From the LATimes:
Reports of Priests' Abuse Enrage Boston Catholics
By ELIZABETH MEHREN, TIMES STAFF WRITER

BOSTON -- Among Catholics here, the floodgates of rage and disappointment poured open this week.
    On radio talk shows, in chatter at convenience stores and in emergency "listening sessions" convened hastily by the Archdiocese of Boston, the faithful vented anger and frustration over daily disclosures that scores of pedophile priests worked in the region with the full knowledge of church officials.
    As the number of implicated clergy members soared to 80, the crisis grew so deep that nearly half the Roman Catholics polled said Cardinal Bernard Law should resign. The turmoil over what church officials knew, when they knew it and what they did or did not do to protect themselves and their parishioners has rocked a region that is more than 50% Catholic.
    "This is our Sept. 11," Boston College professor Thomas H. Groome said Friday.
    By week's end, the archdiocese had given law enforcement authorities the names of at least 80 priests accused of sexual misconduct with minors over the last 20 or more years.
    The archdiocese also announced Thursday that six more priests had been suspended. Earlier in the week, the archdiocese relieved two other priests of duties, also following accusations that they had sexual relations with children.
    Both actions came days after Law publicly insisted that all priests in his jurisdiction who were suspected of sexually abusing children had been removed from their duties...
    The survey found that 64% said church leaders care more about protecting the accused priests than helping the victims.
    "I think for a long time people have known that the church has been aware of these problems and has not acted expeditiously," said Lisa Cahill, a professor of moral theology at Boston College, a Jesuit institution.
    "Part of what's appalling," she continued, "is the extensiveness of the problem, based just on the number of these priests that keep surfacing in New England. Every day, you hear about six more cases."
    Recently, the archdiocese said it had settled so many child sexual abuse claims against it that a multimillion-dollar insurance fund was running dry.
    Scandals involving pedophile priests have hit parishes across America--and indeed, around the world--in recent decades. Thousands of adults have come forward to say they were abused as children and many priests have been sent to jail.
    At first, accusations against Father James Geoghan seemed no different. The 66-year-old defrocked priest was charged in three separate criminal sexual abuse cases dating from the 1980s and 1990s. More than 130 people have claimed they were fondled or molested by Geoghan, who also is a defendant in 84 civil lawsuits.
    But in the course of the Geoghan investigation, Law was forced to tell prosecutors that the priest's pattern of pedophilia was no secret in the local Catholic hierarchy.
    Law abruptly promised to supply law enforcement agencies with names of priests suspected of such behavior. He organized a panel including medical experts to look into sexual abuse within the church. The cardinal also appealed for public understanding, urging Catholics to pray for him as he faced this difficult situation.
    On Jan. 25, he vowed, "There is no priest, or former priest, working in this archdiocese in any assignment whom we know to have been responsible for sexual abuse."
    Days later, he removed two more priests for alleged child molestation.
    The archdiocese did not respond to requests Friday for an interview with the cardinal. However, after returning from the Vatican, Law told local reporters at Logan International Airport: "Our intent is to do everything we possibly can to ensure the protection of children."
    Around the archdiocese, the scope of the scandal--and its growing momentum--continued to shock Catholics, who expressed grief, outrage and, most of all, a sense of betrayal.
    "You have an organization that is based on faith, and part of that faith derives from your confidence in the institution that houses that faith," said Paul Nace, a real estate developer in Newton who was raised Catholic.
    "When events happen that call into question that institution, at a very basic and moral level it also calls into question your faith," Nace said.
    As horrific as the spiraling number of clergy sexual abuse cases might be, "the most disturbing part is that it appears that decisions were made to protect the institution at the expense of the victims," Nace said. "You've got a head-on, loggerhead collision with everything that institution is supposed to stand for."
    Groome, a former priest and author of a new book called "What Makes Us Catholic," said that to Catholics, the church represents a vastly more important institution than in some other denominations.
    "We have obviously exaggerated the importance of the institution," he said. "Everybody has a priesthood, and everybody invests in their priesthood, but nobody in the Western world has invested in their priesthood the way Catholics have. This is why all of this is so desperately shattering."
    Mitchell Garabedian, an attorney representing 84 plaintiffs in civil suits against Geoghan, said his clients have had their faith ravaged by their experiences.
    "They cannot seek spiritual relief anywhere because of what has happened to them," Garabedian said. "The very entity they want to turn to has in a sense helped them to be molested. It is mind-boggling."
    Some of the claims he has looked into involving the Boston archdiocese date back more than 40 years, Garabedian said. Far from surprised that so many names of alleged predator priests have been put forward by the church, "I'd be surprised if more names were not revealed," he said.
    "There is a serious problem within the Archdiocese of Boston," Garabedian went on. "For decades they have been imprisoned by pedophiles and shackled by their own denial."
    The troubles at the archdiocese took a new turn late in the week when a family in which both a father and son were abused by priests filed a suit against Cardinal Law. The latest legal action--the first directed at the cardinal himself--claims Law "intentionally" and "recklessly" inflicted emotional damage on Thomas and Christopher Fulchino by knowingly assigning a pedophile priest to their parish.

