Archive for People
How is the Aid money Haiti spent
Posted by: | CommentsThere’s a storm brewing in Haiti.
Not a storm from the rainy season bearing down, but a storm over why so many are still in dire straits a full four months after the earthquake.
Why so many are facing the ravages of the rainy season without safe shelter to protect them?A storm over how that could be the case when so much international aid has been committed to help the people of Haiti.
A CBS News investigation examines the total aid committed to Haiti and explores how much has been spent so far.
Critics such as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy and Research say more money should have been spent up front making sure the population’s emergency needs were met. He argues that many donors who dug deep during their own tough times to give, thought they were putting immediate food in people’s mouths, giving immediate medical help, and putting a roof over victims’ heads now.
Just how much money has been collected so far? Within days of the earthquake, the United States and the
World Bank each made commitments of $100 million in aid. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Americans sent private donations worth another $150 million — more than they gave after the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. A recent international telethon raised another $57 million.
To put these amounts in perspective, consider that the annual value of all the goods and services produced by Haiti’s economy is about $7 billion. Pledges of aid from around the world already total about 10 percent of that figure, if not more. And so far, aid has been collected based on people’s willingness to give, not on the size of the need. There has been a tacit assumption that the amount donated cannot possibly be excessive.
That may indeed be true, but it does not mean that so much money can be put to immediate use. As aid groups on the ground in Haiti have found, the country’s infrastructure — roads, the power grid, etc. — are not very well developed, and it has few businesses capable of taking on big logistics and construction projects. In this environment, it is not easy to spend a lot of money productively in a short period of time.
This problem is similar to the “resource curse” facing poor countries that discover major reserves of fuels and minerals. When they begin extracting those natural riches (or selling the rights to do so), their economies receive sudden inflows of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. But they can’t always use all of that money right away; even if you have good intentions, you can’t double the size of an education or public health system overnight. Nor can you simply distribute the money to your people; if the economy doesn’t produce more goods and services, all that extra cash sloshing around will just raise prices. Left to sit, the money has a way of disappearing; for decades in Nigeria, billions in oil money were siphoned away annually by elites and corrupt bureaucrats.
Even saving the money for the future, as East Timor has done with its newfound oil wealth, can be dangerous. Several years ago, the Timorese knew that their government was starting to build up billions of dollars in saved funds — the process was actually quite transparent — but they wanted to see the money spent sooner, to create jobs and improve their quality of life. Riots and a change of government ensued.
If Haiti wants to spend its aid money now, it will clearly need help from overseas. But doing so will create an additional danger: that given Haiti’s lack of infrastructure and capacity, it will be dominated by foreign contractors in the same way as Iraq or Afghanistan. Foreign donors will undoubtedly employ their compatriots for big rebuilding projects — doing so makes giving aid that much easier — and they’ll risk falling into the same old traps of cronyism and unaccountability, as evidenced by no-bid contracts, shoddy work, and lack of buy-in from local people.
Priest Removed After Sex Abuse Complaint
Posted by: | CommentsA Centennial priest has been removed from active ministry after the archbishop of Denver received complaints the priest abused a minor in the 1970s.
In a statement Sunday, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said Father Mel Thompson has been removed from his priestly duties and has withdrawn from active ministry.
Thompson has served at St. Thomas More church in Centennial for about nine years
The removal comes after an April 7 complaint against Thompson for “past sexual misconduct with a minor that reportedly occurred in the early 1970s,” Chaput said.
A spokeswoman for the archdiocese, Jeanette DeMelo, said Sunday the abuse complaint came from a grown male.
The church would not be more specific about when the alleged misconduct occurred, and a timeline provided by the church does not say where Thompson served from 1970 to 1973. After that, Thompson was assigned to Good Shepherd Parish in Denver, formerly named St. John the Evangelist.
The church has reported the alleged abuse to local law enforcement, Chaput said. Denver police spokesman Matt Murray said the officer in charge of leading such investigations has not been notified about this particular case. However, Murray said that doesn’t mean the case could be in the department’s system waiting to be investigated on Monday.
