Translation

.يولد جميع الناس أحرارا متساوين في الكرامة والحقوق. وقد وهبوا عقلا وضميرا وعليهم أن يعامل بعضهم بعضا بروح الإخاء‎
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Sunday, March 28, 2010

Canarias, entre las CCAA con menos consejerías

El Gobierno de Canarias presidido por Paulino Rivero se encuentra entre los ejecutivos autonómicos con menos consejerías. Mientras Cataluña cuenta con 14 áreas, Murcia y Madrid se quedan con nueve.


La Comunidad de Madrid y la Región de Murcias son las autonomías españolas con menos consejerías, nueve cada una, mientras que las que más tienen son Cataluña, con 14 y Andalucía con 13, pese a la reciente supresión de los departamentos de Justicia y Administración Pública y de Vivienda y Ordenación del Territorio andaluces.

Según los datos recabados por Europa Press en las 17 comunidades autónomas, Cataluña lidera ahora el ranking autonómico con 14 consejerías, las mismas que tenía al inicio de la legislatura, y una más que Andalucía y la Comunidad Valenciana, que cuentan actualmente con 13.

Por detrás se sitúan Baleares, Navarra y Castilla y León, con doce consejerías; Aragón, Extremadura y País Vasco, con once; Castilla La Mancha, Galicia, Cantabria, Canarias, La Rioja y Asturias, con diez; y Murcia y Comunidad de Madrid, con nueve.

EL REPARTO

De este modo, las consejerías canarias comprenden las áreas de Presidencia, Justicia y Seguridad, dirigida por José Miguel Ruano (CC); de Economía y Hacienda, con José Manuel Soria (PP); de Obras Públicas y Transportes, con Juan Ramón Hernández (CC); de Agricultura, Ganadería, Pesca y Alimentación, con Pilar Merino (PP); y Educación, Universidades, Cultura y Deportes, con Milagros Luis Brito (CC).

A estas se unen las consejerías de Bienestar Social, Juventud y Vivienda dirigida por Inés Rojas (CC); de Sanidad con Mercedes Roldós (PP); de Medio Ambiente y Ordenación Territorial con Domingo Berriel (CC); de Empleo, Industria y Comercio con Jorge Rodríguez (CC); y de Turismo con Rita Martín (PP).

Ratzinger se rebela ante las acusaciones de encubridor

Benedicto XVI ha utilizado la misa del Domingo de Ramos para cargar contra las informaciones que le acusan de encubrir casos de abusos sexuales a menores. El declaró que no se "dejará intimidar por las mezquinas habladurías de la opinión dominante", en relación a los escándalos de curas pederastas en EEUU, Irlanda, Alemania, Austria, Holanda, que han colocado en el ojo del huracán al Vaticano y salpicado al propio Pontífice.

El diario New York Times asegura que cuando era el prefecto del ex Santo Oficio, Ratzinger encubrió a un sacerdote estadounidense acusado de abusar sexualmente de unos 200 menores sordos y en la década de los años 80 cuando era arzobispo de Múnich autorizó que un sacerdote pederasta que había sido expulsado por ese motivo de la ciudad alemana de Essen, ejerciera en la capital bávara.

La insanta Sede ha desmentido categóricamente esos casos y ha denunciado una "innoble campaña" para golpearle "cueste lo que cueste". Según el diario vaticano L'Osservatore Romano, "nadie ha hecho tanto" como Benedicto XVI en la lucha contra esos abusos sexuales y menos ocultó caso alguno.
Por primera vez en sus casi cinco años de Pontificado, Benedicto XVI, que el 16 de abril cumplirá 83 años, ha presidido la homilía del Domingo de Ramos desde el "papamóvil", una medida, según el portavoz, Federico Lombardi, para que así lo pudieran ver mejor todos los fieles.

Ratzinger recordó su viaje a Tierra Santa, donde visitó los lugares de la vida, muerte y resurrección de Cristo y dijo que estaba muy "afligido" por las recientes "tensiones" verificadas "una vez más" en Jerusalén, por las nuevas construcciones judías en Jerusalén este, la zona palestina.

El pidió "a los responsables de la suerte" de la Ciudad Santa, "que es la patria espiritual de cristianos, judíos y musulmanes", que acometan con valentía el camino de la paz y lo sigan con perseverancia". Asimismo exhortó a los cristianos a permanecer en Tierra Santa, donde cada vez quedan menos.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

DR Congo: Lord’s Resistance Army Rampage Kills 321

Regional Strategy Needed to End Rebel Group’s Atrocities and Apprehend Leaders
2010_DRC_LRA1.jpg

The Makombo massacre is one of the worst ever committed by the LRA in its bloody 23-year history, yet it has gone unreported for months. The four-day rampage demonstrates that the LRA remains a serious threat to civilians and is not a spent force, as the Ugandan and Congolese governments claim.
Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher
(Kampala) - The rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) killed at least 321 civilians and abducted 250 others, including at least 80 children, during a previously unreported four-day rampage in the Makombo area of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo in December, 2009, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

"The Makombo massacre is one of the worst ever committed by the LRA in its bloody 23-year history, yet it has gone unreported for months," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. "The four-day rampage demonstrates that the LRA remains a serious threat to civilians and is not a spent force, as the Ugandan and Congolese governments claim."

The 67-page report, "Trail of Death: LRA Atrocities in Northeastern Congo," is the first detailed documentation of the Makombo massacre and other atrocities by the LRA in Congo in 2009 and early 2010. The report, based on a Human Rights Watch fact-finding mission to the massacre area in February, documents the brutal killings during the well-planned LRA attack from December 14 to 17 in the remote Makombo area of Haute Uele district.

LRA forces attacked at least 10 villages, capturing, killing, and abducting hundreds of civilians, including women and children. The vast majority of those killed were adult men, whom LRA combatants first tied up and then hacked to death with machetes or crushed their skulls with axes and heavy wooden sticks. The dead include at least 13 women and 23 children, the youngest a 3-year-old girl who was burned to death. LRA combatants tied some of the victims to trees before crushing their skulls with axes.

The LRA also killed those they abducted who walked too slowly or tried to escape. Family members and local authorities later found bodies all along the LRA's 105-kilometer journey through the Makombo area and the small town of Tapili. Witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that for days and weeks after the attack, this vast area was filled with the "stench of death."

Children and adults who managed to escape provided similar accounts of the group's extreme brutality. Many of the children captured by the LRA were forced to kill other children who had disobeyed the LRA's rules. In numerous cases documented by Human Rights Watch, children were ordered to surround the victim in a circle and take turns beating the child on the head with a large wooden stick until the child died.

The United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in Congo (MONUC) has some 1,000 peacekeeping troops in the LRA-affected areas of northeastern Congo - far too few to protect the population adequately, given the area's size.  Yet instead of sending more troops, the peacekeeping force, under pressure from the Congolese government to withdraw from the country by July 2011, is considering removing some troops from the northeast by June in the first phase of its drawdown.

"The people of northeastern Congo are in desperate need of more protection, not less," said Van Woudenberg. "The UN Security Council should stop any drawdown of MONUC peacekeeping troops from areas where the LRA threatens to kill and abduct civilians."