INSIDE THE DRESSING ROOM OF THE HIVES! (NOTE THE RIGHT HAND.)

ABOVE: French farmer Jose Bove has some French bread, cheese and wine after he was freed from the Villeneuve les Maguelonne jail in the south of France, Tuesday, September 7, 1999. Bove, leader of a radical farmers' union, was jailed for nearly three weeks for vandalizing McDonald's restaurant property. The small Farmers' Confederation has made McDonald's the main target in a wave of sometimes violent protests, decrying the fast-food chain as a symbol of American trade ``hegemony'' and economic globalization.(AP Photo/Christophe Ena).

from New Left Review 12, November-December 2001

JOSÉ BOVÉ
The demolisher of McDonald’s explains his personal background, the history of
the Peasants’ Confederation in France, and the international objectives of Via
Campesina. Struggles in the countryside of the Massif Central or Karnataka as
spear-points in the anti-globalization movement.

You founded the Confédération Paysanne in 1987. What is its project?
JOSE BOVE: Firstly, it’s a defence of the interests of peasants as workers. We’re
exploited, too—by the banks, by the companies who buy our produce, by the firms
who sell us equipment, fertilizers, seeds and animal feed. Secondly, it’s a
struggle against the whole intensive-farming system. The goals of the
multinationals who run it are minimum employment and maximum, export-oriented
production—with no regard for the environment or food quality. Take the
calf-rearing system. First the young calf is separated from its mother. Then
it’s fed on milk that’s been machine-extracted, transported to a factory,
pasteurized, de-creamed, dried, reconstituted, packaged and then, finally,
re-transported to the farms—with huge subsidies from the EU to ensure that the
processed milk actually works out cheaper than the stuff the calves could have
suckled for themselves. It’s this sort of economic and ecological madness,
together with the health risks that intensive farming involves, that have given
the impetus to an alternative approach.
    ...We’re committed
to developing forms of sustainable agriculture, which respect the need for
environmental protection, for healthy food, for labour rights. Any farmer can
join the Confédération Paysanne. It’s not limited to those using organic methods
or working a certain acreage. You just have to adhere to the basic project.
There are around 40,000 members now. In the Chambres d’Agriculture elections
this year we won 28 per cent of the vote overall—and much more in some
départements. It was 44 per cent in Aveyron, and 46 per cent in La Manche.

How did this come to pit you against the junk-food industry—most famously,
dismantling the McDonald’s in Millau?
During the eighties we built up a big campaign in France against the pressures
on veal farmers to feed growth hormones to their calves. There was a strong
boycott movement, and a lot of publicity about the health risks. Successive
Ministers of Agriculture were forced to impose restrictions, despite heavy
lobbying from the pharmaceutical industry. At the end of the eighties the EU
banned their use in livestock-rearing, but it has been wriggling about on the
question ever since. In 1996, the US submitted a complaint to the WTO about
Europe’s refusal to import American hormone-treated beef—exploiting the results
of a scientific conference, organized by EU Commissioner Franz Fischler, that
had concluded, scandalously, that five of the hormones were perfectly safe. But
there was so much popular opposition, linked to people’s growing anxieties about
what was happening in the food chain—mad cow disease, Belgian chickens poisoned
with benzodioxin, salmonella scares, GMOs—that the European Parliament actually
held firm. When the WTO deadline expired in the summer of 1999, the US slapped a
retaliatory 100 per cent surcharge on a long list of European products—Roquefort
cheese among them. This was a huge question locally—not just for the sheep’s
milk producers, but for the whole Larzac region.
    When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald’s in our
town, everyone understood why—the symbolism was so strong. It was for proper
food against malbouffe, agricultural workers against multinationals. The actual
structure was incredibly flimsy. We piled the door-frames and partitions on to
our tractor trailers and drove them through the town. The extreme Right and
other nationalists tried to make out it was anti-Americanism, but the vast
majority understood it was no such thing. It was a protest against a form of
food production that wants to dominate the world. I saw the international
support for us building up, after my arrest, watching TV in prison. Lots of
American farmers and environmentalists sent in cheques.