The announcement comes as sex abuse allegations have swept across Europe and the U.S. in recent weeks. The pope himself has come under fire for the handling of cases that date to his tenure as archbishop of Munich and as a Vatican cardinal in charge of the office dealing with abuse cases.
Last week Pope Benedict XVI said he is willing to meet with more victims of clerical sexual abuse.
Benedict has already met with abuse victims during trips to the United States and Australia and with Canadians at the Vatican.
Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said many victims are looking not for financial compensation but for moral help.
He said proper selection and training of prospective priests will be crucial in preventing further abuse, and he insisted that the church keep carrying out canon trials “with decisiveness and truthfulness” and cooperate with civil authorities.
Vatican failed to heed sex abuse
Posted by: | CommentsThe tsunami of sex abuse scandals hitting the Roman Catholic church indicates it learned little from the trailblazing work done in Canada on the issue two decades ago, say experts in the church here.
“Anyone who was paying attention had to know, at least 20 years ago, that there’s a right way to manage this and a wrong way,” said Sister Nuala Kenny, professor emeritus of bioethics at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
In 1990, Kenny was a member of the Winter Commission set up by the Catholic church to investigate the sexual abuse of boys by members of the Christian Brothers religious order at the notorious Mount Cashel orphanage in St. John’s, Nfld., in the 1970s and 1980s.
Two years later, she became a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Child Sexual Abuse, set up by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. Its report, From Pain to Hope, was issued after the church and the Ontario government agreed to a $40 million compensation package for 1,600 men abused as children at two Catholic training schools near Ottawa and Toronto. Provincial police laid more than 200 assault and sex-related charges, which ended in 15 convictions.
Allegations of child abuse, the reports insisted, must be treated as potential crimes, rather than internal church matters, and reported to civil authorities. The primary obligation, they stressed, is protection of the child.
Yet in subsequent scandals that erupted in Boston and Ireland, priests accused of sex abuse were simply moved to other parishes, while church authorities turned a blind eye to allegations, if not flatly tried to cover them up.
Last month, it was revealed that the head of the Irish Catholic church, Cardinal Sean Brady, was present during meetings in 1975 when children signed vows of silence about complaints against a pedophile priest. Brady has so far resisted calls to resign.
The latest scandal is swirling around the pontiff himself. A psychiatrist who treated a priest accused of sexually abusing boys in the early 1980s says a German archdiocese, headed at the time by the future pope, neglected repeated warnings that the priest should not be allowed to work with children.
The priest was convicted of sexual abuse in Bavaria in 1986.
Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, as the Pope was then known, approved a decision to send the priest for therapy in 1980. But the psychiatrist told The New York Times he doesn’t know if Ratzinger knew of repeated warnings about the man.
Kenny says Canada’s Catholic churches have extensively improved the reporting and handling of sex abuse cases, and the screening and education of student priests.
But she says Canada’s bishops have failed to deal with the underlying issues in abuse scandals – the power of priests over parishioners, their lack of accountability to bishops or parishioners, and the church’s attitude toward sexuality in general, and the celibacy of priests in particular.
“In general, the approach that I see is not in the tradition of brave action for justice that I’ve come to respect the Canadian bishops for. I think it’s: `Head down, if it didn’t happen here, if it’s not happening now, if we took care of that, let’s move on.’ We’re not taking the opportunity for this larger conversation,” Kenny said.
Too many priests are isolated from their parishioners, she says, lacking in the kind of a support that can keep them out of trouble
Violence against women gets worse during disasters
Posted by: | CommentsPORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Natural disasters, says Denyse Cote, are when women’s rights matter most. Which is why the sociology professor at the University of Quebec in the Outaouais agreed so readily to be part of Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean’s small official delegation to Haiti this week.
The invitation came only a week ago, and Cote admits she was surprised by it. But with deep ties to Haiti’s women’s movement, she felt it was important to travel to the Caribbean nation.