In mid-April, the Security Council is due to visit Congo to discuss the peacekeeping force's   plans for withdrawal and the protection of civilians.
The Makombo massacre is part of a longstanding history of atrocities and abuse by the LRA in Uganda, southern Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Congo. Pushed out of northern Uganda in 2005, the LRA now operates in the remote border area between southern Sudan, Congo, and CAR. In July 2005, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the senior leaders of the LRA for crimes they committed in northern Uganda, but those indicted remain at large.

The Human Rights Watch research indicated that the Makombo massacre was perpetrated by two LRA commanders - Lt. Col. Binansio Okumu (also known as Binany) and a commander known as Obol. They report to Gen. Dominic Ongwen, a senior LRA leader who is believed to command the LRA's forces in Congo and who is among those sought by the International Criminal Court. Human Rights Watch urged investigations of these commanders' alleged participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In December 2008, the governments of the region, led by the Ugandan armed forces, with intelligence and logistical support from the United States, began a military campaign known as Operation Lightning Thunder against the LRA in northeastern Congo. A surprise aerial strike on the main LRA camp failed to neutralize the LRA leadership, which escaped. In retaliation, the LRA attacked villages and towns in northern Congo and southern Sudan, killing more than 865 civilians during the Christmas 2008 holiday season and in the weeks thereafter.

On March 15, 2009, Operation Lightning Thunder officially ended, following pressure from the Congolese government, which found it politically difficult to support a continued Ugandan army presence on Congolese territory. But a covert joint military campaign continued, with the quiet approval of the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila. Both governments publicly maintain that the LRA is no longer a serious threat in Congo and that the bulk of the rebel group has either moved to Central African Republic or has been killed or dispersed.

These public declarations might have contributed to burying information about ongoing LRA attacks, leaving many victims feeling abandoned. An 80-year-old traditional chief, whose son was killed during the Makombo massacre, told Human Rights Watch: "We have been forgotten. It's as if we don't exist. The government says the LRA are no longer a problem, but I know that's not true. I beg of you, please talk to others about what has happened to us."

While the Makombo massacre is the most deadly documented attack by the LRA since the Christmas massacres of 2008, dozens of attacks against civilians have also been carried out in other areas in recent months - near the towns of Bangadi and Ngilima in Haut Uele district, in Ango territory in Bas Uele district, as well as in the Central African Republic.

In the December 2009 attacks near Bangadi and Ngilima, LRA combatants horribly mutilated six civilians, cutting off each victim's lips and an ear with a razor. The LRA sent the victims back to their villages with a chilling warning to others that anyone who heard or spoke about the LRA would be similarly punished.

On March 11, 2010, the US Senate unanimously passed the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act. If it becomes law, it will require President Barack Obama's administration to develop a regional strategy to protect civilians in central Africa from attacks by the LRA, to work to apprehend the LRA's leadership, and to support economic recovery for northern Uganda. The bill is currently before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

"The people of northeastern Congo and other LRA-affected areas have suffered for far too long," said Van Woudenberg. "The US and other concerned governments should work with the UN and regional parties to develop and carry out a comprehensive strategy to protect civilians and apprehend abusive LRA leaders."

As Archbishop, Benedict Focused on Doctrine

The New York Times
MUNICH — When Pope Benedict XVI was archbishop of Munich and Freising, he was broadly described as a theologian more concerned with doctrinal debates than personnel matters. That, say his defenders, helps explain why he did not keep close tabs on a pedophile priest sent to his archdiocese in 1980 and allowed to work in a parish.

Yet in 1979, the year before Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, approved the Rev. Peter Hullermann’s move to Munich, the cardinal blocked the assignment to the local university of a prominent theology professor recommended by the university senate. And in 1981, he punished a priest for holding a Mass at a peace demonstration, leading the man to ultimately leave the priesthood.

Pope Benedict’s four-and-a-half-year tenure as archbishop is among the least-examined periods of his life, but his time presiding over 1,713 priests and 2.2 million Catholics was in many ways a dress rehearsal for his present job tending to the Roman Catholic Church’s more than one billion members worldwide.

As archbishop, Benedict expended more energy pursuing theological dissidents than sexual predators. Already in the early 1980s, one could catch a glimpse of a future pope preoccupied with combating any movement away from church tradition. Vatican experts say there is little evidence that Benedict spent much time investigating more than 200 cases of “problem priests” in the diocese, with issues including alcohol abuse, adultery and, now under the microscope, pedophilia.

“His natural habitat was the faculty lounge, and he hadn’t even been a faculty chair,” said John L. Allen Jr. of The National Catholic Reporter. “He would be the first to concede he was much more interested in the life of the mind than the nuts and bolts of administrative work.”

Andreas Englisch, a leading German Vatican expert and the author of several books on Benedict, said that Cardinal Ratzinger “was never interested in bureaucratic stuff,” and noted that when he was first asked to be archbishop of Munich, he considered turning down the post because he did not want to work as “a manager.” In his autobiography, Benedict described taking the post as “an infinitely difficult decision.”

His management decisions are now the central focus of the widening scandal in the church in Germany. His supporters say that although he approved Father Hullermann’s move to his archdiocese, they assume that he may not have paid attention to a memo informing him that the priest, who had sexually abused boys in his previous posting, was almost immediately allowed to resume parish duties.

“He certainly would not have realized anything; he was in a different sphere,” said Hannes Burger, 72, who covered the church, including during Benedict’s time as archbishop, for the Munich-based daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.

“He held beautiful sermons and wrote beautifully, but the details he left to his staff,” said Mr. Burger, who interviewed the future pope several times before he went to Rome. “He was a professorial bishop, with Rome as his goal.”

Three decades ago it was common practice in the church to ignore or cover up incidents of molestation, or, in severe cases, to transfer priests to faraway parishes. Even outside the church, both victims and law enforcement authorities were less likely to take decisive steps to expose and combat abuse.

But Benedict’s track record in handling such cases under his direct control has assumed new relevance because he presides over a church troubled by scandal. He has to weigh whether and how severely to punish bishops who failed to act to deal with abuses in their domains.

In fact, in his efforts to combat child abuse in 2010, Benedict faces a dilemma over how to handle the same kind of institutional secrecy that was practiced by his own archdiocese in 1980. The future pope himself chose “co-workers of the truth,” as the motto for his time as archbishop.

The case is alarming, wrote the German newspaper Die Zeit last week, not “because Ratzinger was guilty of an exceptional offense.”

“It is the other way around: It is significant because the archbishop acted as probably most other dignitaries in those years,” it wrote. “In 1980 Joseph Ratzinger was part of the problem that preoccupies him today.”

Benedict was a stern disciplinarian on the issue that propelled him up the church hierarchy. An early enthusiast for reform in the Catholic Church in the early 1960s, he soon changed his mind and joined the ranks of those trying to put the brakes on the liberalizing forces unleashed by the counterculture movement.

His time in Munich was marked by confrontations with the local clergy, theologians and priests who worked there at the time say.

Cardinal Ratzinger ruffled feathers almost upon arrival in Munich by ordering priests to return to celebrating First Communion and first confession in the same year, rather than having the first confession a year later, a practice that had become established over the previous decade, and which its advocates considered more appropriate for young children.