...What were your demands at Seattle?
Firstly, all countries should have the right to impose their own tariffs, to
protect their own farming and food resources and maintain a balance between town
and countryside. People have a fundamental right to produce the food they need
in the area where they live. That means opposing the current relocation of
American and European agribusiness—chicken and pig farms, and greenhouse
vegetables—to countries with cheap labour and no environmental regulation. These
firms don’t feed the local people: on the contrary, they destroy the local
agriculture, forcing small peasant-farming families off the land, as in Brazil.
Secondly, we have to take measures to end the multinationals’ dumping practice.
It’s a well-established tactic used to sweep a local agriculture out of the way.
They flood a country with very cheap, poor-quality produce, subsidized by
massive handouts in export aid and other help from big financial interests. Then
they raise prices again, once the small farmers have been destroyed. In
sub-Saharan Africa, livestock herds have been halved as a result of the big
European meat companies flooding in heavily subsidized frozen carcasses. The
abolition of all export aid would be a first step towards fair trading. The
world market would then reflect the real cost of production for the exporting
countries.
    Thirdly, we absolutely refuse the right of the multinationals to impose patents
on living things. It’s bio-piracy, the grossest form of expropriation on the
planet. Patents are supposed to protect a new invention or a new technique, not
a natural resource. Here, it’s not even the technique but the products, the
genetically modified seeds themselves, that are ‘patented’ by half-a-dozen
chemical companies, violating farmers’ universally recognized right to gather
seed for the next year’s harvest. The multinationals’ GM programme has also been
a ferocious attack on biodiversity. For instance, something like 140,000 types
of rice have been cultivated in Asia, over the centuries. They’ve been adapted
to particular local tastes and growing conditions—long-grain, short-grain,
variations in height, taste, texture, tolerance of humidity and temperatures,
and so on. The food companies are working on five or six strains, genetically
modified for intensive, low-labour cultivation, and imposing them in areas of
traditional subsistence farming. In some Asian countries—the Philippines and
China are the worst cases—these half-dozen varieties now cover two-thirds of
rice-growing land.
    ...The Marrakesh accords were supposed to be subject to a balance sheet at
Seattle—of course, this never came. Not that we need an official report to know
that the countries of the South have been the biggest losers: opening their
borders has invited a direct attack on the subsistence agriculture there. For
example, South Korea and the Philippines used to be self-sufficient in rice
production. Now they’re compelled to import lower-grade rice at a cheaper price
than the local crops, decimating their own paddy production. India and Pakistan
are being forced to import textile fibres, which is having a devastating effect
on small cotton farmers. In Brazil—a major agricultural exporter—a growing
percentage of the population is suffering from actual malnutrition. The
multinationals are taking over, denying large numbers of farming families access
to the land and the possibility of feeding themselves.

 Daniel and Manuela Ruda: Kiss after the judgement
 

JUDGEMENT DURING THE SATANISTEN PROCESS

Grinsen in the face

Grinsend and smirking received the two Satanisten Manuela and Daniel Ruda the judgement, which will bring them for long time into a closed psychiatric hospital. Before the Bochumer regional court they were condemned for the murder at a 33-jaehrigen acquaintance to detentions by 13 or 15 years.

Bochum - after the message of the judges the Rudas must spend indefinite time in a closed psychiatric institute. A chance, from the measure execution in such a way specified dismisses to become, exists only, if consultants classified the patients as harmless. The defender said after in relation to the judgement the ARD: " the two are bekloppt, if you permit me the printout. " Also Manuela and Daniel Ruda are still felsenfest convinced a half year after the murder at the 33-Jaehrigen of the fact that the devil would have given them personally the job to the blood act.
    During the process several consultants had come to the judgement that the married couple could due to their personality disturbances and the act insight lacking at any time again murders. Experts had explained that a handling could take clearly more than ten years up. It is not to be excluded however that a therapy fails completely. The married people are momentary not even able to develop debt feelings.
    The pair had brutally murdered the acquaintance with 66 meter passes and hammer blows after own confession in July 2001. However had the accused abgestritten that it concerned murder - finally they would have received the job from Satan. A voice from the underworld instructed it: " kill! Bring victims! Bring souls! " Also Daniel Ruda, which had wanted original to state during the process, explained: " if one someone with the auto over-driven, is accused also not the auto. "
    " it did not concern Satanismus, but around a crime of two disturbed humans ", the chairman Richter of the court of assizes chamber, explained Arnjo Kerstingtombroke in his in-hour grounds. " the Satanismus was a Popanz, it before itself moved over. " The criminally liableness was so substantially reduced that a lifelong detention was out of the question. To the accused he said. " with the production is now conclusion. Now the grey Einerlei of the psychiatry comes for long time. "
    For Daniel Ruda did not detect the judges milderungsgruende on. Because of murder in the status of reduced criminally liableness he got the maximum penalty of 15 years. Since its wife did not take the original initiative to the act, so the grounds, were reduced their imprisonment by two years. The pair killed, continued to tighten the completely badless victim insidiously and from low motives the court.
    With the message the judges still go beyond the demands of the public prosecutor's office, which had required 14 years for the accused and for its wife detention of twelve years. Both public prosecutor's office and the defenders had expressed themselves in their final speech on Monday to accommodate the married people in a closed psychiatric institute. Both pages had pleaded for reduced criminally liableness.
    The lawyers still announced in the court room revision against the judgement. " the judgement is too hard, and the Satanismus played very probably a role ", said attorney Reinhard Benneken.