Sexual aggression and violence against girls and women often go hand in hand with the breakdown of social order during a catastrophe such as the Jan. 12 earthquake that pulverized parts of Haiti.
“We’ve heard a lot of architects and urban planners but they don’t think about these things. They don’t necessarily think about how to build a city that would be women friendly or family friendly, where schools are close to homes” for instance, she said.
But leaders must move forward on women’s issues even during disasters so that greater equality gaps don’t result in the aftermath of the catastrophe, she said. Cote acted as the Canadian delegate to a roundtable on women’s issues that Jean was to attend Monday in Port-au-Prince.
Religion in alcoholic treatment sparks complaint
Posted by: | CommentsA Winnipeg man who has struggled with alcoholism for decades says he has filed a complaint with the Manitoba Human Rights Commission over the lack of a treatment program that’s free of religious or spiritual elements.
Rob Johnstone said he has battled alcoholism for 40 years and can’t find a treatment program that doesn’t rely on religion or spirituality as part of the recovery process.
“I should not be forced to participate in someone else’s religious beliefs. I shouldn’t have to add to mine,” said Johnstone, who added he has been an alcoholic for 40 years.
“We get involved in mood-altering substances and mind-altering substances,” Johnstone said. “That means the person is very vulnerable when they come in and that person should not be subjected to someone else’s religion.”
He’s hoping his human rights complaint pushes the province to create a treatment program that’s free of spiritual or religious elements. The commission wouldn’t comment on the status of his complaint.
“Spirituality … is part and parcel of everyone’s life. For some people, their spirituality is more important than others, but it’s a dimension of all of our lives as human beings,” Goossen said.
“When they’re in … programming, we do want them to go look for a grain of something that will be helpful for them and disregard the rest,” Goossen added.
Other people who work with addicts agree.
“If you talk to the concept of spirituality, most social recovery models have a level of spirituality,” Hoeft said. “Really, spirituality is getting in touch with who you are.”
“Some degree of a spiritual component is common as these types of programs are believed to be more effective,” the spokeswoman said.
“It is important to recognize that spirituality is not the same as religion. People in recovery tend to benefit from self-reflection, examining their lives, where they’ve come from, who they are and where they’re going.”
‘Normal women’ replace size-zero models in German mags
Posted by: | CommentsIn October last year, the 700,000-circulation magazine had promised to stop featuring size-zero models. Many readers had protested that they could not relate to models with “protruding bones”.
The editor of the magazine, Andreas Lebert, even admitted that the models on Brigitte used to be so thin that they often had to “fatten them up” using Photoshop. However, the magazine announced that it would snap “normal women” on its pages in future.
“It is not a question of them suddenly becoming models. They simply step out of their normal lives for a moment and present fashion for us as personalities,” the Independent quoted Lebert as saying.
A total of 20,000 women put themselves forward after the “normal women as models” campaign was announced.
Sybille Zschaber, history teacher at a Hamburg grammar school, is one of the few who have made it. Zschaber has been made to look like late German actress Marlene Dietrich in the January issue.
Olay Twiggy Advertising Complaints
Posted by: | CommentsA magazine ad for an Olay beauty product featuring Twiggy has been banned by the advertising watchdog, after more than 700 complaints gathered for a campaign against airbrushing in ads by the Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson.
In the ad, Twiggy, who also fronts Marks & Spencer’s TV campaigns, promotes the Procter & Gamble-owned Olay Definity eye illuminator. Her picture appears next to the words: “Olay is my secret to brighter-looking eyes.”
“Because younger-looking eyes never go out of fashion … reduces the look of wrinkles and dark circles for brighter, younger-looking eyes,” the ad continued.
The Advertising Standards Authority received two complaints that the ad was misleading because the image of Twiggy had been digitally retouched.
In addition Swinson forwarded more than 700 complaints, gathered via her anti-airbrushing web campaign, that the ad had was not only misleading but also socially irresponsible, because it could have a “negative impact on people’s perceptions of their own body image”.
