Gardai knew of Brady link to Smyth for years

By Shane Phelan, John Cooney, Grainne Cunningham and Breda Heffernan
www.independent.ie
Tuesday March 16 2010

GARDAI have known about Cardinal Sean Brady’s involvement in the Fr Brendan Smyth affair for several years, the Irish Independent has learnt.

But despite this, detectives made no attempt to charge the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland and others with orchestrating a cover-up during investigations into Smyth’s reign of terror.

The revelation came as the Catholic Primate last night refused to bow to intense pressure to resign over revelations he failed to report complaints against the paedophile priest to the civil authorities.

The link between Cardinal Brady and the Smyth case became apparent to gardai several years ago when officers obtained documents giving details of meetings with victims the then Fr Brady attended in 1975.

However, a senior garda source with knowledge of the Smyth inquiry last night said Cardinal Brady’s involvement “never came up” as an issue for gardai to pursue.

At those meetings, two children, a boy and a girl, were made to sign undertakings not to discuss their allegations with anybody other than an approved priest.

As secretary to the diocese of Kilmore, Cardinal Brady acted as the recorder of the evidence on behalf of the late Bishop Francis McKiernan at one meeting. At a second meeting, he questioned witnesses and recorded their answers.

The female victim whose evidence was recorded by Cardinal Brady is suing him personally for his failure to alert the civil authorities about her allegations.

Smyth continued abusing children and was not jailed until 1994. He died three years later. During his lifetime, he sexually abused and indecently assaulted 90 children.

Cardinal Brady resisted calls for his resignation for the second day in a row. He again defended his role at the 1975 meetings where the children were asked to take a vow of silence.

Although admitting he would act differently today if faced with the same situation, he said he had obeyed church law at the time by reporting his findings to a bishop.

“I played my part, the part I had 35 years ago, as a priest recording secretary to the best of my ability. We are judging the behaviour of 35 years ago by the standards we set today and I don’t think that is fair and it’s not applied to other sectors of society,” he said.

Cardinal Brady insisted he would only step down if ordered by the Pope.

However, victims groups were unequivocal in their demands for Cardinal Brady to resign.

One-in-Four accused the prelate of “reckless endangerment” and said that his actions could not be excused because it was the prevailing culture within the church at the time. Read more…

French woman ‘murdered newborn babies and hid corpses in cellar’

A French mother on Monday stood trial for murdering six of her newborn babies in almost as many years and hiding their corpses in a cellar.

By Henry Samuel
www.telegraph.co.uk
15 Mar 2010

Céline Lesage, 38, faces life in prison for “aggravated homicide” after allegedly choking four babies by placing her finger in their mouths, and strangling two others who were “more vivacious” with a cord.

She secretly delivered the babies alone between August 2000 and September 2007, putting “the babies and their dirty clothes neatly in a sealed plastic bag and (hiding) them,” according to Michel Garrandaux, the Cherbourg prosecutor.

“Her attitude was wholly ambivalent. On the one hand, she expressed her desire to have children, and then she refused to keep them,” Mr Garrandaux added.

Wearing a beige dress and with her brown hair tied back, Miss Lesage told the court in the Channel port of Cherbourg: “I admit to the charges.”

Miss Lesage was described as a “modest and otherwise ordinary housewife” who performed charity work and had a son aged 14. She had “no idea” why she had killed her tiny children, the prosecutor said, adding that it was the job of the court to “try to understand you, before judging you”.

Among those in the public gallery was Pascal Catherine, her 39-year-old former boyfriend who fathered the first five of the murdered babies.

He was originally arrested for not reporting a crime, and hiding the corpses, before being cleared for thinking the babies had been still born or aborted.

Miss Lesage and Mr Catherine, a plumber, ended their relationship in the spring of 2006 after 5 years living together, though they never married. Read more…

Ireland Forced to Purchase Carbon Credits

stephenhopkins.wordpress.com
15 March 2010

As a result of “Climategate” Internet search, I came across this letter to the editor…

It was with bewilderment that I listened to the RTE news last Friday about what science boffins working for the EU had to say about Ireland’s carbon dioxide emissions.

They stated that Ireland was not going to meet its targets and would have to purchase additional carbon credits to pay for not reaching these targets.

What? Did I hear them correctly? A country that is shedding jobs at the highest rate in its history, a country that has little or no industry to speak of, and a country that has one of the lowest population densities in Europe is not going to meet its targets?

This is absolute nonsense. In order to meet these targets Ireland would have to shed even more jobs and then our population would have to reduce reproduction dramatically. When is this nonsense going to stop?

