Dublin
Church still hiding pedophiles: The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland is still covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests, the Irish government charged in a blistering new report. The Irish church promised in 1996 to report all abuse cases to state authorities, but the government found that clergy in the diocese of Cloyne did nothing about complaints voiced against 19 priests between 1996 and 2009. Worse, the report found that the Vatican explicitly directed Irish bishops not to abide by the 1996 policy. And after a seminarian complained that the bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, inappropriately hugged and kissed him, church officials justified such behavior as simply “Italianate.” The Irish government is now planning to make it a criminal offense to withhold knowledge of child abuse from authorities.
Paris
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More DSK allegations: As former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn faces new attempted rape charges, brought by French writer Tristane Banon, Banon’s mother says she knows from personal experience that he is predatory and sexually violent. The mother, Socialist politician Anne Mansouret, told the French weekly L’Express that she had a sexual encounter with DSK in 2000 that was “consensual but brutal” and left her disgusted. She said sexual arousal seemed to trigger a domination instinct in him. When her daughter told her three years later that DSK had attacked her, Mansouret consulted a lawyer, who said that without physical evidence, Banon’s case had little chance in court. Strauss-Kahn has filed a lawsuit against Banon for slander; he hasn’t yet responded to Mansouret’s allegations.
Budapest
Nazi collaborator acquitted: In a verdict that shocked human-rights advocates around the world, a Hungarian court has acquitted a Hungarian police captain of involvement in a notorious Nazi massacre. Sandor Kepiro, 97, was accused of assisting in the slaughter of some 1,200 Jews, Roma, and Serbs in the Serbian town of Novi Sad in 1942. In 1944, Kepiro was convicted for his role in the massacre, but he was subsequently freed after a fascist coup in Hungary. After the war he fled to Argentina along with other Nazi collaborators and was convicted a second time in absentia by Hungary’s communist government. This new acquittal “flies in the face of all the evidence, all logic,” said Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Hungary has lurched rightward in recent years.