In its ruling, the ASA said that it considered that the post-production retouching of the original ad, specifically in the eye area, could give consumers a “misleading impression of the effect the product could
However, the ASA rejected the complaints that the ad was socially irresponsible, saying: “We considered that consumers were likely to expect a degree of glamour in images for beauty products and would therefore expect Twiggy to have been professionally styled and made-up for the photo shoot, and to have been photographed professionally.
“We concluded that, in the context of an ad that featured a mature model likely to appeal to women of an older age group, the image was unlikely to have a negative impact on perceptions of body image among the target audience and was not socially irresponsible.”
P&G said that there would “always be differences between uncomplimentary paparazzi shots and professional beauty photographs”.
The company argued that an article in a national newspaper, which featured Twiggy “off-duty” in the Olay ad, may have prompted the complaints.
P&G added that it was “routine practice to use post-production techniques to correct for lighting and other minor photographic deficiencies before publishing the final shots as part of an advertising campaign”.
Experts: Bishops covered up priests’ child abuse
Posted by: | CommentsRoman Catholic Church leaders in Dublin spent decades sheltering child-abusing priests from the law and most fellow clerics turned a blind eye, an investigation ordered by Ireland’s government concluded Thursday.
Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who handed over more than 60,000 previously secret church files to the three-year investigation, said he felt deep shame and sorrow for how previous archbishops presided over endemic child abuse — yet claimed afterward not to understand the gravity of their sins.
Martin said his four predecessors in Ireland’s capital, including retired Cardinal Desmond Connell, must have understood that priests’ molestation and rape of boys and girls “was a crime in both civil and canon law. For some reason or another they felt they could deal with all this in little worlds of their own.
“They were wrong, and children were left to suffer.”
That report in May sought to document the scale of abuse as well as the reasons why church and state authorities didn’t stop it, whereas Thursday’s 720-page report focused on why church leaders in the Dublin Archdiocese — home to a quarter of Ireland’s 4 million Catholics — did not tell police about a single abuse complaint against a priest until 1995.
By then, the investigators found, successive archbishops and their senior deputies — among them qualified lawyers — already had compiled confidential files on more than 100 parish priests who had sexually abused children since 1940. Those files had remained locked in the Dublin archbishop’s private vault.
The investigators also dug up a paper trail documenting the church’s long-secret insurance policy, taken out in 1987, to cover potential lawsuits and compensation demands. Dublin church leaders publicly denied the existence of the problem for a decade afterward — but since the mid-1990s have paid out more than euro10 million ($15 million) in settlements and legal bills.
It was not until 1995 that then-Archbishop Connell allowed police to see church files on 17 clerical abuse cases. At that time, Connell actually held records of complaints against at least 29 priests, the report found. Connell later pursued a lawsuit against the investigators in an abandoned bid to keep them from seeing more than 5,500 files documenting the church’s knowledge of abusive priests.
The report said all four archbishops sought “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities.”
The investigators lauded a handful of priests and mostly low-ranking police who pursued complaints and prosecutions, almost always unsuccessfully, from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The government also apologized for the state’s failure to pursue Dublin priests accused of child abuse until recent years.
Justice Minister Dermot Ahern, who received the Dublin Archdiocese report in July but delayed its publication for legal vetting, vowed that the state would never again treat the Catholic Church with deference.
“A priest’s collar will protect no criminal,” he said.
But pressure groups representing more than 15,000 documented victims of abuse by Irish Catholic officials said the government was not doing enough to end the danger of Catholic child abuse — in part because the law still stops short of requiring bishops to report abuse complaints to police.
And she forecast that, because abused children often do not seek justice until they reach adulthood, children today were still being abused by priests. “It’s very likely in 10 or 15 years’ time that the children who are being abused today will bring forward allegations,” she said.
“As Irish people we like to think we live in a civilized society,” she said, “but we need to hang our heads in shame.”
