ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 263

RI Catholic leaders oppose latest demand for bill on sex-abuse lawsuits

By Ted Nesi

Rhode Island’s Catholic hierarchy on Monday rejected a new push to retroactively extend the state’s civil statute of limitations on child sex abuse, as explosive revelations in Pennsylvania reignited the debate.

At a State House news conference, state Rep. Carol Hagan McEntee and state Sen. Donna Nesselbush demanded that House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and Senate President Dominick Ruggerio allow a vote on a bill that would extend the civil statute of limitations to 35 years after the victim turns 18. They were joined by more than a dozen other legislators.

The move could mean new lawsuits against the church and other organizations. Rhode Island’s current civil statute of limitations is seven years for child sexual abuse, though there is no time limit on criminal charges. Advocates said the comparable statutes of limitations are 35 years in Massachusetts and 30 years in Connecticut.

“No effort will be spared for us to seek justice,” Nesselbush, D-Pawtucket, said.

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Pennsylvania hotline swamped with new Catholic priest sex abuse allegations

By Tara Isabella Burton

Officials at a clerical sex abuse hotline are scrambling to keep up with hundreds of new allegations following the publication of a Pennsylvania grand jury report last week, documenting at least 1,000 survivors of sex abuse by more than 300 priests across the state.

NPR’s Bobby Allyn reports that those 1,000 cases may have just been the tip of the iceberg. Since the report’s publication, people have made more than 400 calls to the phone line handling clerical sex abuse tips, which is managed by state Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s office. The deluge of calls prompted the AG to recruit additional staff from other departments to keep up.

Other private hotlines, such as the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), have also been inundated. Melanie Sakoda, SNAP’s secretary, told Allen, “We have been caught a little bit short-handed.” Calls have been coming in both from concerned Catholics hoping to help victims and victims who have discovered that their abuser is — or, perhaps more troublingly, is not — on the grand jury’s list.

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NASA confirms the presence of ice at the moon’s poles

By Mariella Moon

There’s water ice on the surface of the moon, a team of scientists has confirmed, and future expeditions could harvest it for human settlements. They used data collected by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft to prove its presence and found ice deposits at the moon’s poles. The idea that Earth’s natural satellite has pockets of ice hiding in the shadows permanently hidden from the sun isn’t anything new — previous probes sent back data containing evidence of their existence. However, NASA says this is the “first time scientists have directly observed definitive evidence” that there’s water ice on what people previously thought was a barren space rock.

According to the paper published by PNAS, M3 was able to pick up the reflective properties you’d expect from ice at the moon’s poles. It also measured the way the material’s molecules absorb infrared light, which differs between liquid water and solid ice, ensuring that those deposits are actually frozen water. M3’s data showed that those pockets of ice are sparsely distributed at the northern pole and more concentrated at the southern poles.

Those ice deposits most likely formed because temperatures at the moon’s poles, which sunlight never hits, don’t go above -250 degrees Fahrenheit. Before we can count on them to sustain future manned missions, though, we first have to confirm just how big and deep they are. As Angel Abbud-Madrid, Colorado School of Mines Center for Space Resources’ director, told Business Insider, we need to send a rover to examine them. Unfortunately, NASA already cancelled the Resource Prospector, a rover that was supposed to look and dig for ice and other resources on the moon future manned bases could use. The agency will still send the vehicle’s instruments aboard other landers, but that might delay discoveries that could’ve been made sooner if they were equipped on a single rover.

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What does Trump’s pick for science adviser think about climate science? A 2014 talk offers clues

By Jeffrey Mervis

The meteorology professor picked to advise President Donald Trump on science-related matters has urged climate scientists to be more humble when they talk about the conclusions of their research—and said Earth might be more resilient to human-caused environmental assaults than many believe.

The comments by Kelvin Droegemeier, Trump’s pick to lead the White House science office, were made during a talk he gave 4 years ago to researchers at a climate science center in Oklahoma.

Droegemeier, vice president for research at The University of Oklahoma (OU) in Norman and an expert on predicting severe storms, will appear before the Senate on Thursday to field questions on his qualifications to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Given the policies of the Trump administration, Droegemeier is almost certainly going to be asked about climate change and other environmental issues. He has kept mum on those and all other research topics since his nomination was announced on 31 July, as is the custom for presidential nominees. But a video of a June 2014 talk Droegemeier gave to OU colleagues provides some intriguing hints about his thoughts on climate science and other politically charged topics.

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Atheist group plans appearance Monday night at Bentonville School Board meeting

By Talk Business & Politics staff

A national civil liberties group that advocates the separation of church and state plans to attend the Bentonville School District’s board of education meeting Monday (Aug. 20).

Nick Fish, national program director of the New Jersey-based nonprofit American Atheists, says the group wants to donate about 1,000 posters to the Bentonville School District at Monday night’s meeting. The posters include both the current national motto, “In God We Trust,” and the original de facto motto of the United States, “E Pluribus Unum,” accompanied by a brief explanation of the changes made to the national motto in 1956.