One priest, the Rev. Wilfried Sussbauer, said he wrote to the archbishop at the time questioning the change, and said Cardinal Ratzinger “wrote me an extremely biting letter” in response.

After receiving the letter, Father Sussbauer and other priests asked for an audience with their archbishop in 1977. They did not get one. But the visiting sister of President Jimmy Carter did. When the priests found out, they called Cardinal Ratzinger’s office. “We asked, ‘Who is more important, your own priests or the sister of the American president?’ ” Father Sussbauer, 77, recalled. “Then suddenly we got an appointment.”

Cardinal Ratzinger was already something of a clerical diplomat, traveling as the official representative of Pope John Paul I to Ecuador in 1978. And with two conclaves to select a new pope in 1978, it seemed at times as if the archbishop already had one foot in the Vatican.

“His predecessor as archbishop was simply more aware of the practical problems of pastoral work,” said Wolfgang Seibel, a Jesuit priest and editor of the Munich-based magazine Stimmen der Zeit from 1966 to 1998. “He didn’t have enough time to leave his mark.”

How closely he would have watched personnel decisions, especially with an administrative chief, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, who had been in his post since 1968, is an open question. But the transfer of Father Hullermann from Essen would not have been a routine matter, experts said.

Mr. Englisch, the Vatican expert, said that transferring a problem priest was “such a difficult decision” that it would necessarily have required his opinion.

“I think the guy who handled it would have gone to his archbishop and said, ‘This case of transferring a priest is not common, and we should really have an eye on him,’ ” Mr. Englisch said. Referring to Benedict, he added, “I don’t think that he really knew the details; I don’t think he was really interested in the details.”

“As they say in the legal profession, you either knew or you should have known,” said the Rev. Thomas P. Doyle, who once worked at the Vatican Embassy in Washington and became an early and well-known whistle-blower on sexual abuse in the church. “The archbishop is the unquestioned authority in that diocese. The buck stops there.”


Rachel Donadio and Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.

Can Gaddafi's Son Reform Libya?

It is a warm February afternoon and the sun is streaming through the open doors of a large, airy farmhouse set at the far end of a guarded estate outside Libya's capital, Tripoli. Trays of dates and almonds are laid out in the living room, where the owner of the house, relaxed in a traditional North African robe and slippers, sips orange juice freshly squeezed from the fruit trees outside. All is a picture of prosperity and calm.

The serenity, though, is illusory. The home's inhabitant is Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Libya's four-decade-long leader Muammar Gaddafi. At 37, Saif finds himself at the heart of a political battle for his country's future. To hear Saif tell it, the need for reform is urgent. "The whole world is going through more freedom, more democracy," he says, pumping the air in impatience. "We want to see those changes now, instead of 10 years' time, or 15 years." (See pictures of the rise of Colonel Gaddafi.)

Just over six years ago, Saif coaxed his father into abandoning Libya's chemical- and nuclear-weapons program. Muammar Gaddafi's stunning aboutface, which followed longstanding demands from Washington, ended Libya's isolation from the West. Trade embargoes and an air blockade that had sealed most Libyans from the outside world for decades were lifted. In late 2008 the U.S. confirmed its first ambassador to Tripoli since 1972. More than 100 oil companies, including U.S. majors like Chevron and ExxonMobil, and European giants such as BP and Royal Dutch Shell, arrived to tap Libya's vast oil reserves, betting that the country would become an energy powerhouse. Construction crews now bang and clatter across Tripoli, building apartment and office towers, Western hotels (InterContinental, Starwood and Marriott are all working on new hotels) and a new airport.

In the latest sign of change, the first U.S. ambassador to Libya in 37 years hosted 100 Libyan women at his house one February evening for the first American cultural event in decades. American singers shimmied across the stage in tight dresses, belting out Broadway show tunes like "All That Jazz" and "New York." "For years this place was Slumberland," says Sami Zaptia, a Libyan business consultant in Tripoli. "Now everyone wants to get on the Libya gravy train." (Read: "After 37 Years, the U.S. Arrives to Do Business in Libya.")
But for all the new glitz and buzz, Libya's international acceptance has not brought deeper political or social change. Last September, Gaddafi celebrated his 40th anniversary in power with a blowout party featuring an air force flypast, hundreds of performers and a massive fireworks display. Aged just 68, Gaddafi Senior is now the world's longest-serving head of government (a few monarchs beat him when it comes to longest-serving head of state). His face peers from billboards across the country, and his firebrand style has barely tempered with age. His blast against Western leaders in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly last September could have been written years ago. The first sign visitors see at Tripoli airport is not an advertisement for Libya's spectacular beaches or Roman ruins, but a quote from Gaddafi's revolutionary manifesto, the Green Book, proclaiming workers to be "Partners Not Wage Earners." Crucially, it is Gaddafi and his appointed revolutionary committees who still make all of Libya's key decisions.

As Western companies arrive with billions of dollars to spend, though, Gaddafi's exhortations are beginning to sound like the language of a vanishing culture. Who will take his place? What will take his system's place? Those questions are at the core of the political debate, and as yet, there are no clear answers. "We are reckoning within ourselves," says Youssef Sawani, a close associate of Saif and executive director of the influential Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation. "The world has changed around Libya, and Libya has to change. Change is long overdue."

Friday, March 26, 2010

Abuse Scandal’s Ripples Spread Across Europe


MUNICH — The fallout from the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church settled across Europe, as prosecutors said they were weighing criminal charges against a priest suspected of molesting children in Germany, and Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation of a bishop accused of mishandling allegations of abuse in Ireland.

The possibility of criminal charges emerged from new accusations against a priest at the center of the child-molesting scandal rocking the church in Germany. On Wednesday, church officials in Munich said the priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann — whose transfer in 1980 to an archdiocese led at the time by Benedict, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, has drawn the pope himself into the nation’s child abuse controversy — had been accused of molesting a minor as recently as 1998.

The latest revelation comes as church officials in northern Germany say they have “credible evidence” of at least two other cases of sexual abuse committed by Father Hullermann in the 1970s, adding to a trail of accusations that suggest a pattern of abuse over two decades. During that time, church officials repeatedly transferred Father Hullermann to new parishes and allowed him to work with children, even after a 1986 conviction for sexually abusing boys.

Father Hullermann has not returned repeated calls and hung up without comment when reached briefly on Wednesday.

At the Vatican on Thursday, a small group of abuse victims gathered to demonstrate against the church’s refusal to defrock a priest in Wisconsin implicated in the abuse of as many as 200 deaf boys, and the role the pope had played in the case when oversaw the Vatican’s doctrinal arm.

“The goal of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, was to keep this secret,” Peter Isely, Midwest director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, told the Associated Press. “This is the most incontrovertible case of pedophilia you could get.”

The A.P. reported that some of the demonstrators were detained by police. In Ireland, Bishop John Magee, whose resignation was accepted by the pope on Wednesday, issued a statement of apology. In 2008, an investigation by a church panel into allegations in Cloyne found that Bishop Magee had failed to respond to accusations of abuse and that policies to protect children were severely lacking, setting off calls for his resignation.

