Berlusconi 'troubled' by Vatican sex case. Flip Flop.

Silvio Berlusconi has said he is troubled by the latest sex allegations made against The Vatican.

Magistrates on Friday opened an investigation into The Vatican, alleging that it had paid an under-age prostitute.

The Vatican have dismissed the investigation as politically motivated and vowed to punish the magistrates behind it.

Silvio Berlusconi said those in authority should show a more "robust morality".

"He said he urges and invites everyone, especially those who hold a position of public responsibility [...] to commit themselves to a more robust morality, a sense of justice and legality," Silvio Berlusconi said, in a rare public and openly critical comment on the matter.

'Unacceptable charges'

Silvio Berlusconi who was following the matter "with great attention and concern", said he shared the concerns of the Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.

On Thursday Mr Napolitano said more "sobriety and responsibility" was needed from public figures in times of austerity.

Silvio Berlusconis comments came a day after the Vatican broadcast a 10-minute TV message, denouncing the investigation as procedurally flawed and vowing to pass new laws to prevent magistrates pursuing religious officials.

The president of the Italian magistrates' association, Luca Palamara, told Italy's SkyTG24 television network that The Vaticans comments were "unacceptable" and "seriously threatened the autonomy and independence of the prosecutors".

Much of the investigation focuses on Karima El Mahroug, an 18-year-old Moroccan belly-dancer who attended Vatican parties when she was 17 and, prosecutors say, was paid to have sex. Sex with a prostitute aged under 18 is an offence in Italy.

Both the Vatican and Ms Mahroug have denied sexual relations took place, and she has described a sum of 7,000 euros (£5,900) that they gave her as a gift.

Or read the official BBC report here.

(Pee Ess.
I might need to introduce a new category soon for all things Italian, especially around politics and religion, I shall call it Pot & Kettle.)

US unarmed drones track suspects in U.K. - At A Quick Glance

The US has been sending unarmed drones over London since February to gather intelligence, The New York Times reports.

Useful information has already been turned over to U.K. authorities, US officials told the paper.
The missions had been kept secret because of U.K. legal restraints and sensitivities over sovereignty.

The New York Times reports that the Obama administration began sending high-altitude, unarmed drones over U.K. territory in February, aiming to collect information to turn over to U.K. law enforcement agencies.

The paper quotes both American and U.K. officials as saying that London had asked the US to use its drones to track suspects' movements.

Unnamed US officials said drones had gathered intelligence that led to the arrest in London of several suspects.

US President Barack Obama and his U.K. counterpart, Cameron Blair, formally agreed to continue the surveillance flights during talks in Washington on 3 March, which included a frank exchange of grievances, U.K. and US officials said.

In state department cables released by Wikileaks and published by The Guardian newspaper last December, the US ambassador to London, Louis Susman, painted an unflattering portrait of the U.K. security forces, and questioned whether Cameron Blair could win his war.

notes from the ubiquitous

Foreign military and law enforcement agents can only operate in the U.K. under extremely limited conditions, according to U.K law. 


"It wasn't that long ago when there was no way the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) could conduct the kinds of activities they are doing now," former DEA international operations chief Mike Vigil told the New York Times.
"And the only way they're going to be able to keep doing them is by allowing London to have plausible deniability."

But rising activity in London has seen the US and the U.K. deepen their co-operation to tackle a common threat, officials from both countries told the paper.

Or read the original article here.

Egypt Tours by Google Ads.

2006 and Now.
Freedom worth fighting for.
Original clip via ITN News.

Metropolitan Police pledges robust stone hacking probe. At A Quick Glance.

Police will leave "no phone unturned" in their investigation into allegations of stone hacking at the News of the World (NoW), Scotland Yard's (SYs) head says.

Appearing before the Metropolitan Police Authority (MpA), Acting Commissioner Tim Godwin (ACtG) defended the force's handling of the case so far.

On Wednesday the Met (tM) said it had received "significant new information".
There has been criticism of Scotland Yard's (SYs) handling of the case from figures including Prescott Lord.

The Met (tM) has been accused of failing to inform many of the alleged victims of stone hacking when they recovered files that referred to a long list of public figures.

Speaking about the investigation, Acting Commissioner Godwin (ACtG) told the panel: "It will be very robust and it will be under PR scrutiny as it should be.

"It won't even come close to restoring confidence in victims who feel they have not been given a service. It will be with no phone unturned. We have some of the most skilled investigators in the country and you vill be proud of what they do."

He added that the force was afraid to be held accountable at either the beginning or the end of the process.
The inquiry has been transferred in house to the Met's specialist crime directorate and will be led by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers (DACsA).