Climategate, Amazongate, Himalayagate and all the other gates have highlighted that man-made global warming is based on flawed, manipulated and some might say fraud science and it has led the people of Ireland to be saddled with a carbon tax that will grind them further into poverty and hardship.

Our government and the people in this country have to start challenging the EU on this carbon credits nonsense now.

Declan Cullen
Dublin 7

Irish Independent

Read more…

German Arms Exports Double In Five Years

www.thelocal.de
15 Mar 2010

Germany has doubled its arms exports over the last five years, making it the world’s third largest weapons dealer after the United States and Russia, according to a new study released on Monday.

Sales of mainly submarines and armoured vehicles helped Germany capture 11 percent of the global arms market, compared to 30 percent and 23 percent for the United States and Russia, the study from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said.

Warships made up 44 percent of all arms exports, while armoured vehicles accounted for 27 percent. The study included the sale of used military wares and goods given away to allies.

Germany’s most important customers included Turkey, Greece and South Africa.
Fourteen percent of Germany’s arms exports went to Turkey, while Greece bought 13 percent and South Africa imported 12 percent – but SIPRI did not place a price tag on the goods.

The growth is part of a worldwide increase of 22 percent in weapons sales in the last five years, particularly in the trade of extremely expensive fighter planes. SIPRI warned of an arms race in tense regions like the Middle East, North Africa, South America and South Asia.

Meanwhile Greece has become one of the world’s top-five importers despite being on the verge of bankruptcy.

Caterers ‘had access to patient files’

By Paul Melia
www.independent.ie
Monday March 15 2010

CATERING staff were able to access confidential patient information held on a €60m HSE record system which is being rolled out across the country.

Workers in Kerry General Hospital were able to access information including the patient’s name, address, admission, discharge date and doctor information, an internal audit of the system last year found.

And the audit warned of five “high-level” security risks in the Integrated Patient Management System (IPMS) which is used by 10 acute hospitals and 20 HSE centres.

While no clinical data had been uploaded on to the system at the time of the breach, it also found there was no national security policy on how to protect patient records and that some hospitals were just using the new system to replace older technology. Fine Gael health spokesman Dr James Reilly last night said that unless doctors and patients were confident that information would remain confidential, they would not co-operate.

“IT and the further development of it in the health service is critical, but patient confidentiality has to be of the utmost importance,” he said.

“People give information to doctors to get the best treatment available to them, and they don’t expect their personal details to be accessible to others. Read more…

Mainstream Paper Refuses Ventura’s 9-11 Commentary

By Jesse Ventura
americanfreepress.net

EDITOR’S NOTE: The popular online publication Huffington Post run by outspoken Greek-American author Arianna Huffington refused to publish former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura’s column on the Sept. 11 attacks from the web site with 24 hours. Since AFP does not believe in censorship, we are happy to publish Ventura’s column in its entirety in this week’s edition.

You didn’t see anything about it in the mainstream media, but at a recent conference in San Francisco, more than 1,000 architects and engineers signed a petition demanding that Congress begin a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9-11.

That’s right, these people put their reputations in potential jeopardy—because they don’t buy the government’s version of events. They want to know how 200,000 tons of steel disintegrated and fell to the ground in 11 seconds. They question whether the hijacked planes were responsible or whether it could have been a controlled demolition from inside that brought down the twin towers and WTC Building 7.

Richard Gage, a member of the American Institute of Architects and the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth, put it like this: “The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction.”

He’s especially disturbed by Building 7, whose 47 stories came down in “pure free-fall acceleration” that afternoon, even though it was never hit by an aircraft. This is a subject I take up in my new book, American Conspiracies, published by Skyhorse. An excerpt follows: Some people have argued that the twin towers went down, within a half hour of one another, because of the way they were constructed. Well, those 425,000 cubic yards of concrete and 200,000 tons of steel were designed to hold up against a Boeing 707, the largest plane built at the time the towers were completed in 1973. Analysis had shown that a 707 traveling at 600 miles an hour (and those had four engines) would not cause major damage. The twin-engine Boeing 757s that hit on 9-11 were going 440 and 550 mph.

Still, we are told that a molten, highly intense fuel mixture from the planes brought down these two steel-framed skyscrapers. Keep in mind that no other such skyscraper in history had ever been known to collapse completely due to fire damage. So could it actually have been the result of a controlled demolition from inside the buildings?

I don’t claim expertise about this, but I did work four years as part of the Navy’s underwater demolition teams, where we were trained to blow things to hell and high water. And my staff talked at some length with a prominent physicist, Steven E. Jones, who says that a “gravity driven collapse” without demolition charges defies the laws of physics.