“As I depart, I want to offer once again my sincere apologies,” said Bishop Magee, who had served as private secretary to three popes. He added, “To those whom I have failed in any way, or through any omission of mine have made suffer, I beg forgiveness and pardon.”

Bishop Magee’s was the first resignation the pope accepted since issuing a long-awaited letter to Irish Catholics last weekend apologizing to victims of sexual abuse and expressing “shame and remorse.”

Yet Benedict’s letter did not call for any church leaders to be disciplined, feeding a growing sense of anger in Ireland. Many Catholics there are demanding that the leader of the Irish church, Cardinal Sean Brady, resign over his role as a young priest in the 1970s in urging two children to sign secrecy agreements and not to report abuse.

Benedict’s letter followed two scathing Irish government reports last year revealing decades of sexual abuse of tens of thousands of children and a widespread cover-up. The findings have shaken the Irish church to its core; some fear it has lost a generation to the crisis.

Bishop Magee’s resignation accompanied a steady drumbeat for more church leaders to step down. Beyond Bishop Magee, four other Irish bishops implicated in the government reports for failing to protect children have offered to resign, but Benedict has accepted only one’s offer.

Nor has Benedict addressed the German scandal directly. So far, no cases have emerged from the two-year period when Father Hullermann worked at St. John the Baptist Church in Munich and Benedict was archbishop. But accusations have now surfaced at every other stop between Father Hullermann’s ordination in 1973 and his criminal conviction in 1986, and during a later assignment in 1998.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Munich archdiocese said the most recent potential victim had contacted the church. “The likely victim was a minor at the time,” the statement said, noting that the case had been referred to the prosecutor’s office.

“We are currently investigating the circumstances of the case,” said Eduard Mayer, the head of the prosecutor’s office handling the matter.

Church authorities have also been alerted to two previously unknown potential victims in the northern town of Bottrop. “We have two tip-offs that are so conclusive that we must proceed under the assumption that these incidents took place,” said Ulrich Lota, spokesman for the diocese in Essen, where Father Hullermann was ordained, confirming that in both cases the victims were boys.

Father Hullermann was abruptly transferred from Bottrop to Essen in 1977, but, according to Mr. Lota, there are no references in his file to abuse from that time.

Two years later, three sets of parents told the priest in charge of Father Hullermann’s new church that he had abused their children, prompting his transfer to Munich for therapy, where he was returned to parish duties.

After just over two years in Munich he was transferred once again, this time to the nearby town of Grafing. There, he abused several boys, leading to his conviction in 1986, which resulted in a suspended sentence of five years’ probation and a fine.

He then spent one year working in a nursing home before he was sent to a parish in Garching.

On Tuesday, Cardinal Friedrich Wetter, the archbishop at the time of Father Hullermann’s transfer to Garching, asked victims and their families to forgive him for allowing the priest to transfer to there during his tenure. “I am now painfully aware that I should have made a different decision at the time,” said Cardinal Wetter, who stepped down as archbishop in 2007.

Wolfgang Reichenwallner, the mayor of Garching, where Father Hullermann worked for 21 years after his 1986 conviction, said that the apology had come “awfully late” and that town officials had not been informed about the priest’s repeated transgressions.

Cardinal Wetter said he had “overestimated a person’s ability to change and underestimated the difficulties of therapeutic treatment for people with pedophile tendencies.”

The Munich archdiocese, in its initial statement on Father Hullermann’s case this month, said “the statements of the treating psychologist” were decisive in his return to parish duties.

But Dr. Werner Huth, the psychiatrist who treated Father Hullermann from 1980 to 1992, said last week that from the very outset he had repeatedly warned church officials not to allow the priest to work with children ever again.


Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys

The New York TimesBy LAURIE GOODSTEIN


Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.

The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.

In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.

But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.

“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.

The New York Times obtained the documents, which the church fought to keep secret, from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, the lawyers for five men who have brought four lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The documents include letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims’ affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Father Murphy and minutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican.

Father Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims. Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.

Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.

Even as the pope himself in a recent letter to Irish Catholics has emphasized the need to cooperate with civil justice in abuse cases, the correspondence seems to indicate that the Vatican’s insistence on secrecy has often impeded such cooperation. At the same time, the officials’ reluctance to defrock a sex abuser shows that on a doctrinal level, the Vatican has tended to view the matter in terms of sin and repentance more than crime and punishment.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was shown the documents and was asked to respond to questions about the case. He provided a statement saying that Father Murphy had certainly violated “particularly vulnerable” children and the law, and that it was a “tragic case.” But he pointed out that the Vatican was not forwarded the case until 1996, years after civil authorities had investigated the case and dropped it.

Father Lombardi emphasized that neither the Code of Canon Law nor the Vatican norms issued in 1962, which instruct bishops to conduct canonical investigations and trials in secret, prohibited church officials from reporting child abuse to civil authorities. He did not address why that had never happened in this case.

As to why Father Murphy was never defrocked, he said that “the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties.” He said that Father Murphy’s poor health and the lack of more recent accusations against him were factors in the decision.

The Vatican’s inaction is not unusual. Only 20 percent of the 3,000 accused priests whose cases went to the church’s doctrinal office between 2001 and 2010 were given full church trials, and only some of those were defrocked, according to a recent interview in an Italian newspaper with Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the chief internal prosecutor at that office. An additional 10 percent were defrocked immediately. Ten percent left voluntarily. But a majority — 60 percent — faced other “administrative and disciplinary provisions,” Monsignor Scicluna said, like being prohibited from celebrating Mass.

To many, Father Murphy appeared to be a saint: a hearing man gifted at communicating in American Sign Language and an effective fund-raiser for deaf causes. A priest of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, he started as a teacher at St. John’s School for the Deaf, in St. Francis, in 1950. He was promoted to run the school in 1963 even though students had disclosed to church officials in the 1950s that he was a predator.

Victims give similar accounts of Father Murphy’s pulling down their pants and touching them in his office, his car, his mother’s country house, on class excursions and fund-raising trips and in their dormitory beds at night. Arthur Budzinski said he was first molested when he went to Father Murphy for confession when he was about 12, in 1960.

“If he was a real mean guy, I would have stayed away,” said Mr. Budzinski, now 61, who worked for years as a journeyman printer. “But he was so friendly, and so nice and understanding. I knew he was wrong, but I couldn’t really believe it.”

Mr. Budzinski and a group of other deaf former students spent more than 30 years trying to raise the alarm, including passing out leaflets outside the Milwaukee cathedral. Mr. Budzinski’s friend Gary Smith said in an interview that Father Murphy molested him 50 or 60 times, starting at age 12. By the time he graduated from high school at St. John’s, Mr. Smith said, “I was a very, very angry man.”

In 1993, with complaints about Father Murphy landing on his desk, Archbishop Weakland hired a social worker specializing in treating sexual offenders to evaluate him. After four days of interviews, the social worker said that Father Murphy had admitted his acts, had probably molested about 200 boys and felt no remorse.

However, it was not until 1996 that Archbishop Weakland tried to have Father Murphy defrocked. The reason, he wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, was to defuse the anger among the deaf and restore their trust in the church. He wrote that since he had become aware that “solicitation in the confessional might be part of the situation,” the case belonged at the doctrinal office.