05 FEB 02: THE LEOPARD MAN OF SKYE AND THE GERMAN SATANISTS

FROM http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_435810.html?menu=news.quirkies

Leopard man shuns society for hut on Isle of Skye

A tattooed hermit known as the Leopard Man of Skye lives in a hut made of sticks and stones and bathes in a river.
    Tom Leppard dropped out of society years ago after spending £5,500 to have his body covered in spots. Once a week, the ex-soldier goes by canoe to buy supplies and pick up his pension.
    Mr Leppard told Grampian Television: "I spent too long in the forces, 28 years. I couldn't mix with ordinary people. I decided I wanted to be the biggest of something, the only one of something. It had to be a tattoo, one tattoo. This is one tattoo."
    Mr Leppard, who also has a set of fangs, is recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the most tattooed man on earth.
    He says he would be plagued by "interfering busybodies" and children throwing stones at his window if he went back to civilisation.

Blood-drinking devil worshippers face life for ritual Satanic killing
Murder trial reveals sinister link to British vampire groups
John Hooper in Berlin
Friday February 1, 2002
The Guardian

A young married couple who admitted to a ritual Satanic killing were yesterday told they could spend the rest of their lives in a secure psychiatric unit after a trial which has raised the spectre of bizarre underground occult groups in Britain.
    Manuela Ruda, aged 23, who told a German court she had become a vampire in London, and her husband, Daniel, aged 26, were given prison sentences of 13 and 15 years respectively after admitting to the hacking to death of a friend in their flat in Witten, in the Ruhr valley.
    The victim, a 33-year-old colleague of Daniel's, Frank Hackert, was targeted as suitable prey for his mild temperament and love of The Beatles, and was lured to their apartment where he was attacked repeatedly with a hammer.
    Manuela Ruda told the court: "Then my knife started to glow and I heard the command to stab him in the heart."
    The couple stabbed Hackert 66 times, carving an occult pentagram on his chest and collecting his blood in a bowl and then drinking it.
    When police broke into the flat they found a scalpel still embedded in his stomach with his body lying beneath a banner saying "When Satan Lives".
    They also found imitation human skulls and a coffin in which Manuela slept during the day.
    The judge in the case, which has led to disturbing scenes in court, coupled their jail terms with an order that they be held indefinitely for psychiatric treatment.
    Neither of the two self-styled devil worshippers showed the slightest emotion as the sentences were read out to a courtroom dotted with supporters and admirers of the bizarre couple, many dressed in black and holding roses.
    Throughout the trial in the western town of Bochum, the couple had remained defiant, making rude gestures, rolling their eyes maniacally, sticking their tongues out and flashing smiles at journalists.
    Manuela had told the court how, after working in the Scottish Highlands, she had headed for north London where she se cured a job in a gothic club. It is here she made her first forays into the world of bloodsucking. In the words of her lugubriously bizarre testimony, it was frequented "by both vampires and human beings".
    Returning to Germany she began to give substance to her sinister fantasies. She started to mix with people who went to graveyards at night where they would "have a perfectly normal chat and drink some blood". The blood came from donors contacted on the internet.
    She also learned how to suck blood from another person's neck without penetrating the artery. And she had two of her teeth removed and replaced with long animal fangs.
    A psychologist said she appeared to have been unable to develop any feeling of self-worth. Born into a working-class family, she was selected to attend a gymnasium, the German equivalent of a grammar school, intended to groom its pupils for university. But she dropped out at the age of 14, at about the same time as she tried to kill herself with an overdose.
    When she was on the stand, Manuela's lawyer asked her if she had actually signed over her soul to the devil. "That was two-and-a-half years ago, on the night before Halloween," she replied, adding in quasi-Biblical language: "That was when I placed myself in, and swore myself, to, the service of our Lord, his will to perform."
    Her Lord, though, was Satan, and he had come to play a big role too in the life of Daniel, the car parts salesman she met through an advert he placed in a heavy metal magazine in August 2000. "Pitch-black vampire seeks princess of darkness who hates everything and everyone," he wrote.
    She and her husband were arrested after being spotted at a petrol station after a nationwide manhunt. Police found a list in their flat of their intended future victims. There were 16 names on it.
    Manuela, in verbal testimony, and Daniel, in a statement read to the court, both denied murder on the grounds that they were acting on a command from a higher authority. "I got the order to sacrifice a human for Satan," Daniel insisted.
 