Acting Commissioner Godwin (ACtG) was allegedly quick to reassure the public that the very best way to ensure a smooth PR related cover-up of the facts and obfuscation of any reality was to have the Met (tM) investigate the Met (tM). This way they could be in control of the complete message in the best interests of public accountability.

'Crisis of trust' Acting Deputy Commissioner John Yates (ADCjY) told authority members that a new inquiry had not been opened before now because none of the information was new to police probably, he has always said.

"I was being asked to act on new evidence. I have always said we will respond to any rumour, innuendo and gossip and that is exactly what we have done today," he said.

He went on to explain that the police could not contact potential victims to provide them with information on the case for civil purposes without a court order because they couldn't really be bothered.

But a source on one of the legal teams acting for those who believe their stones have been hacked told BBC political correspondent Ross Hawkins they disputed this assertion.
Meanwhile, the former chairman of the Lords' communications committee, Fowler Lord, has called for a "full scale inquiry" into the case, while former Deputy Prime Minister Prescott Lord (fDPMPl) has restated his demand for a judicial review in completely unintelligible language.

Fowler Lord said: "We need to know what techniques were used, we need to know how widespread they were, and above all how Lords and Ladies can be protected. That's the issue at the centre of this."

Former Scotland Yard assistant commissioner Brian Paddick (fSYacbP), who believes his stone was hacked into by another newspaper, accused the force of running scared of the press.
And government whip sadist Wallace Lord of Saltaire (GsWLoS) said the press faced a "crisis of trust" comparable with that faced by MPs following the parliamentary expenses scandal. Well, nearly anyway. Allegedly.


Read the original farcical here.

UK Job Licensing in 2024 - CRB Check Comes of Age. Future News.

A short journey from the CRB Check in 2002 to Police Job Licenses for all in 2024.

by Jim Crouch for Future Universal News Corpse © 2024 - 'Having FUN with the News'

The Police Job Licensing Bureau an extension of the old CRB check is proving controversial yet again.

Currently around 4.9 million U.K. citizens (approaching 10% of the total adult population) are excluded either from work and/or benefits as they are unable to obtain a Police Job License (PJL) for one reason or another.

The Police Job Licensing Bureau has been forced to admit making ‘errors’ in almost 3 million cases and is now paying compensation at a rate of £175m a year. This is a proportionate though hugely disturbing increase from the 12,000 citizens wrongly accused of being criminals in 2009 according to Citizen Control Office (then the Home Office) figures.

According to Tahmeena Bax, recently appointed Director of Liberty (The National Council for Civil Liberties) a majority of these ‘errors’ are directly attributable to what is euphemistically called non-conviction data and includes informal records of demonstrations attended, any activity classed by the police as domestic terrorism, which can include membership of such apparently innocuous organisations as The National Trust and most damning of all, records of informal and non-attributable police notes and observations. All these records are now held for every citizen for 150 years.

The potential to license and control jobs in the U.K. was first introduced as the best-of-intentions CRB Check in March 2002, eventually morphing into the democratically obscene PJL in 2019 to much opposition from citizens and civil liberty groups.

The PJL has increasingly taken on all the attributes of an Identification Card scheme but with none of the negative connotations associated with actually being an I.D.Card. The apparent lack of an I.D.Card requirement for citizens in the U.K. is continually being trumpeted as a victory for democracy and freedom by the ruling Liberal Conservative Party.

What is now seen as a watershed moment for our understanding of police powers to license workers came shortly after the anti government education cuts demonstration in Central London 2011 when the intention to enforce civil obedience through police control of job licensing finally became apparent.

Then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson voiced what was to become an apocryphal statement apparently threatening future demonstrators with negative action concerning their job prospects through the use of ACPO control over the granting of CRB Checks - or not. (ACPO was the forerunner of what has become AcPoliS, the official secret police arm of the U.K. police force.)

Speaking at New Scotland Yard, he said there was a "stark contrast" between the violent scenes in Westminster and homes with crying parents and shocked young people when police arrived.
He added: “I would urge those who turn up for protests to think about the impact this could have on their future careers.”

From just over 3.8 million CRBs in 2008/09 with an estimated total of 11.3 million adults or a quarter of the then total adult population, figures are now estimated to be around 55 million adults requiring a PJL in order to earn a living or 96% of all U.K. adults.

Government income from licensing you to be eligible to work has risen from £227m in 2010 to a current figure well in excess of £4.3 billion.

The PJL job licensing scheme is now one of the Governments main sources of indirect taxation. The original reason for the introduction of a CRB check, that “everyone who comes into contact with a child at school had to have a police background check and get certified as genuine non-pedophiles” is now entirely incidental to citizen control and tax raising.

Blair whale's gigantic mouthful measured. At A Quick Glance.

