TELEGRAPH– There are not many sane people who can say with confidence that, had a president of America only listened to them, they could have saved $1.3 trillion and many hundreds of thousands of lives. Michael Scheuer can.

YAHOO NEWS– The latest sex abuse case to rock the Catholic Church is unfolding in the archdiocese of an influential Italian Cardinal, who has been working with Pope Benedict XVI on reforms to respond to prior scandals of pedophile priests.

Father Riccardo Seppia, a 51 year-old parish priest in the village of Sastri Ponente, near Genoa, was arrested last Friday on pedophilia and drugs charges. Investigators say that in tapped mobile phone conversations Seppia asked a Moroccan drug dealer to arrange sexual encounters with young and vulnerable boys. “I do not want 16-year-old boys, but younger. Fourteen-year-olds are OK. Look for needy boys, who have family issues,” he allegedly said. Genoa Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco, who is also head of the Italian Bishops Conference, had been working with Benedict to establish a tough new worldwide policy released this week on how bishops should handle accusations of priestly sex abuse. 

Bagnasco said when he met the Pope this weekend he “asked for a particular blessing for my archdiocese,” in light of the accused crimes, adding that “like every father toward a son (feels) great pain in seeing a priest who is not faithful to his vocation.”

Read full article about Priest Sex Abuse Case Hits Archdiocese Powerful Cardinal.

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TELEGRAPH– The fuel in reactors No 2 and 3 is suspected to have melted amid reports that the operators Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) failed to cool the plant in the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Read more about Meltdown Feared at Two More Reactors.

© 2011 Telegraph

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AP– Muslim clerics said Monday that Osama bin Laden’s burial at sea was a violation of Islamic tradition that may further provoke militant calls for revenge attacks against American targets.

Although there appears to be some room for debate over the burial — as with many issues within the faith — a wide range of senior Islamic scholars interpreted it as a humiliating disregard for the standard Muslim practice of placing the body in a grave with the head pointed toward the holy city of Mecca.

Sea burials can be allowed, they said, but only in special cases where the death occurred aboard a ship.

Bin Laden’s burial at sea “runs contrary to the principles of Islamic laws, religious values and humanitarian customs,” said Sheik Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand Imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque, Sunni Islam’s highest seat of learning.

A radical cleric in Lebanon, Omar Bakri Mohammed, said, “The Americans want to humiliate Muslims through this burial, and I don’t think this is in the interest of the U.S. administration.”

A U.S. official said the burial decision was made after concluding that it would have been difficult to find a country willing to accept the remains. There was also speculation about worry that a grave site could have become a rallying point for militants.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security matters.

President Barack Obama said the remains had been handled in accordance with Islamic custom, which requires speedy burial, and the Pentagon later said the body was placed into the waters of the northern Arabian Sea after adhering to traditional Islamic procedures — including washing the corpse — aboard the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.

But the Lebanese cleric Mohammed called it a “strategic mistake” that was bound to stoke rage.

In Washington, CIA director Leon Panetta warned that “terrorists almost certainly will attempt to avenge” the killing of the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Bin Laden is dead,” Panetta wrote in a memo to CIA staff. “Al-Qaida is not.”

According to Islamic teachings, the highest honor to be bestowed on the dead is giving the deceased a swift burial, preferably before sunset. Those who die while traveling at sea can have their bodies committed to the bottom of the ocean if they are far off the coast, according to Islamic tradition.

“They can say they buried him at sea, but they cannot say they did it according to Islam,” Mohammed al-Qubaisi, Dubai’s grand mufti, said about bin Laden’s burial. “If the family does not want him, it’s really simple in Islam: You dig up a grave anywhere, even on a remote island, you say the prayers and that’s it.”

“Sea burials are permissible for Muslims in extraordinary circumstances,” he added. “This is not one of them.”

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© 2011 AP

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THE CHRONICLE HERALD– Last Monday’s massive prison break in Kandahar essentially put the boots to any last hopes of a successful NATO mission in Afghanistan.

As straight-faced Afghan prison officials scratched their heads and pointed to the empty tunnel entrance, which apparently allowed at least 471 Taliban prisoners to escape, we are expected to believe their claim that this was not an inside job.

To back up that story, the Afghan guards stated that there was no need for the Taliban detainees to obtain the keys to their cells that night because it was common practice to leave all the cells open at night.

We are then to believe that some 471 prisoners — essentially an entire battalion of fighters — carrying their belongings and equipped with flashlights silently filed out through a 360-metre tunnel.

This was to have occurred sometime between 2 and 4 a.m., and during that two-hour time frame, not a single guard twigged to the fact that the crowded mass of snoring, farting, wheezing humanity had gone silent and that the cellblocks had emptied.

The tunnel itself is another amazing feat of surreptitious construction. Using a building about 400 metres from the bustling Sarpoza prison, the Taliban mining crew somehow managed to conceal their months-long digging, despite the fact that, in the estimate of one Afghan official, they would have extracted one thousand truckloads of dirt.

In all that time, not one guard or policeman found it untoward that truckloads of earth were emanating from the same dwelling?

As for the night of the escape, the official theory is that, as the 471 prisoners emerged from the tunnel, they were given a fresh set of civilian clothing and then whisked away in a convoy of waiting cars. Even if we are to accept the possibility that six prisoners crammed into each vehicle alongside the drivers, that would still amount to no fewer than 80 cars involved in the prison break.

Given that this central part of Kandahar City is subjected to a strictly enforced night curfew, heavily patrolled by the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, not to mention being in close proximity to NATO rapid reaction forces, how could such a monumental, nocturnal movement of people have gone unnoticed and unchecked?

If we are to accept that this was simply a lucky lightning strike by the Taliban, then we would have to accept that this is the second time that lightning has struck the same prison.

Read more about Tough To Secure Kandahar Prison, Afghan Loyalty

© 2011 The Chronicle Herald

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