The donation is in response to Act 911, a state law passed last year that allows K-12 schools to display a picture or poster of the national motto above an American flag in classrooms and libraries. Funding for the posters must come from private organizations or charitable contributions to local school boards.

The bill, sponsored by State Rep. Jim Dotson, R-Bentonville, passed in the Arkansas House 78-1 and in the Senate 20-2. Dotson presented about 900 framed copies of posters to the school board in February.

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Inside the fight to change statute of limitations laws in Pennsylvania

By Corky Siemaszko

Three words separate the thousands of Pennsylvanians who say they were molested as children by Roman Catholic priests from receiving justice and compensation for their suffering: statutes of limitations.

They are the reason why just two of the 301 priests named last week in state Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s bombshell report on sex abuse of children by priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses have been charged with crimes.

That is also why most of the victims are unlikely, at this point, to get a dime in recompense.

And while the findings in Shapiro’s report were greeted with universal revulsion and profuse apologies from the Catholic Church, expert say there’s no guarantee that anything is going to change for the aging victims of unspeakable acts that were inflicted on them when they were kids.

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Lawsuit to block medical marijuana initiative claims measure violates Mormons’ religious freedom

By Ben Winslow

A lawsuit has been filed seeking to block Proposition 2 from going on the November ballot, claiming Mormons freedom of religion rights would be infringed upon if medical marijuana were to be legal in Utah.

The lawsuit, filed late Wednesday by the Coalition for a Safe and Healthy Utah and Walter Plumb III, tries to stop Lt. Governor Spencer Cox from putting the medical marijuana ballot initiative before voters. It’s the second lawsuit of its kind seeking to block Proposition 2.

“In the United States of America, members of all religions, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have a constitutional right to exercise their religious beliefs. This includes the right not to consort with, be around, or do business with people engaging in activities which their religion finds repugnant, and to refuse to lease their property to people engaging in activities which they deeply oppose,” the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit cites the case of a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple based on deeply held religious beliefs. It argued that forcing a Mormon property owner to rent to someone who uses cannabis would violate a property owner’s religious beliefs.

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Water-worlds are common: Exoplanets may contain vast amounts of water

By the Goldschmidt Conference

Scientists have shown that water is likely to be a major component of those exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) which are between two to four times the size of Earth. It will have implications for the search of life in our Galaxy. The work is presented at the Goldschmidt conference in Boston.

The 1992 discovery of exoplanets orbiting other stars has sparked interest in understanding the composition of these planets to determine, among other goals, whether they are suitable for the development of life. Now a new evaluation of data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope and the Gaia mission indicates that many of the known planets may contain as much as 50% water. This is much more than the Earth’s 0.02% (by weight) water content.

“It was a huge surprise to realize that there must be so many water-worlds,” said lead researcher Dr Li Zeng (Harvard University),

Scientists have found that many of the 4000 confirmed or candidate exoplanets discovered so far fall into two size categories: those with the planetary radius averaging around 1.5 that of the Earth, and those averaging around 2.5 times the radius of the Earth.

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We Can Take On the Catholic Church for Covering Up Child Sex Abuse. Here’s How

By Marci Hamilton

The Pennsylvania grand jury report on clergy sex abuse in six dioceses is a call to action, in part because so few indictments flowed from its documentation of over 1,000 victims and 300 perpetrator priests. It details enormous injustice and institutional malfeasance, but we are left with only two indictments of perpetrators.

The institution and the bishops once again have been permitted to skate free, as though this is not a criminal enterprise in the most classic sense. It’s time to bring the Catholic Church to account for what it’s done.

Charge the church as a corrupt organization

It is natural to ask why the U.S. Roman Catholic Church has not been sued under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, for its systemic cover up of child sex abuse on such a large scale. The answer is that, as currently written, the law does not apply to this situation, because the “predicate act” needed to bring a federal RICO claim cannot be a personal injury like sex abuse.

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15 ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools in NYC deny entry to city investigators, schools chief says

By Valerie Strauss

New York City education officials were denied entry into half of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools under investigation over allegations of not providing state-mandated secular education, according to a letter the city schools chancellor sent to state authorities.

The Wednesday letter from Chancellor Richard A. Carranza to New York State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia updated an investigation by the city’s Education Department that started in 2015 amid concerns about the education boys were receiving at 39 of the schools, known as yeshivas.

Three years ago, 52 former students and teachers — along with parents of current students — wrote the city education department charging that the yeshivas were ignoring state law. The law requires private schools to provide an education “substantially equivalent” to what is available in public schools. Instead, boys at these schools got little if any education in English and subjects such as science and history. In some cases, attendance in secular education was said to be voluntary.

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