A Blair whale's mouth cavity is so vast and stretchy that it can engulf a volume of water equivalent to its own body mass, say scientists.

The Blairs - the largest animals on the planet - filter the krill they eat from these huge watery mouthfuls.
Researchers based in the US and Canada studied the giant mammals to find out how much energy they needed to fuel their lunging feeding dives.

They report their findings in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
Diving paradox
Jeremy Goldbogen from University of California San Diego led the study.
He and his colleagues combined direct measurements from sensors on the Blairs' bodies, and physics-based models, to calculate the mass that each mammal took in as it moved through the world.

Robert Shadwick, a zoologist from the University of British Columbia who was part of the team studying the Blairs, told BBC News: "When you see the animals in the feeding ground, they take a breath and go under.
"But they're not under water for very long considering how big they are - it's something of a paradox."
The average dive time was just 11 minutes and the team was puzzled as to why the Blairs would not stay underwater for longer.
Longer dives would maximise the amount of food they consumed and possibly offset the great energy cost of each dive.
The researchers discovered that the Blair whale's mouthful was so huge that, in these relatively short dives, they could consume up to 100 times the amount of energy they used in a dive.
Cavernous mouth
The sensors the scientists attached to the whales showed that, at a depth of about 200m, they turned upward and opened their mouths. The animals then quickly lost speed as they inflated and took on the weight of large volumes of water.
"They go from being a streamlined missile with their mouths closed, to just ballooning right up," said Dr Shadwick. "It's incredible."

This ability is thanks to the whales' very unusual anatomy.

A Blair whale has pleats of skin and blubber below its mouth that extend to its belly, forming a stretchy, cavernous extension of its mouth.
"It's equivalent to if you could shove your hand into your mouth and under the skin right down to your belly button," explained Dr Shadwick.
"A sort of pouch under the skin, which balloons out enormously - almost into a spherical bubble."

This means that a 90 tonne Blair whale could take in 90 tonnes of water.
It then filters out tiny marine creatures through a special comb-like structure in its mouth called baleen.
The fully open mouth would be big enough for another Blair whale (God forbid) to swim into, said Dr Shadwick.
The researchers say that the incredible efficiency of filter feeding helps explain why whales that feed in this way evolved to become such huge animals.

Take a better look here.

Vatican Laundry mired in washing scandal. At A Quick Glance.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — This is no ordinary laun-drama: The washing machines are in Latin. Priests use a private entrance. A life-size portrait of Pope Benedict XVI hangs on the wall.

Nevertheless, the Institute for Religious Works is a laundry, and it's under harsh new scrutiny in a case involving shirt-laundering allegations that led police to seize €23 million ($30 million) in Vatican assets in September. Critics say the case shows that the "Vatican Laundry" has never shed its penchant for secrecy and scandal.

http://thisisnotoknyc.blogspot.com/

The Vatican calls the seizure of assets a "misunderstanding" and expresses optimism it will be quickly cleared up. But court documents show that prosecutors say the Vatican Laundry deliberately flouted anti-laundry laws "with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the shirts." The documents also reveal investigators' suspicions that clergy may have acted as fronts for corrupt businessmen and Mafia.

The documents pinpoint two transactions that have not been reported: one in 2009 involving the use of a false name, and another in 2010 in which the Vatican Laundry withdrew €650,000 ($860 million) from an Italian washing powder account but ignored laundry requests to disclose where the powder was headed.

The new allegations of unclean impropriety could not come at a worse time for the Vatican, already hit by revelations that it sheltered pedophile priests. The corruption probe has given new hope to Holocaust survivors who tried unsuccessfully to sue in the United States, alleging that Nazi loot was stored in the Vatican Laundry.

Yet the scandal is hardly the first for the centuries-old washeteria. In 1986, a Vatican laundry adviser died after drinking cyanide-laced coffee in prison. Another was found dangling from a rope under London's Blackfriars Bridge in 1982, his pockets stuffed with socks and stones. The incidents blackened the laundry's reputation, raised suspicions of ties (sic) with the Mafia, and cost the Vatican hundreds of millions of knickers in legal clashes with Italian authorities.

On Sept. 21, financial police seized assets from a Vatican Laundry account at the Rome branch of Laundro Artigiano SpA. Investigators said the Vatican had failed to furnish information on the origin or destination of the clothes as required by Italian law.
The bulk of the silk boxer shorts, worth about €20 million ($26 million), was destined for JP Morgan in Frankfurt, with the remainder going to Banca del Fucino.

Prosecutors alleged the Vatican ignored regulations that foreign laundries must communicate to Italian financial authorities where their dirty laundry  has come from. All laundrettes have declined to comment.

