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Cassandra white


Last Updated: 10/12/2009

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Age: 30
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Friday, October 16, 2009 
Workers in Brazil, Lithuania receive most vacation days
  • By Jessica Dickler, CNNMoney.com staff writer
  • On 4:33 pm EDT, Wednesday October 14, 2009
      • ..Buzz up! 337..
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    Here's one reason to move to Lithuania: Eight weeks of time off.
    Workers in the Baltic state tied with Brazil for the most days off in the world: a whopping 41 a year, according to a report released Wednesday by global consulting firm Mercer."People take a lot of time, especially in the summer, because a lot of them own places outside the cities, in villages and by the sea," said Dina Kopilevic, a Lithuanian citizen working for the consulate in New York. "We take it for granted, probably."In Lithuania, the minimum annual leave is 28 days plus 13 public holidays. Brazil has a statutory minimum of 30 vacation days plus 11 public holidays.Ade Umhey is from Belo Horizonte, a city in southeastern Brazil, but is working temporarily in upstate New York. She said that in her country, there's a real appreciation for time spent outside of work."Being with family and friends is important," she explained. "You spend weekends dancing, going to clubs and barbecuing." Workers also take extended vacations at the beach or to other parts of the country, she said."It's a healthier attitude, because even though you don't work as long, you do work hard and then you get great time off."Employees in Finland, France and Russia post a close second in time off, thanks to 40 vacation days and holidays.Meanwhile, U.S. workers receive 25 days total. Although vacation policies vary widely, according to Mercer, many businesses in the U.S. give employees only 15 days, or three weeks of vacation, plus 10 holidays a year.Employees in Singapore also get 25 days, while Chinese employees get 21 and Canadian employees only get 19. Excluding public holidays, workers in Canada and China each get just 10 days, the lowest allotment of any countries in Mercer's study.Anthony Brown, a Canadian citizen who currently works in New York, argued that the lack of time off there is mitigated by other pluses. "The social benefits, including both welfare and unemployment benefits, should be factored in," he said. "Maybe there are fewer days but in reality you get paid a lot more for doing a lot less."In addition to annual leave and public holidays, employers in some countries are also required by law to give additional leave for special circumstances such as getting married, having a baby or bereavement.The Mercer report was based on mandatory vacation time for an employee working five days a week after 10 years service.

    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Workers-in-Brazil-Li...
    10:11 AM 
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    Tuesday, October 13, 2009 
    I did have a blast weekend and thought that I would tell someone about it!!! I was a little nervous about driving down there, because I get lost constantly! My sense of direction is BLAH :(. Soooo, I left close to 6:00 AM in the morning and got there like at 8:00 AM. Of course I had to call Jeff in order to figure out where his house was. I would have never figured out where the street was, because it was hidden. I hate those types of streets. So, I rested for a bit and we went to some Mom and Pop restaurant where I had a a bagel. The place was kinda small, but it gets good business. We had to wait like 5 minutes to get seated. So, we talked about what my plans were for the weekend! IT WAS TO DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!! So, we went back to his house and started our journey to Tampa! So, he took me around Tampa and it seemed ok. I really like the Va hospital that they have there, and I love their downtown. We stopped at this grocery store and I swear to God I will never go in another grocery store to us the bathroom. It was not my idea, but Jeff's and he got his glasses stolen. Hello, we were in a crime ridden neighborhood!!! I still felt bad though. I shed a tear. So, after that we drove home and I feel asleep, because I was SO tired! When I woke up....Mr. I am not tired was asleep and work up a little after me. So, we decided to go out to this bar and didnt know that there was going to be such a spetacle! There was a Bar Fight! Of course I was not involved...alas..no one was fighting over me. These guys were weird looking and I think they were on drugs. Jeff was trying to be brave and wanted to help. So, I was calm while the drama happened. As long as they were not messing with me. I am not sure why the bartender lady didnt call the police sooner, BUT.....after that we left the excitement there....oh did I mention this old guy was trying to talk to me (yayyyyy for me!)  We went and walked on the beach. We just talked together and watched the stars.....awwww..mushy I know! Then, we went home and went to bed.  Sunday, I woke up early and went to the store...and then about 12:00 we headed out to this restaurant called Gators to watch football! The place was gorgeous and I loved it, some of the scenary was a little meh, but it was a nice place. It was huge. I ate this Maui Maui sandwich which was delicious! After that, sadly we drove home and I left!  I had such a nice weekend there that I am going back for more!
    5:19 AM 
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    Thursday, October 01, 2009 
    11:46 PM 
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    Thursday, October 01, 2009 


    http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1927...

    Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi joked again this week about President Obama..'s skin color. Where..'s the outrage, Italy?

    11:45 PM 
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    Saturday, September 26, 2009 

    Could a Mixed-Race Contestant Become a Chinese Idol?


    In many ways, Lou Jing is a typical young woman from Shanghai. Pretty and confident, she speaks Mandarin heavily accented with the lilting tones of the Shanghai dialect and browses the malls of this huge city for the latest fashions. But there is one thing that distinguishes this 20-year-old from her peers, something that has made her the unwitting focus of an intense public debate about what exactly it means to be Chinese: the color of her skin. Born to a Chinese mother and an African-American father whom she has never met, the theater student rocketed into the public consciousness last month (See pictures of modern Shanghai.)
    <A href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/time/wl_time/storytext/08599192558900/33519316/SIG=11vvo3kht.r{}
    12:02 PM 
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    Saturday, September 26, 2009 


    http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/09/25/marines.breas...

    For Rick Kelly, the first sign of cancer was a feeling of discomfort in his chest.

    9:20 AM 
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    Friday, September 25, 2009 

    Divorce in America: Ind., Fla. counties are tops

    ISLAMORADA, Fla. – It's easy to see why bookkeeper Linda Mortimer moved to the Florida Keys 20 years ago: the impossibly blue water, the year-round sunshine, a lifestyle so laid-back that every day is like a Jimmy Buffett lyric.
    What Mortimer didn't anticipate was falling in love — and then getting divorced less than two years after taking her wedding vows.

    "I discovered after we got married that my husband had been divorced four times," said Mortimer, as she finished a noontime burger while sitting at the bar at the Ocean View, a local party spot and Mortimer's place of employment. "I was his No. 5. He didn't understand why I got so upset." Divorce is as common in the Florida Keys as fresh grouper and cold beer. Census statistics released this week show that Monroe County — which includes the cluster of 1,700 islands floating off South Florida — has the second-highest proportion of divorced residents. A little more than 18 percent of the people living in Monroe County are divorced, second only to Indiana's Wayne County, which had 19 percent. Nationwide, 10.7 percent of people over 15 are divorced.
    Three of the top 10 counties the divorced call home are in Florida — rural Putnam County in Northeast Florida and urban Pinellas County on the Gulf Coast are the other two. Indiana had a total of three counties in the top 10 as well. Along with Wayne County, Floyd and Madison counties made the list.

    Newly released census figures show that while the number of unmarried people continued its 10-year climb, the ranks of married people in the United States rose by nearly 6 million last year, bucking a decade-long decline. The number of divorced people rose, but only slightly. Among the other marriage- and divorce-related findings from the census ..
    • The number of unmarried people climbed to about one-third of all Americans over 15.
    • Oklahoma has the highest rate of people who have been married three times or more.
    • Utah and Idaho tied for the youngest median bride age, at 23.5 years old.
    Residents of Wayne County, Ind., don't see why their home should be the divorce capital of America. The water tower in Richmond, Ind., the county's largest city, welcomes visitors to "A Great All-American City."

    "It just doesn't make all that much sense," said Michael Jackson, an associate professor of psychology at Earlham College, a private university in Richmond. "We find it really questionable. It just sounds funny." Indiana is one of a handful of states that don't track divorce statistics. So it's hard to tell if the percentage is caused by a large number of divorces or a large number of young single people moving out of the county to attend college, or if it's just a statistical anomaly. Divorce counselors say the economy could be partly to blame for adding more stress to marriages. Indiana has been hit hard by the collapse of the auto and manufacturing industries. Wayne County had an average annual unemployment rate of 6.8 percent in 2008 — when the census data was collected — a rate above the state average at the time but still below many other areas of the state and country. Tom Amyx, who owns a deli along Richmond's main street, said bad financial times shouldn't be a reason for married couples to split. He just celebrated his 40th wedding anniversary with his wife, Sherry, and says couples should tough out hard times. He said attitudes have changed about marriage, with some younger people considering it a less-than-permanent relationship that they can escape if they aren't happy. "It's not ever about the other person anymore; it's about me, me, me," he said. "People need to make a commitment and stick to the commitment. It's not just a promise — it's a covenant. That's a very serious thing."
    Amyx, who has lived in several other states, sees no reason Wayne County would top the list. "We don't have that many people in the county," he said, "but evidently they get around."

