.
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - After years of difficult negotiations, the U.N. General Assembly voted on Friday to set up a body that will seek to improve the situation of women and girls around the world.
The new body will be known officially as the U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, although officials say it will be referred to as U.N. Women (www.unwomen.org). It will consolidate four separate U.N. divisions now dealing with women's and gender issues.
The office led by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922, documents show and canon lawyers confirm.
But for the two decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church’s credibility in the United States, Australia, Ireland and elsewhere.
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