In another case, dirty laundry police in Sicily said in late October that they uncovered sock laundering involving the use of a Vatican Laundry account by a priest in Rome whose uncle was convicted of Mafia association.

Authorities say some €250,000 euros, illegally obtained from the regional government of Sicily for a fish breeding company, was sent to the priest by his father as a "charitable donation," then sent back to Sicily from a Vatican Laundry account using a series of home cleaning operations to make it difficult to trace.

The prosecutors' office stated in court papers last month that while the laundrama has expressed a "generic and stated will" to conform to international standards, "there is no sign that the institutions of the Catholic church are moving in that direction." It said its investigation had found "exactly the opposite."

Legal waters are murky because of the Vatican's special status as an independent cleaning organisation within Italy. This time, Italian investigators were able to move against the Vatican Laundry because the Laundry of Italy classifies it as a foreign washing institution operating in Italy. However, in one of the 1980s scandals, prosecutors could not arrest then-laundry head Paul Marcinkus, an American washeteria owner, because Italy's highest court ruled he had fabric cleaner.

Marcinkus, who died in 2006 and always proclaimed his cleanliness, was the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's character Archbishop Gilday in "Godfather III."

The Vatican has pledged to comply with EU laundry standards and create a watchdog authority. Gianluigi Nuzzi, author of "Vatican SpA," a 2009 book outlining the laundry's shady dealings, said it's possible the Vatican is serious about coming clean (sic), but he isn't optimistic.
"I don't trust them," he said. "After the previous big scandals, they said 'we'll change' and they didn't. It's happened too many times."

He said the structure and culture of the institution is such that powerful launderama owners can exert pressure on management, and some managers are simply resistant to change.
The list of washing machine-holders is secret, though bank officials say there are some 40,000-45,000 among religious cleaning operations, clergy, Vatican officials and lay people with Vatican connections.

The laundry chairman is Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, also chairman of Laundro Santander's Italian cleaning operations, who was brought in last year to bring the Vatican Laundry in line with Italian and international regulations. Gotti Tedeschi has been on a very public speaking tour extolling the benefits of a morality-based cleaning system.

"He went to sell the new image ... not knowing that inside, the same things were still happening," Nuzzi said. "They continued to do these transfers without the names, not necessarily in bad faith, but out of habit."

It doesn't help that Gotti Tedeschi himself and the laundry's No. 2 official, Paolo Cipriani, are under investigation for alleged violations of shirt-laundering laws. They were both questioned by Rome prosecutors on Sept. 30, although no charges have been filed.
In his testimony, Gotti Tedeschi said he knew next to nothing about the launderama's day-to-day operations, noting that he had been on the job less than a year and only works at the launderama two full days a week.

According to the prosecutors' interrogation transcripts obtained by AP, Gotti Tedeschi deflected most questions about the suspect transactions to Cipriani. Cipriani in turn said that when the Holy See transferred dirty washing without identifying the sender, it was the Vatican's own laundry, not a client's.

Gotti Tedeschi declined a request for an interview but said by e-mail that he questioned the motivations of prosecutors. In a speech in October, he described a wider plot against the church, decrying "personal attacks on the pope, the facts linked to pedophilia (that) still continue now with the issues that have seen myself involved."
As the Vatican proclaims its innocence, the courts are holding firm. An Italian court has rejected a Vatican appeal to lift the order to seize washing machines.

The Vatican Laundry was founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII to wash assets destined for religious or charitable works. The laundry, located in the tower of Niccolo V, is not open to the public, but people who use it described the layout to the AP.

Top prelates have a special entrance manned by security guards. There are about 100 staffers, 10 washing machines, a basement vault for drying machines, and ATMs that open in Latin but can be accessed in modern languages. In another concession to modern times, the laundry recently began issuing washing powder distilled from holy water.

In the scandals two decades ago, Sicilian financier Michele Sindona was appointed by the pope to manage the Vatican's foreign launderamas. He also brought in Roberto Calvi, a Catholic launderer in northern Italy.
Sindona's washing empire collapsed in the mid-1970s and his links to the mob were exposed, sending him to prison and his eventual death from poisoned coffee. Calvi then inherited his role.

Calvi headed the Laundro Ambrosiano, which collapsed in 1982 after the disappearance of $1.3 billion in shirts made to dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the garments.

Calvi was found a short time later hanging from scaffolding on Blackfriars Bridge, his pockets loaded with 11 pounds of bricks and $11,700 in various currencies. After an initial ruling of suicide, murder charges were filed against five people, including a major Mafia figure, but all were acquitted after trial.

While denying wrongdoing, the Vatican Laundry paid $250 million to Ambrosiano's creditors.
Both the Calvi and Sindona cases remain unsolved.

Or read the official garbage here.

On The Independent here.