These buildings fell, at nearly the rate of free-fall, straight down into their own footprint, in approximately 10 seconds. An object dropped from the roof of the 110-story-tall towers would reach the ground in about 9.2 seconds. Then there’s the fact that steel beams that weighed as much as 200,000 pounds got tossed laterally as far as 500 feet.

NIST started its investigation on Aug. 21, 2002. When their 10,000-page-long report came out three years later, the spokesman said there was no evidence to suggest a controlled demolition. But Jones also says that molten metal found underground weeks later is proof that jet fuel couldn’t have been all that was responsible. I visited the site about three weeks after 9-11, with Gov. Pataki and my wife Terry. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but they had to suspend digging that day because they were running into heat pockets of huge temperatures. These fires kept burning for more than three months, the longest-burning structure blaze ever.

And this was all due to jet fuel? We’re talking molten metal more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Probably the most conclusive evidence about a controlled demolition is a research paper (two years, nine authors) published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal in April 2009. In studying dust samples from the site, these scientists found chips of nano-thermite, which is a high-tech incendiary/explosive. Here’s what the paper’s lead author, Dr. Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen’s chemistry department, had to say about the explosive that he’s convinced brought down the twin towers and the nearby Building 7:

“Thermite itself dates back to 1893. It is a mixture of aluminum and rust powder, which react to create intense heat. The reaction produces iron, heated to 2,500 degrees Centigrade [4,532 degrees Fahrenheit]. This can be used to do welding. It can also be used to melt other iron. So in nano-thermite, this powder from 1893 is reduced to tiny particles, perfectly mixed. When these react, the intense heat develops much more quickly. Nano-thermite can be mixed with additives to give off intense heat, or serve as a very effective explosive. It contains more energy than dynamite, and can be used as rocket fuel.”

Gage is one of hundreds of credentialed architects and structural engineers who have put their careers on the line to point out the detailed anomalies and many implications of controlled demolition in the building collapses. As he puts it bluntly: “Once you get to the science, it’s indisputable.”

A former Navy Seal, professional wrestler and actor Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota on the Reform Party ticket in 1998 where he served until 2002. Today, Ventura is best known for hosting the popular television show Conspiracy Theory, which airs on cable television. He is also the author of five books, including I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic from the Bottom Up, Do I Stand Alone: Going to the Mat Against Political Pawns and Media Jackals, Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me!, Jesse Ventura Tells It Like It Is: America’s Most Outspoken Governor Speaks Out About Government and his latest book American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies and More Lies that the Government Tells Us. (Available from AFP).

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US Federal Reserve Dealing in Magic and Secrets

Bob Chapman
The International Forecaster
March 13 2010

Fed makes money out of thin air to solve deflation with inflation, credit crisis continues, frustrations with politicians, not healthy to have over 3 trillion in t-bills held in foreign hands, Fed fights audit legislation, Threats to the Eurozone…

The dramatic and costly undertow of deflation continues unabated, as government via fiscal policy and the Federal Reserve, by creating money and credit out of thin air, proceed to overpower this deflation with massive inflation.

Unbeknownst to most the Fed and the Treasury have been maintaining this program for the past several years, accompanied by most major countries, all of which have taken the path of least resistance rather than address the underlying problems.

The current stage of problems had to be addressed 2-1/2 years ago in what has become known as a credit crisis. This continuing crisis has been accompanied by 22-1/8% current unemployment that has resulted in a perpetual fall in tax revenues and a resultant enlargement of government deficits. We might add that this condition is being experienced by many countries worldwide, which followed America’s leadership into this terrible financial and economic morass. These policies have led to massive sovereign debt policies, a hangover of the policies of 1933 and 1971.

The financial system in America is on the edge of default. A recent poll found that 92% of those surveyed wanted to unseat their current representative or Senator in Washington and only 21% believed that government enjoyed the consent of the governed. It’s very obvious people are not happy with the political, economic and financial situation presently. Eighty percent believe that government is enmeshed in partisan infighting. Not only between parties, but within parties as well. Politicians are very aware of these numbers and are frantic to get reelected. The public has recoiled in disgust. People are demanding that the power of government be curbed. People are sick and tired of paid off corrupt politicians, more than half of whom have been in office for more than ten years.

It is not healthy for a nation to have $3.3 trillion in Treasury bonds held by foreigners. China holds about $900 billion and Japan about $800 billion. We also understand that hedge funds and others also are fronting both countries, so the figures are not really reflective in their total positions. These nations for the most part are rolling their positions, but have not injected new capital into US Treasuries. That is why the Fed had to fund 80% of new Treasury debt last year.