Tour of Britain's bizarre underworld
Vikram Dodd
Friday February 1, 2002
The Guardian

Manuela Ruda's obsession with Satanism brought her to Britain where her tour of this nation's bizarre underbelly took her to the Isle of Skye.There she met Tom Leppard, in his 60s, who lives in a cave and with whom she corresponded while awaiting her trial.
    Mr Leppard said she had told him what she had done, but not the reason why.
    He told Sky News: "I said you can't just hate, you've got to have something to hate. You can't hate this, or hate that without a reason. And she never answered the question."
    Ruda told German police they had visited the UK twice, touring Scotland for five months in 1996 and in February 1997 visiting London.
    Manuela said: "I was in England and Scotland, met people and vampires in London. We went out at night, to cemeteries, in ruins and in the woods.
    The so-called Leopard Man of Skye has told in the past how Ruda visited him four times in August 2000 as he worked in a Kyleakin hotel bar and said she seemed fascinated by his way of life. A colourful eccentric, Mr Leppard is in the Guinness Book of Records for having his body covered in a leopard tattoo.
    Satanism in this country is secretive and underground, and there is no hard evidence pointing to the number of Satanists.
    Iain Taylor, of the Evangelical Alliance, puts it in the thousands, although critics accuse evangelists of hyping up the threat as it suits their own agenda.
    One estimate puts the number of committed Satanists in Britain at just 100.
    Mr Taylor said: "There is increasing anecdotal evidence of people becoming involved in satanism, especially children."
    Two years ago a UK branch of the American Church of Satan was set up, merging groups trying to recruit Satanists here, such as the Church of the Nine Angels and the UK Temple of Set.
 

04 FEB 02: CATWOMAN MAKES AN APPEARANCE IN SHASTA LAKE

(ABOVE: Celeste Draisner, 27, of Mountain Gate, Calif., walks around a catwalk on
Knauf's 199-foot smokestack in Shasta Lake, Calif., on Wednesday. She was
protesting the new fiberglass manufacturer plant.)

http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/1555794p-1632269c.html

Cat Woman protester arrested in Shasta Lake after climbing smokestack

Published 12:00 a.m. PST Thursday, Jan. 31, 2002
SHASTA LAKE, Calif. (AP) - A environmental protestor dressed in a Catwoman suit
was arrested Wednesday after spending close to seven hours perched 125-feet
above ground on fiberglass manufacturing plant smokestack.
    Celeste Draisner, 27, of Mountain Gate said she was protesting health dangers
she claims are posed by the fiber glass plant.
    Draisner was dressed in full Catwoman gear, donning a mask, cape, over-sized
ears and a tail similar to those worn by the Batman comic book character of
Gotham City fame.
    The Knauf Fiber Glass plant in Shasta Lake employs about 140 people, but has
been closed for years amid concerns over emissions and water use. It could open
within a week.
    Draisner snuck up the smokestack at about 5 a.m., stayed there for awhile and
told negotiators she would come down "when she was good and ready," said Shasta
County sheriff's Lt. Harry Bishop.
    Good and ready turned out to be about noon when Draisner walked down from the
perch and was arrested, handcuffed and taken to jail. She later posted $1,000
and was been released. Her attorney says her choice of protest attire was a
mystery.
    "The Catwoman risked her life to save the lives of others," said Draisner's
lawyer Eric Berg.
    Berg said those opposed to the plant want an environmental study conducted
before the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation grants Shasta Lake's request for water to
serve the fiberglass plant.
    Knauf Fiber Glass is a member of the family of building materials companies
owned by the Knauf family of Iphofen, Germany.

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