    Some folks in the Florida Keys are quick to say that it's not that people are actually divorcing in droves there — it's that divorced people come to the area to start new lives. "The Keys are a great place to hide," said Mortimer, who is 60. When asked from what, she said: "Child support. Alimony." A guy sitting next to Mortimer at the Ocean View bar finished his martini in a plastic cup. His chuckle nearly drowned out the Creedence Clearwater Revival song playing on the radio. "The IRS. The CIA. Family," he said. Others say that the party lifestyle — and a high cost of living — stresses families to the breaking point.

    "This is a place of escape. A place of hedonistic abandon," said Dr. Fred Covan, a Key West therapist. "We have a condition here, we say people get Key Wasted. People come down here and do really, really stupid stuff." Alcohol was named as a frequent culprit. People in Nevada, which at 14 percent had the highest divorce rate of any state, gave similar reasons. Frank Lin, a divorce attorney whose firm, Lin & Associates, uses the phone number 702-DIVORCE, said Nevada laws, a 24/7 Sin City environment rich in temptation and other marriage hurdles probably combine to lead to more divorces.
    "One of our clients was a bartender at the Palms and he started seeing a cocktail waitress at the Playboy Club. When I go to work, I don't have cocktail waitresses in high heels showing cleavage," Lin said. "He does — that's part of sort of his daily environment."

    The most popular ad campaign in recent years promoting Las Vegas to tourists is "What happens here, stays here," and several party planners sell special divorce parties, offering the recently unmarried a guys' or girls' night out on the town.
    But casino and nightclub employees aren't the only ones feeling marriage pressures, Lin said, because the rest of Las Vegas works a 24-hour cycle, too. Affairs aren't the only reason people get divorced here, he said. "If both parties work 9-to-5 jobs, you see each other. But if one party works 9-to-5 and the other party works swing or graveyard, it's not an environment conducive to a marriage," Lin said. Nevada's laws make it easier to get divorced compared with other states. Couples need only live in the Silver State six weeks before their marriage can be dissolved, while other states require longer residency and a cooling-off period.

    Key West divorce lawyer Jiulio Margalli has noticed another trend among couples who are divorcing on the island paradise. "What we have now is people getting divorced and fighting over who is going to take over the debt. Who's going to be saddled with the $800K mortgage that neither one could pay?" he said. "It used to be that we saw people get divorced and fight over the home. Now it's, 'Oh, my God, not only are we getting divorced, our credit is going down the tubes and we're going into foreclosure.'"
    Regardless of the cause, having nearly 20 percent of the population divorced is cause for concern, said Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.
    "It's basically a social and environmental toxin," Wilcox said of divorce.
    ___ 

    1:23 AM 
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    Friday, September 18, 2009 
    ROME (Reuters) – The deaths of 73 African migrants who drifted for three weeks in the Mediterranean without rescue have heightened concern about Italy's crackdown on immigration, opening cracks in its ruling coalition and a rift with Brussels. Five survivors, picked up off the Italian island of Lampedusa, said their grey dinghy left Libya carrying 78 people. A day later, the motor died: two pregnant girls, raped by traffickers, were among the first to die of thirst and exposure. Italy is the first landing-point in Europe for many migrants from Africa and tragedies in the Mediterranean have become a fixture of the migration season, but since Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi toughened its immigration laws, things have changed.
    The migrants said a dozen fishing boats passed but only one answered their calls, throwing food but refusing to board.