Presently the Fed is fighting and pulling out all stops to halt legislation to audit the Federal Reserve, a private corporation, which has managed our monetary policy since 1913, under the Federal Reserve Act. On Monday the Treasury held a media conference for financial reporters and bloggers in which the Fed was discussed. The meeting had some very strange conditions. Mr. Geithner, Mr. Krueger and Mr. Sperling could be paraphrased but not quoted and what was paraphrased could not be connected to a specific official. Again, the element of secrecy to protect the guilty. One blogger said, “Did they get the ground rules from Al Qaeda?” The meeting was a travesty. How can government officials demand secrecy in public briefings? It is no wonder that 90% of the public and 317 members of Congress want more Treasury transparency and an audit and investigation of the Fed. This is the same gang run by Geithner and Bernanke that are currently running the gold suppression scheme. When you have a criminal cabal involved you have no transparency. That is why the audit of the Fed is so important. Such an exercise would expose exactly what both have been doing in the markets. The Fed and Treasury have lied for years about what they have been up too in behalf of their Illuminist friends. It is not only about the actions of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, but the funding of Watergate, Saddam Hussein, who they supposedly conveniently hung, the countries that secretly received loans, how much, who got them and what was the collateral? Were currency swaps with foreign control banks used to strengthen the dollar by the Fed and for those foreign control banks to purchase Treasury and Agency paper? How about all the inside information funneled to Wall Street and banking for almost a century from both the Fed and Treasury? Their lies are legion. They both are manipulating every market in the world 24/7 and the American people want it stopped. We also want an audit of America’s gold and the testing of the gold bars held. There is much we want to know, so we can save our country and our freedom. Read more…

U.K. government wants to replace House of Lords with elected chamber

LONDON, March 14 (RIA Novosti)

The U.K. government has plans to radically reform the House of Lords and replace it with a wholly elected 300-seat second chamber, the British media reported on Sunday.

The proposals, which have been leaked to The Sunday Telegraph and are expected to be announced soon, would sweep away centuries of tradition and set ministers on a collision course with the current 704-member House of Lords, which is resolutely opposed to having elected members, the paper said.

The plans would see all members of the new-look assembly being directly elected – ending the system of hereditary and life peerage in the House of Lords, the paper said.

The plan comes amid growing concern over peers’ abuse of expenses, The Sunday Times reported.

Although the plan is unlikely to become law before parliament is dissolved, Labor strategists hope it will open up a dividing line with the Conservatives, who will be reluctant to back any Labor reforms, the paper said.

This move “is designed to put the Tories on the back foot during the election campaign,” the paper said.

Cardinal Brady will not resign over abuse ‘cover-up’

news.bbc.co.uk
14 March 2010

The Catholic church’s most senior cleric in Ireland has rejected calls to resign over claims he helped cover up sex abuse investigations in the 1970s.

Cardinal Sean Brady, primate of all-Ireland, admitted he was present at meetings where two abused teenagers were made to sign vows of silence.

The meetings followed complaints of abuse against Fr Brendan Smyth, jailed in the 1990s for serial child abuse.

“Frankly I don’t believe that this is a resigning matter,” the cardinal said.

Cardinal Brady said he had been following church orders and that there were no guidelines for him to follow.

Fr Smyth was a notorious child sex offender who was believed to have abused at least 20 children over a 40 year period in the north and south of Ireland.

He was eventually convicted and jailed for more than 90 offences.

However campaigners believe the cleric could have abused hundreds of children as he was moved around parishes, diocese and countries by the church.

They have accused Cardinal Brady of reckless endangerment and demanded his resignation. Read more…

Scottish Government Cover Up of Hollie Greig Part 1 – How It All Came to Light

www.davidicke.com
Sunday, 14 March

‘I have decide to reveal the Hollie Greig’s story in fine detail so that you the public can read for yourself exactly how this sordid story came about and how the Scottish Government suppressed this terrible crime. It covers not only Hollie but also includes other children that fell victim to this ring of peodophiles.

This series will not hold back any information and will include names of the offenders and their victims. It will also include articles that were bouncing around at the time. In writing this series it is also an open invitation for anyone to write to the Palestine Telegraph who feel they have information relating to this or any other case involving children in Scotland who may have succumbed to the same group of the so called Scottish Justice System.’

Read more: Scottish Government Cover Up of Hollie Greig Part 1 – How It All Came to Light

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