With no response from Cardinal Ratzinger, Archbishop Weakland wrote a different Vatican office in March 1997 saying the matter was urgent because a lawyer was preparing to sue, the case could become public and “true scandal in the future seems very possible.”

Recently some bishops have argued that the 1962 norms dictating secret disciplinary procedures have long fallen out of use. But it is clear from these documents that in 1997, they were still in force.

But the effort to dismiss Father Murphy came to a sudden halt after the priest appealed to Cardinal Ratzinger for leniency.

In an interview, Archbishop Weakland said that he recalled a final meeting at the Vatican in May 1998 in which he failed to persuade Cardinal Bertone and other doctrinal officials to grant a canonical trial to defrock Father Murphy. (In 2002, Archbishop Weakland resigned after it became public that he had an affair with a man and used church money to pay him a settlement.)

Archbishop Weakland said this week in an interview, “The evidence was so complete, and so extensive that I thought he should be reduced to the lay state, and also that that would bring a certain amount of peace in the deaf community.”

Father Murphy died four months later at age 72 and was buried in his priestly vestments. Archbishop Weakland wrote a last letter to Cardinal Bertone explaining his regret that Father Murphy’s family had disobeyed the archbishop’s instructions that the funeral be small and private, and the coffin kept closed.

“In spite of these difficulties,” Archbishop Weakland wrote, “we are still hoping we can avoid undue publicity that would be negative toward the church.”


Rachel Donadio contributed reporting from Rome.

Document Trail: The Predator Priest Who Got Away

Do Nannies Really Turn Boys Into Future Adulterers?

Mothers who outsource the care of their sons to other women may be inadvertently raising adulterers. Or so claims Dr. Dennis Friedman in a book that has kicked up a bit of a ruckus in Britain. A Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the doctor argues that men become womanizers because their mothers left them with nannies.

According to Friedman, having two women care for a baby boy may cause his little brain to internalize the idea that there are multiple females to meet his needs. "It introduces him to the concept of The Other Woman," he said in London's Daily Telegraph. He explicates the relationship in his book The Unsolicited Gift: Why We Do The Things We Do, which explores how mothers love their offspring that determines how those children behave as adults. (See the mobile apps that make adultery easier.)

Girls are affected by nannies too. Not having her mother around creates in the infant female a "vacuum of need," says Friedman, which she might try to fill in later life with substance abuse or promiscuity — presumably with those married men in her social circle who were also raised by nannies.

But it is the thesis concerning boys that has been more controversial. Having two maternal objects, says Friedman, "creates a division in [the boy's] mind between the woman he knows to be his natural mother and the woman with whom he has real hands-on relationship: the woman who bathes him and takes him to the park, and with whom he feels completely at one." This dual-woman life, one for family and one for catering to his every need might become a set pattern in his mind, so that when he grows up and feels like his needs are not being met, he strays beyond the home. (See the top 10 mistresses.)

Friedman suggests mothers should not work, or if they must, should not return to work until their children are at least one year old. Critics, and many, many working mothers, quickly pointed out that he offers no statistics for his theory (as in, exactly how many nannies must Tiger Woods have had?), nor does his proposal seem particularly practical, since many women have little choice but either to return to work after having children or to not feed said children. Additionally, it rankled many women that Friedman still lays the blame for men's fidelity issues on females. If it's not the inattentive wife who drives a man into another woman's arms — it's his inattentive mother.

It also doesn't make developmental sense, says Dr. Jean Mercier, Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, who specializes in infant development. "Babies don't form attachments solely to their mothers — they become attached also to fathers, grandparents, nannies, child care providers, older brothers and sisters, or anyone else who interacts with them socially and frequently participates in care routines like feeding and bathing." These relationships are healthy and part of normal development. And becoming attached to a nanny doesn't equal becoming detached from a mother, or that the two are interchangeable. "A nanny or other person is added to the existing relationships most babies have."

It's unclear how wide a cross section of society Friedman used to draw his conclusions, but it's possible they may have been a bit skewed. His previous three books were explorations of the psychology of a small but prominent group of people with powerful matriarchs and lots and lots of nannies: the British Royal family.




Thursday, March 25, 2010

Union says that homosexuals -dominate the railways in Czech Republic-

Ensures that three senior officials of the sector are gay. And it will ask for a quota 4% of heterosexuals o there  for equal opportunities.



obreroThe latest dispute between railroad workers from Czech Republic and the government has deviated from the prohibitions absolutely expected and incorporated (in the worst way of course) the question-gay.


The fuse lit Dušek Jaromír, leader of the guild grouping railway employees. On Saturday last, told the newspaper Lidove Noviny, the union described as "gay lobby" in the direction of Czech Railways.

Not content with this, Dusek-threw-some names: "The Zaludos is gay hand in hand with the gay Slameèka. The gay Slameèka goes with the gay Novak.

The names correspond respectively to the general director of Czech Railways, Petr Zaludos, the transport minister, Gustav Slameèka, and director of the Office of Government, Jan Novak.

I want to put a quota of around four per cent of heterosexual, to have equal opportunities.

I can tell you there I'm afraid to stoop to pick up the pen in the hallways, finished Dusek, which was won in record time all the headlines,...and also all the calls for his resignation.

According to Radio Prague, from the prime minister to members of unions representing themselves Dusek, have spoken out for the man to apologize or resign. So far, Dusek has shown no intention to rectify their sayings.



The gay community sends a pen :)

Meanwhile, the LGBT group of the city of Brno, STUD, has found an ingenious way to repudiate the homophobic words of the union. We have sent a pen with a rope-for he was not falling-and-trade union leader and become more comfortable in the corridors of Czech Railways and not have to bend down, "says an association statement.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Lt. Dan Choi + Capt. Jim Pietrangelo Plead Not Guilty, Will Go to Trial

Rather than plead guilty and accept fines, White House chain-males Lt. Dan Choi and Cap. Jim Pietrangelo both just plead not guilty and will have a trial. It's been set for April 26. Choi, walking into court in handcuffs and Army fatigues, tells the judge: "not guilty, not ashamed, and not finished." Oh snap! Both men have been uncuffed and are being released.

Statement after their release: "There was no freer moment than being in that prison."

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

A Special Mission in Afghanistan

To Save a Snow Leopard


In a valley high in the Wakhan mountains of Afghanistan, a hunter several weeks ago waded through snow drifts to check his traps and found that he had snared one of the rarest creatures alive: a snow leopard.

If a naturalist had seen the leopard, he or she would have focused on its snowy fur with black, half-moon markings and its white goatee. A naturalist would have known that it is a solitary, elusive creature, a night hunter that roams the icy Central Asian peaks far above human villages. A naturalist would have known that there are perhaps less than a thousand left on the planet. But the hunter who snared the snow leopard saw only a $50,000 price tag. That was the fee supposedly offered by a wealthy Pakistani businessman to any hunter in the Wakhan who could deliver a snow leopard — alive. (See 10 species near extinction.)

The leopard was snarling and furious at being caught, with its hind leg gashed by a wire snare. But otherwise, it was in good shape. With the help of a few friends, the hunter tied the leopard's legs and muzzle, threw it in the back of a truck, and headed out of the Wakhan Valley to Feyzabad, a three-day journey of hair-pin curves along terrifying mountain roads.