    "There used to be competition among fishermen to save lives, but...with Italy's new law making immigration a crime, they've become too afraid," said Laura Boldrini of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. "The Mediterranean has become a No Man's Land."
    In Italy, the survivors were placed under guard. Unless they win asylum, they may face detention under legislation passed in July making it a felony to be an illegal immigrant or help one. That followed a deal Italy struck with Libya in May enabling it to return migrants stopped in international waters to Libya: the UNHCR has said that arrangement, the fruit of Berlusconi's closer ties with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, consigns hundreds of asylum-seekers to inhumane camps in North Africa.
    Rome's hard line has strained relations with the European Commission, which last month called for an investigation into the repatriations to Libya. Berlusconi threatened to block all EU business unless Commission spokespeople were silenced. "We need more than words," Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said last month, denying Italy was responsible for the tragedy. He said frontier states were being unfairly burdened by illegal migration to the 27-nation bloc: "This is a European problem." Current EU President Sweden has vowed to discuss migration at an October summit, but analysts say it could be hard to curb mounting racism in Italy as the global crisis ups unemployment.

    FAR RIGHT NOT MARGINAL
    Italy's crackdown was promoted by the far-right Northern League, a lynchpin of Berlusconi's coalition, following a 75 percent leap in migrants arriving by sea last year to 37,000. The measures, which include legalizing citizens' patrols to enforce law and order, cut the number of migrants landing in south Italy between May and August to less than a tenth of last summer's 10,000 and struck a chord with many Italians, worried by mass immigration and rising crime. One TV poll said 71 percent thought the five survivors of last month's boat tragedy should be tried as illegal immigrants.
    "There is no doubt that racism is becoming more visible... and it's going to get worse: partly because of the economy," said James Walston, professor of Italian politics at the American University in Rome. "It's dangerous because the far right in most countries is marginal. Here it is not."

    But Italy's influential Catholic Church has spoken out. Days after the boat tragedy, its newspaper Avvenire likened Italians' indifference with those who ignored the Holocaust, sparking a war of words with the League and driving already tense relations with the government to a new low. Even in Berlusconi's party, parliament speaker Gianfranco Fini, its second most important figure, has voiced unease. Fini has called on the government to sideline the League and offer immigrants the vote. "We need strong censure of any show of racism and xenophobia," he said. League leader Umberto Bossi, who brought down Berlusconi's first government in 1994, branded Fini's comments "suicide" and threatened to force elections unless the reforms remained.
    Crime was the focus of a bitter election last year, with a campaign by Berlusconi-owned media whipping up public anger at crimes by Roma and eastern Europeans. EU statistics show a 17 percent rise in violent crime between 2004 and 2007 in Italy, outpacing a 3 percent rise for the European Union.

    PATROLS
    In the industrial north, the League's powerbase and home to most of Italy's 4 million immigrants, far-right groups with fascist-style salutes have been keen to take part in the citizens' patrols. The groups, some in storm-trooper uniforms, evoke memories of the Black Shirt thugs of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. "Italy is in chaos. It's time to react," said Gaetana Zaya, founder of the far right Italian National Guard. "Italians can't go for a walk, women can't go out without being attacked. Italians aren't protected anymore, only immigrants are." Italy already has informal citizens' patrols in several cities, but a rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric from fringe groups like Zaya's has raised concern: Milan, Italy's financial capital, suspended a 200,000 euro ($295,100) deal with the Blue Beret watch group after its founder was linked to Zaya.
    Italy has one of Europe's largest police forces -- at 324,000 officers in 2006 it was roughly double Britain's, which has a similar-sized population. That shows, some argue, Italy has no need to enlist amateurs and should concentrate on the real enemy: organized crime rings like Sicily's Cosa Nostra. "The state is outsourcing its security responsibilities. It's a deeply alarming development that could encourage acts of hostility," said James Goldston, head of the Open Society Justice Initiative. "Italy has a fundamental problem with human rights, perhaps more than any other nation in Western Europe." http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090918/wl_nm/us_italy_immigrationIronically, economists say Italy's fast-graying population means it may have need of immigrants.