Why do some people complain about everything
Posted by: | CommentsSome people are naturally positive and optimistic, whereas others tend to see the world in a more negative light and always think the glass is half-empty. Therefore, it is only natural that some people tend to complain more than others do. However, complaining is not always related to how pessimistic or unhappy a person is. Most of us have things we complain about, yet there are some people that seem to complain about everything.
Just because someone complains a lot, does not necessarily mean they are unhappy. Obviously, there is some connection between what happens in someone’s life and the things that they complain about. When a lot of bad events occur, one is more likely to complain than when everything is rosy. Some people though, seem to complain a lot regardless of life’s circumstances. We all know of people who are always complaining and never seem to stop.
There are different reasons why people complain. For some people, complaining comes forth out of a true sense of unhappiness. They are unhappy about themselves or about their lives and they express this by complaining to others about their bad fortune. When people are that unhappy it does not really matter what happens in their lives, because they will always find something to complain about. They need to complain, because for them it is a way of coping with their unhappiness that they have learned is effective.
This is different to the every day complaining most people do. We all complain sometimes, about little things that happen to us, like being stuck in a traffic jam or being turned down for a job. However, because most of us are not truly unhappy we do not have the need to complain all the time. When no bad events take place in our lives, we simply cease to complain. This is not the case with so-called compulsive complainers.
People do not only complain incessantly because they are unhappy, for some complainers it is more of a bad habit that they have picked up. These are the kind of people who either just need to complain for no good reason, or they are so used to complaining all the time that they do not even notice that they are doing it. You can recognize them by their casual way of complaining. They might walk into your house and mention that traffic was a nightmare, the weather sucks, they are not feeling too well and that something in your house smells funny.
A final reason why some people complain a lot is because it makes them feel better. These people are not necessarily unhappy people, but by complaining about every little thing that bothers them, they actually feel better. In other words, they burden other people with all their problems and worries, making those people feel bad, while they in turn end up feeling great. There is nothing wrong with complaining, we all need to do it now and again, but the trick is to not over do it. The last thing you want is to end up being known as one of those people who complains about everything.
Our View: Can America manage a day without complaints?
Posted by: | CommentsFed up with a culture of negativity that produces complaints 24-7-365 about the economy, politics and the mundane matters of everyday life, a Missouri congressman decided he’d try to do something about it.
Democrat Emanuel Cleaver introduced a resolution with a simple message: Cut the griping. He wants to see the day before Thanksgiving in future years declared Complaint-Free Wednesday, dedicated to setting the criticism aside and acknowledging that whining does nothing to solve problems. Cleaver is also pitching it as a chance to prepare for the day that follows. Like stretching before a workout, laying down our list of problems will make it easier for people to see what they’re thankful for.
Not surprisingly, his proposal has generated – you guessed it – complaints. Some folks paint it as another attempt to try to muzzle speech and make dissent unpatriotic. Of course they ignore that the identical idea was proposed last year by Cleaver’s Missouri colleague Sam Graves, a Republican. Others have made hobbies of grumbling and aren’t keen on stopping, even for a day.
Truth be told, we can come up with a couple things to groan about ourselves. Today of all days, shouldn’t we be able to blow off whatever steam we have before sitting around with family? Don’t we need the chance to complain about traffic jams, airport waits and somebody absconding with that last tube of Pillsbury crescent rolls at the grocery store? Heck, what would our online commenters do with themselves if they’re not allowed to satisfy their very reason for being? I find fault, therefore I am.
Then, of course, there’s the healthy measure of doubt that this will have much effect. Cleaver has acknowledged those doubts and still figures it can’t hurt to try. He’s pointed out that it’s revenue-neutral – how many proposals can claim that nowadays? – and keeps people healthier. Indeed, the Dallas Morning News cites reports that the average person grouses about one thing or another 15 to 30 times a day (a number we suspect goes up on days city councils and school boards meet). Yet, contrary to popular belief, hard-core complainers tend to die before those who give it a rest occasionally, according to a Mayo Clinic study.