But the capture of a snow leopard, once believed to be extinct in Afghanistan, didn't stay a secret for long. This feline was to become the object of a four-day rescue operation that involved NATO forces, the U.S. Ambassador in Kabul, a royal prince and even President Hamid Karzai. But this mission would end like so many others of similarly good intention in Afghanistan. (See the top 10 animal stories of 2009)

First, the hunter and his friends were undone by their own greed. Upon reaching Feyzabad, they thought they might get a better price for their cat than $50,000 and began to shop around. "Somebody on the Internet was supposedly offering $2 million for a live snow leopard," says Mustapha Zaher, Director General of the National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) in Kabul.

But the environmental protection agency office in Feyzabad was tipped off about the cat. The agency's chief, Zaher, also happens to be a prince, the grandson of the late Afghan monarch Zaher Shah, and he has far more clout around Kabul than the ordinary bureaucrat. "I raised a hullabaloo," Zaher tells TIME with a grin. He paged through his contact book, calling U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a contingent of German troops stationed in Feyzabad (who at first were skittish about leaving their base even though this region of Afghanistan is relatively calm). And, he called the Afghan president. It had been a hard day for Karzai; suicide bombers and gunmen had attacked an Indian guest house in Kabul, killing dozens. But the president was sympathetic to the plight of the leopard. "He told me: 'Do what you can to save him,'" says Zaher.

The leopard was confiscated from the hunters, and Richard Fite, a New Hampshire veterinarian who advises for the U.S. Agricultural Department in northern Afghanistan, was dispatched to tend the snow leopard. Fite was more accustomed to dealing with farm animals, and to encounter a snow leopard was a marvel. "I never imagined in my life that I would be so close to such a creature," he says in a telephone interview. At first, the leopard was kept in a cage at the police station where it was poked by curious onlookers.

When Fite examined the leopard, it had been moved to the atrium of a nearby guesthouse, and its cage was littered with chunks of uneaten raw meat. The leopard growled at Fite but remained subdued, he says. When he looked into the eyes of the animal, says Fite, he could tell it was ailing. "All I could think of was the tragedy of it all." He adds: "The mental stress on the animal from capture, transport, being bound, and being held for almost a week would have been unimaginable."

Over the next three days, Fite tended to the leopard. Then, after advice from experts at the World Conservation Society in Kabul, a decision was made to fly the leopard back to the Wakhan and free it into the wild, once it had regained strength. "We didn't want it dumped unconscious on a snowfield where it would freeze to death," says Dave Lawson, the Society's country director. Bad weather kept the U.S. helicopter grounded. After what seemed like a day of improved health — the leopard was holding its head up and grooming itself — and a break in the storm clouds that would allow the chopper to take off, Fite was optimistic. But the next morning, on March 2, he was informed the snow leopard had died. "My guess — and it is just that — is that it died from shock." He adds, "Snow leopards are solitary, reclusive animals."

An Afghan elder who had seen the leopard in the cage wept when he saw its dead body carried out. "A lot of these mountain people have respect for wildlife," says Lawson, who was told by one elder that "God put these animals here for us to look after." The death of a snow leopard may not be of great consequence in Afghanistan's larger turmoil. But for many Afghans, the snow leopard is a symbol of the country's spirit of untamed wildness. For a few brief moments, everyone from the president to the top U.S. diplomat in the country turned their gaze away from politics and terrorism to a shivering, sick cat in a cage. And when it died, everyone from the highest echelons of power to humble villagers suffered a profound loss.

With reporting by Shah Mahmood Barakzai/Kabul

Pressure Grows on U.S. to Tamp Down Its Spat with Israel

Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly feeling lucky. As his skirmish with the Obama Administration over Israel's settlement activity in East Jerusalem entered its second week on Tuesday, the Israeli Prime Minister was pushing back against Washington's demands. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has put the onus on Israel to "demonstrate its commitment" to the peace process by reversing a plan to build new housing units in East Jerusalem (occupied by Israel since 1967); declaring its readiness to hold substantial negotiations with the Palestinians on all final-status issues (including Jerusalem, whose control by Israel Netanyahu has repeatedly insisted is non-negotiable); and making other gestures such as freeing Palestinian prisoners and easing the siege of Gaza. But the Israeli leader insisted on Monday that the Jerusalem construction plans wouldn't change, and on Tuesday he answered Clinton by saying that "the government of Israel has proven over the last year that it is committed to peace, both in words and actions." Clearly, the Israeli leader is through eating crow following the furor caused by his government's public humiliation of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden last week.


Netanyahu appears to sense the political winds at his back. While the initial response by many in Israel had been to berate him over the provocation during Biden's visit, mounting pressure from Washington on a wider range of issues may turn the domestic political tide in his favor. Netanyahu last year strengthened his domestic political position by defying the Obama Administration's demand for a complete settlement freeze as a step toward resuming peace talks. And besides his own right-wing coalition urging him to stay the course, a wider range of Israeli leaders may be leery of allowing Washington to dictate Israel's actions.


As he moves to defuse the crisis on his own terms, Netanyahu may also believe that the political balance in Washington will tip in his favor. U.S. public opinion remains far more favorable to Israel than to the Palestinians, and with the annual conference of the influential America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) due to begin in Washington on Sunday, Netanyahu — who is expected to speak at the event, as is Clinton — appears to be hanging tough. AIPAC fired a warning shot earlier this week, blaming the Administration for the breakdown and urging it to "move away from public demands and unilateral deadlines directed at Israel."

With a number of prominent Republicans excoriating the Administration over the spat and some Democrats increasingly uncomfortable in an election year when many will struggle to hold on to their congressional seats, Netanyahu may be betting that the pressure is greater on Obama to tamp down the tension.

But the Obama Administration will be considering more than simply the narrow concerns of U.S. electoral politics. The showdown with Netanyahu underscores just how little progress Washington has made in resuscitating the moribund Middle East peace process. The limited "proximity talks" over which the latest row broke out are themselves an indicator of just how poor the chances are of brokering a consensual peace agreement between the current Israeli and Palestinian leaderships, even as events on the ground steadily erode the prospects for creating a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The current showdown reflects a recognition by the Administration that getting the peace process back on track may require a willingness to press Israel into actions that its current leaders are unlikely to take of their own volition, and that's an unappealing choice for a politically vulnerable Administration. But there are other voices making themselves heard in ways that preclude an easy retreat. Indeed, there's a growing belief in Washington that U.S. national interests across the region are imperiled by a failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a manner minimally acceptable to the Arab world — a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital. After the East Jerusalem settlement announcement, Biden was reported by Israeli media to have told Netanyahu behind closed doors, "What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace."

Biden's reported comments may simply be channeling a perspective coming from within the U.S. military, which now has nearly 200,000 troops stationed in the Muslim countries of Centcom's Area of Responsibility (AOR). Centcom chief General David Petraeus was blunt about the impact on his mission of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse in testimony submitted to U.S. Senators on Tuesday: "The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR," Petraeus said in prepared remarks, adding, "The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas." The general made clear that "progress toward resolving the political disputes in the Levant, particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict, is a major concern for Centcom."