    A Bank of Italy report in August found that immigrants -- comprising 1.8 million workers or 8 percent of the workforce -- do not take jobs from locals, and even enabled Italian women to seek work, by freeing them from domestic chores.
    Mass immigration, unheard of 20 years ago, is fast changing society. Last month an Italian team of children of migrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh won an under-15 European cricket title, making headlines and winning praise from politicians like Fini. The team, some of whom face deportation unless they receive citizenship, dedicated the victory to Northern League leader Bossi. "This is the first European title in the history of Italian cricket," said Italian Cricket Federation President Simone Gambino. "It shows immigrants bring prestige to our country, not just problems."
    (Editing by Sara Ledwith)
    3:22 AM 
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    Friday, September 18, 2009 
    One of the country’s leading Hispanic organizations is launching a campaign designed to pressure CNN to rein in host Lou Dobbs. The organization behind the campaign, Democracia Ahora, is kicking off the effort Friday with the release of a report based on interviews with 100 Hispanic leaders about the impact of Dobbs’ evening show.
    The results of the report are not surprising – 90 percent of the interviewees believe Dobbs is helping create a negative image of Hispanics, with his frequent criticisms of illegal immigration. But Democracia Ahora is hoping the report inspires a grassroots movement aimed at executives at CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, to draw attention to what the group calls “frequent negative portrayals of Hispanics on the Lou Dobbs show.” It is using its release to start a national campaign, “Enough is Enough!” that will be carried out through a Web site, www.TellCNNEnoughisEnough.com, that goes live Friday. “We’re asking CNN, the alleged ‘most trusted name in news,’ to really hold Lou Dobbs to the journalistic standards he should be held to,” said Jorge Mursuli, president of Democracia Ahora, who expressed frustration with Dobbs’ reports that immigration contributed to thousands of new reported cases of leprosy and of a ‘superhighway’ from Mexico to Canada. “CNN needs to take responsibility for what he’s saying,” he said, adding, “We want CNN to insure that Lou Dobbs is going to stick with the facts. He can have his opinions but he can’t present his opinions as facts.”
    Mursuili said Democracia Ahora will be coordinating petitions and encouraging other Hispanic groups to make phone calls and write letters to CNN asking the news station to “to cease the daily drum roll of misinformation and offensive commentary about the Latino community on the Lou Dobbs Tonight show.” Democracia Ahora has not disclosed the names of all 100 of the individuals whose responses make up the results of the study. It describes them as “political figures, business leaders, heads of civic and community organizations, and journalists and academics.”

    Among those surveyed were Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, and Dan Restrepo, a member of President Obama’s National Security Council, who Democracia Ahora says was interviewed while he was a director for the Americas Project at Center for American Progress. Others taking the survey included Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.). The survey included questions such as, “Many Hispanics are offended by the news content of Lou Dobbs’ show and regard him as a demagogue who is helping to create a negative image of Hispanics. Do you agree or disagree with this assessment?” according to a copy of the report obtained by POLITICO. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27301.htmlCNN did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the National Security Council and representatives for Menendez, Grijalva and Roybal-Allard did not respond to requests for comment.
    The survey was conducted by the Miami-based polling firm Bendixen and Associates. Communications for “Enough is Enough!” are being handled by another Miami-based firm, Balsera Communications, which is run by Freddy Balsera, who coordinated Hispanic media for the Obama campaign and is co-chair of the Democratic National Committee’s National Hispanic Leadership Council.
    3:11 AM 
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    Monday, September 14, 2009 
    VERONA, Italy – It happened night after night, the deaf man said, sometimes in the priest's bedroom, sometimes in the bathroom, even in the confessional. When he was a young boy at a Catholic-run institute for the deaf, Alessandro Vantini said, priests sodomized him so relentlessly he came to feel "as if I were dead." This year, he and dozens of other former students did something highly unusual for Italy: They went public with claims they were forced to perform sex acts with priests. For decades, a culture of silence has surrounded priest abuse in Italy, where surveys show the church is considered one of the country's most respected institutions. Now, in the Vatican's backyard, a movement to air and root out abusive priests is slowly and fitfully taking hold.

    A yearlong Associated Press tally has documented 73 cases with allegations of sexual abuse by priests against minors over the past decade in Italy, with more than 235 victims. The tally was compiled from local media reports, linked to by Web sites of victims groups and blogs. Almost all the cases have come out in the seven years since the scandal about Roman Catholic priest abuse broke in the United States.
    The numbers in Italy are still a mere trickle compared to the hundreds of cases in the court systems of the United States and Ireland. And according to the AP tally, the Italian church has so far had to pay only a few hundred thousand euros (dollars) in civil damages to the victims, compared to $2.6 billion in abuse-related costs for the American diocese or euro1.1 billion ($1.5 billion) due to victims in Ireland.