The message from the comments attributed to Biden, and from Petraeus' testimony, is clear: This is not simply about the Israelis and Palestinians; U.S. national interests are at stake. And that creates pressure on the Administration not to allow the peace process to remain stalled.

Nor are the Palestinians going to wait passively for what Senator Joseph Lieberman calls a "family dispute" to amiably resolve itself. After all, for the Palestinians, that "family" relationship has been a disaster, and they'll seek to drive a wedge on the issue by pushing back against Israeli encroachment in East Jerusalem and elsewhere. Palestinian activists have for weeks been protesting against Israeli construction activities in East Jerusalem, and on Tuesday those escalated with a "Day of Rage" called by Hamas, which led to fierce clashes between youths and Israeli police. The symbolic importance of Jerusalem throughout the Arab world makes protest there a touchstone issue that could generate a surge of outrage that the Palestinian Authority may be unable to restrain, particularly given Israel's intent to keep on building. Hamas is certainly more than happy to encourage a grass-roots challenge to the negotiation policy of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the form of protests in Jerusalem — and many leaders in Abbas' own Fatah movement, equally tired of waiting for diplomacy to deliver, are joining in. Settler groups on the Israeli side, too, are likely to up the ante. So even if the Administration manages to get "proximity talks" back on track, the battle for Jerusalem is likely to intensify.


Sport Gay

A straight buddy of mine wrestles and told me that he always gets hard when he does.

Monday, March 15, 2010

How to give blowjob to uncut guys

Some guys who are cut, are apprehensive about uncut cocks. Don't be! Look at it as an added bonus, and an added chance to make your partner squirm with pleasure. Like with any sexual experience, when giving head, look for your partner's reaction, if he's responding in a good way, then keep doing what you're doing. If he looks like he's ready to watch some TV, then obviously what you're doing to him doesn't feel that good. If you get the opportunity, talk to him and ask him which areas of his cock are really sensitive, and what feels good to him.

Quite a few cut guys loudly proclaim that they find uncut cocks so much fun to play with! These days the number of circumcised men who have a fetish for uncut men/cocks is startlingly large and growing.

Guys who are uncut are generally MUCH MUCH more sensitive than cut guys. You can't always give uncut guys the same rough treatment that you've been giving your other partners. The most common problem I encounter, is my partner pulling the skin of the cock too far down to the point that it is painful. The foreskin is attached to the cock head, so be careful. Teeth can also be a big problem for me. It can be rather awkward when you're in a situation and your partner is trying to give you pleasure, but he is instead hurting you.

With uncut guys, the cock head, and its rim are generally the most sensitive areas. Sliding your tongue between the foreskin and cock head can give him waves of pleasure. Swirling the tip of your tongue between the retracted foreskin and the rim of his cock head can feel wonderful!
Some guys have really sensitive foreskins, so an added bonus for them would be to have it played with, either with your tongue, or nibbled on gently. If your partner has a foreskin that's not too tight, you can take a moist finger place it on the cock head and roll the foreskin over it so it covers your finger. You can then gently move your finger around in the a circular motion. This feels really good. If you're not sure how to do this, ask you partner if he's ever done this, and ask him to show you.

Some uncut guys have really tight foreskins that do not completely retract over the cock head. Do not try to force it, because they will yelp in pain.

10 good rules for Anal Sex

I will be adding to this over time, as you can see I am adding a "Starter Manuals" section on the right toolbar. This is the first link and we will be adding new information all the time. Keep checking back.
Ten Rules of Anal Sex

by Jack Morin

Jack Morin, PhD, a San Francisco sex therapist and researcher, is the author of Anal Pleasure and Health: A Guide for Men and Women.

Anal Eroticism is surrounded by a powerful taboo. Yet millions of men and women - straight, gay and bisexual - are experimenting with anal sex. The anus, richly endowed with nerve endings and interconnected with the main pelvic muscles, is the closest erogenous neighbor of the genitals and contracts rhythmically during orgasm. Thirty-five years ago, Kinsey stated that the anal region had erotic significance for about half of the population. In a survey of 100,000 Playboy readers, 47 percent of the men and 61 percent of the women admitted to having tried anal intercourse.

Yet the anal taboo inhibits most people from thinking, talking and learning about the sexual use of the anus. Listed here are the ten things most men and women still do not know about anal sex.

1. Anal intercourse is the least practiced form of anal sex.
There are many ways to enjoy the anus erotically. The most common techniques include touching the anal opening while masturbating or stimulating a partner's anus during intercourse or oral sex.

Some people enjoy the sensation of a finger - their own or a lover's - insinuated into their anal opening and gently rotated. Others may prefer the insertion of a dildo or vibrator beyond the anal opening and short anal canal into the larger rectum. Many men, including hetereosexuals, prefer this form of penetration.

Oral-anal lovemaking is popularly known as rimming. The very idea disgusts some people. Others enjoy performing it or allowing themselves to be probed in this special way.

From Jade: we will try to post "safe sex" practices for this in the next little bit

2. Anal stimulation, including intercourse, is not painful if done properly.
The belief that anal stimulation, especially intercourse, has to hurt is a persistent and dangerous myth. Just as pain anywhere in the body indicates that something is wrong, so is the same true of the anal area. With its high concentration of nerve endings, the anus can produce extreme agony when it is mistreated. Yet it can be a source of great pleasure.

When a finger, object or penis is intorduced into the anus, the anal muscles go into spasm, as if fighting off an invasion. Pain will result if the partners do not wait for these muscles to relax. Under sufficient stress they will eventually collapse and the pain subside, unless further damage is done. But, any 'pleasure' afforded from this kind of activity derives mostly from the absence of discomfort.

Maximum anal pleasure requires the elimination of all pain or physical trauma from the anal experience. Self-protection on the part of the passive partner involves being ready to say "no" until he or she is ready to proceed. Readiness is a combination of physical relaxation, usually helped along by plenty of leisurely anal touching, and desire.

Occasionally the anal muscles are relaxes, but the passive partner is still not in the mood. Stimulation should mount only in proportion to the degree of receptivity.

3. Anal sex can be enjoyed even if it has been consistently uncomfortable in the past.

Sufficient desire alone does not necessarily guarantee pleasurable anal sex. Nor is an uncomfortable previous experience always the reason for a lack of interest in or desire for anal sex.

Chronic anal tension is the most common cause of anal discomfort during sex. Hemorrhoids and constipation are usually a sign of this condition. Tension can be relieved by touching the anus and becoming more familiar with it. An ideal time to explore the anal opening is while taking a shower or bath. Deep breathing also affects the anal muscles. Tensing the anus and the letting go in another way of learning to relax it. Anyone who enjoys masturbation might want to experiment with some form of anal stimulation, though he or she should stop if any discomfort occurs.

For many people the turning point in anal sex is when they allow a partner to massage the anus with the understanding that intercourse will not be attempted. Then the recipient of anal caresses can concentrate solely on the pleasure that this erogenous zone is capable of generating.