    However, the numbers still stand out in a country where reports of clerical sex abuse were virtually unknown a decade ago. They point to an increasing willingness among the Italian public and — slowly — within the Vatican itself to look squarely at a tragedy where the reported cases may only just be the tip of the iceberg. The Italian church will not release the numbers of cases reported or of court settlements. The implications of priest abuse loom large in Italy: with its 50,850 priests in a nation of 60 million, Italy counts more priests than all of South America or Africa. In the United States — where the Vatican counts 44,700 priests in a nation of 300 million — more than 4,000 Catholic clergy have been accused of molesting minors since 1950. The Italian cases follow much the same pattern as the U.S. and Irish scandals: Italian prelates often preyed on poor, physically or mentally disabled, or drug-addicted youths entrusted to their care. The deaf students' speech impairments, for example, made the priests' admonition "never to tell" all the more easy to enforce.

    In this predominantly Roman Catholic country, the church enjoys such an exalted status that the pope's pronouncements frequently top the evening news, without any critical commentary. Even those with anti-clerical views acknowledge the important role the church plays in education, social services and caring for the poor. As a result, few dare to criticize it, including the mainstream independent and state-run media. In addition, there's a certain prudishness in small-town Italy, where one just doesn't speak about sex, much less sex between a priest and a child.

    "It's a taboo on top of a taboo," said Jacqueline Monica Magi, who prosecuted several pedophilia cases in Italy before becoming a judge. "This is the provincialism of Italy."
    Breaking the conspiracy of silence, 67 former students from Verona's Antonio Provolo institute for the deaf signed a statement alleging that sexual abuse, pedophilia and corporal punishment occurred at the school from the 1950s to the 1980s at the hands of priests and brothers of the Congregation for the Company of Mary. While not all acknowledged being victims themselves, 14 of the 67 wrote sworn statements and videotaped testimony, detailing the abuse they say they suffered, some for years, at the school's two campuses in Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet. They named 24 priests, lay religious men and religious brothers. Vantini said he, too, was silent for years. "How could I tell my papa that a priest had sex with me?" Vantini, 59, told the AP one afternoon, recounting through a sign-language interpreter the abuse he said he endured. "You couldn't tell your parents because the priests would beat you." Vantini named two priests and two lay brothers — three of whom are still alive — but asked that their names not be printed for fear of legal action. He spoke with the nervousness and agitation he says has accompanied him all of his life from being raped as a child by a priest.

    "I suffered from depression until I was 30," said Vantini, who attended the school from age 6 to 19. "My wife said it was good that I spoke out because it lifted this weight from my chest." Vantini's one-time schoolmate, Gianni Bisoli, 60, named the same men in his written declaration and in an interview, as well as 12 other priests and brothers from the Congregation, accusing them of sodomizing him, forcing him to have oral sex and to masturbate them. In his declaration, Bisoli also accused Verona's late bishop, Monsignor Giuseppe Carraro — who is being considered for beatification — of molesting him on five separate occasions while he was a student at Provolo, which he attended from age 9 to 15. A diocesan probe cleared Carraro of sex abuse. But the investigation interviewed none of the alleged victims, limiting testimony to surviving members of the Congregation, other school personnel and their affiliates, and documentation from the Congregation and Verona diocese.

    The late bishop's beatification process was suspended pending the investigation, but is now going ahead to the Vatican's saint-making office. Five decades later, Bisoli still recalls the route he said he took from the institute, located on a quiet street named for the congregation's founder, Don Antonio Provolo, along the serpentine Adige river to the bishop's residence tucked behind Verona's Piazza del Duomo. Bisoli, who became deaf at age eight, said he was accompanied by one of his abusers and walked past the red brick Castelvecchio, an imposing 14th-century citadel, then along the main Corso Cavour thoroughfare or the more out-of-the-way pedestrian shopping street Via Mazzini.