From Jade: also try getting small sex toys and "working your way up". Using sex toys on your own in private is a great way to allow yourself to become more comfortable with anal activity without the added stress of having a waiting person their. I also like the suggestions above about "allowing the partner to massage the anus with the understaning that intercourse will not be attempted." Just play around and get comfortable with the idea.
4. Two muscle rings called sphincters surround the anal opening. Each functions independently.

If you insert a finger about one half-inch into your anus and press your fingertip against the side, you can clearly feel the two sphincter muscles. There is less than a quarter-inch between them. The external sphincter is controlled by the central nervous system - just like the muscles of the hand, for example. You can readily tense and relax this sphincter whenever you want.

The internal sphincter is quite different. This muscle is controlled by the involuntary or autonomic part of the nervous system, which governs such functions as heartbeat and stress response.

The internal sphincter reflects and responds to fear and anxiety during anal sex. It will cause the anus to tense up automatically even if the passive partner is trying to relax. Thus, precautions about safety and comfort are essential here.

Even if a person does feel comfortable during anal sex, he or she may still need to learn voluntary control over his or her internal sphincter in order to relax it at will. Doing so requires regularly inserting a finger, perhaps in the shower each day, and feeling the internal sphincter. The muscle changes spontaneously and in response to behavior. In this instance, simply paying attention is more important than trying to relax. Anyone can gradually learn to control the internal sphincter at will.

5. Anal stimulation provides many kinds of pleasure
The highest concentration of nerve endings is around the anal opening itself. A finger can focus on them especailly effectively. When an object or penis is inserted beyond the anal opening into the rectum, other pleasures are involved. The outer protion of the rectum, like the vagina, has several nerve endings. The inner portion responds mostly to pressure.

Some people enjoy the feelings of pressure and fullness once they understand that these sensations do not presage an impending bowel movement. Rectal pressure is especially important to enthusiasts of "fisting," a form of anal sex in which several fingers or een the entire hand and forearm are inserted into the rectum and sometimes into the lower colon.


In men, the protate - which is just beyond the rectal wall, a few inches in, towards the front of the body - can be a source of pleasure when massaged by a finger, an object, or a penis. Also, the lower end of the penis, or "bulb," is near the anal opening opening. It is stimulated indirectly by most types of anal sex.

Anal pleasure can be psychological as well as physical. The anal taboo adds to the thrill of the forbidden. The most common anti-anal message (it's dirty!) sometimes returns as a source of raunchy, sleazy excitement. Rimming enthusiasts may enjoy the feeling that they are being disgustingly - and delightfully - perverse. Other people regard the anus as a secret, special place. Sharing it with a partner is an act of openness and giving.

From Jade: this is a great place to point out, KEEP THAT AREA CLEAN. Unless you are into more extreme play, it is a good idea to develop a ritual which involves showering before sex to clean the external area and regularly using douche to clean internally.

6. Anal stimulation can lead to orgasm
A minority of men and women can respond orgasmically to anal sex without direct genital stimulation. Women probably do so through pelvic muscle contractions - and a small minority even though the sheer excitement of being anally penetrated. When men expereience an orgasm from anal stimulation, they tend to focus on the prostate. No doubt they are also responding to indirect stimulation of the penile bulb.

Orgasms from anal stimulation are most likely to occur when the participants become thoroughly absorbed in their sensations and fantasies. An almost certain way to prevent such an orgasm is to become determined to have one. Seeking an anal orgasm will create new pressures and disrupt the pleasure.

It must be remembered that most people require direct genital stimulation in order to climax. On the other hand, a few people have orgasms only with anal stimulation.


7. Diet contributes to the enjoyment of anal sex
Regular bowel movements are the major function of the anus and rectum. There must be sufficient fiber in a person's diet to make his or her feces soft, bulky and well formed. This allows a bowel movement to be produced without force or effort. Forced evacuations irritate anal tissues, causing discomfort and adding to muscular tensions. Fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains or unprocessed bran are important sources of fiber.

8. Different rules of hygiene apply to the vagina and rectum
Since intercourse can be vaginal or rectal, many people assume the the same rules apply for the penetration of the vagina and rectum. Although both are lined with soft tissue and are capable of expanding, they are radically dissimilar.

The rectum is not straight. After the short anal canal which connects the anal opening to the rectum, the rectum tilts toward the front of the body. A few inches in, it curves back - sometimes as much as 90 degrees. Then, after a few more inches, it swoops toward the front of the body once again. A person can learn about the shape of his or her rectum by gently inserting a soft object, trying different angles and body positions and concentrating on how it feels. Make sure the object has a flared base so that if you loose your grip, it won't slip into the rectum and become irretrievable.

The rectum does not produce lubrication like the vagina but only a small amount of mucus. Therefore, rectal penetration always requires a lubricant. Chemical additives should be avoided. Water-based lubricants are latex-compatible.

The main function of the rectum is to act as a passageway for feces. But feces are not normally stored in the rectum except just prior to a bowel movement. Yet small amounts may remain in the rectum, expecially if the feces are not well formed. Anal douching before lovemaking will help some people especailly concerned with cleanliness to relax. For others the idea of dirtiness heightens the joy of the forbidden; for them, douching is anti-erotic.

9. Anal intercourse is not necessarily an act of dominance and submission.
The top-bottom imagery associated with anal intercourse is widespread. No doubt the belief that anal sex has to hurt contributes to this notion. And in fact some people are intensely excited by top-bottom fantasies about anal sex. The thought that they are submitting to such a degrading act is a terrific thrill. However, actual, not fantasized, anal pain can lead to trouble.


For others, the enjoyment of anal sex is inhibited by top-bottom imagery. The idea of surrendering control, and perhaps submitting to humiliation, causes immediate, protective tensing of the anal muscles. These individuals are more likely to relax and enjoy themselves if they can learn to regard anal sex as pleasurable rather than as an expression of power.

10. Anal sex can be perfectly safe, even beneficial.
The taboo against anal eroticism is perpetuated by the almost universal belief among physicians that anal sex is inevitably dangerous. No physical injury from anal stimulation results if both partners refuse to tolerate pain, never use force and avoid the use of drugs.

All the other risks center on sexually transmitted diseases. Each of the common STDs - gonorrhea, syphillis, herpes - can affect the anus. Intestinal parasites, bacteria or tiny bugs are usually passed along when fecal matter finds its way into someone's mouth or vagina, most likely through rimming.

AIDS has complicated the matter. (from Jade: welcome to understatement 101) The HIV virus can pass from the semen or blood of an infected person to the bloodstream of a partner through a tiny break in the rectal tissue during anal intercourse.

To avoid this risk, anal intercourse and rimming should not be practiced casually. Those who do enjoy anal intercourse should always use a condom. Rimming should always be accomplished by a latex barrier. Of course, in a monogamous realtionship with two healthy people, the risk of disease transmitted anally is reduced. (from Jade: this statement will generate some disagreement)

Thousands of men and women with chronic anal medical problems have restored their anal health by challenging their negative attitudes. This approach is indespensible for full erotic enjoyment of the anus.

Note: If you find this guide helpful and would like to learn more, then take a look at the books Anal Pleasure and Health: A Guide for Men and Women by Dr. Jack Morin, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women by Tristan Taormino, or The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Men by Bill Brent.