    "They brought me inside the curia (the diocese headquarters)," Bisoli recalled in an interview. "There was a servant who opened the door, then someone brought me inside. It was dark." Bishop Carraro appeared, he recalled. "The bishop started to touch me, grope me," he said, running his hands up and down his body, pulling at his shirt and shorts to demonstrate. "I pulled away. But he continued to touch me for 15, 20 minutes. I didn't know what to do." On a subsequent occasion, Bisoli says, the bishop tried to sodomize him with a banana. Another time, they were on the sofa and he sodomized him with his finger, offering him candy to appease him, Bisoli said.
    Once, Bisoli said, the bishop offered him some gold crosses that had caught Bisoli's eye.

    "I said 'at least give me 10,000-20,000 lire so I can buy a Coca-Cola or an ice cream,'" Bisoli recalled.
    The current bishop of Verona, Monsignor Giuseppe Zenti, initially accused the former students of fabricating their claims in talking in January to L'Espresso, a left-leaning newsweekly. Zenti called the accusations "lies" and a stunt that was part of a long-standing real estate dispute between the Congregation and the deaf students' association, to which the alleged victims belong. But when one of the accused lay religious men admitted to sexual relations with students, Zenti ordered an internal investigation into the Congregation. The results found that some abuse occurred, albeit a fraction of what has been alleged.

    According to the diocese probe, there were episodes of physical violence against two unnamed students between 1958 and 1965. From 1965 to 1967, two would-be priests with "sexual disorders" were kicked out; while between 1965 and 1990 a religious brother had sexual relations with an undetermined number of students, the investigation found. In all cases the accused were removed. "There could have been some episodes, some bad apples are possible," Carlo de' Gresti, spokesman for the Provolo institute said in an interview at the school's Chievo campus, where a lay staff now runs a technical school for poor teens. "It happens, even in families. That there could have been 26, 27, 25 pedophiles? There is no objective corroboration from anyone who isn't inside the (students') association."

    Advocates, however, says the diocese's investigation was fatally flawed because it didn't interview the alleged victims and only people with links to the school who may have something to hide. "If they had wanted to shed full light on it, they wouldn't have only heard from priests and lay brothers, but from the deaf as well," said Marco Lodi Rizzini, a spokesman for the victims. The investigation has been forwarded to the Vatican, said the Rev. Bruno Fasani, spokesman for the diocese. He claimed former students had been manipulated into denouncing innocent priests and accused some of harboring a long-standing animosity to the church. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090913/ap_on_re_eu/eu_in_the_vatican_s_backyardZenti, for his part, asked forgiveness from the victims.

    "The feeling that prevails is above all one of profound solidarity with the victims of abuse," Zenti said in a May statement. "To them and their families, a humble request of forgiveness is made." Among the cases the AP tallied, there were charges of inducing boys into prostitution, participation in satanic rituals, and one notorious case in which the church itself determined that an elderly Florentine priest was responsible for "sexual abuse, false mysticism and domination of consciences."

    Where there were sentences, they ran from a two-year suspended sentence to eight years in jail, although with Italy's notoriously lengthy appeals process it's unclear how many have been carried out. Where civil damages were awarded, which has been rare, the amounts ranged from about euro15,000 per victim to euro150,000 (about $22,000 to $220,000 at today's exchange rates). The cases in the AP survey involve civil or criminal cases and investigations. For that reason, the Verona figures were omitted, since no criminal or civil action is pending because the statute of limitations has expired. In 2002, when the abuse scandal was erupting in the United States, the No. 2 official in the Italian Bishops' Conference, Monsignor Giuseppe Betori, was quoted as saying clerical sex abuse was so limited in Italy that the conference leadership hadn't even  But Italian prelates and the Vatican now seem to be taking the problem far more seriously. Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican prosecutor in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — which handles cases of priestly sex abuse — acknowledged that public awareness of the problem in Italy had increased as a result of the "tsunami" of cases that came to light in the United States.

    "There is a change of mentality, and we find that to be very positive," he told the AP.
    In a shift for the Vatican, Scicluna acknowledged that priestly sex abuse was an age-old problem that needed to be rooted out. "I don't think it's a question of happening. It has always happened. It's important that people talk about it, because otherwise we cannot bring the healing which the church can offer to people who need it — both the victims and perpetrators."
    12:06 AM 
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