Showing posts with label prostitution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prostitution. Show all posts

30 May 2011

Italian priest in diocese of Cardinal assisting Pope on child protection reforms arrested on pedophilia and drug charges



TIME   -  May 19, 2011

Priest Sex-Abuse Case Hits Church of Pope's Adviser


By Alessandra Pieracci and Giacomo Galeazzi / La Stampa / Worldcrunch




This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in the leading Italian daily La Stampa.

(GENOA) — 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, May 13, on pedophilia and drug 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 O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues," he allegedly said. Genoa Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco, who is the 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.(Read "Vatican Gets Tough on Child Abuse but Not Tough Enough.)

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

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi praised Bagnasco's handling of the Sastri Ponente case, lauding its "timeliness and competence." On Saturday, May 14, the Cardinal visited the Santo Spirito church, where Seppia was the parish priest.

According to investigators, Seppia told a friend — a former seminarian and barman who is currently under investigation — that the town's malls were the best places to entice minors. In tapped phone conversations the two cursed and swore against God. The priest is charged with having attempted to kiss and touch an underage altar boy and of having exchanged cocaine for sexual intercourse with boys over 18.

Seppia's defense lawyers are expected to argue that those conversations — monitored since Oct. 20, 2010 — were just words, sex games that were played by adults. It was just a game even when he claimed to have "kissed on the mouth" a 15-year-old altar boy, according to the defense.

On Monday, May 16, during formal questioning by Genoa's investigating magistrate Annalisa Giacalone, Seppia chose not to respond. The magistrate decided to keep him in custody to avoid a risk of relapse or tampering with evidence. Defense attorney Paolo Bonanni said the defense wants to evaluate all the charges, reserving the right to respond to public prosecutor Stefano Puppo in the coming days.

Questioned by the investigators, the altar boy reportedly confirmed the attempted kiss. Another male minor who, according to the investigators, was stalked with messages and pressing invitations, will be questioned soon. Psychologists are helping Carabinieri police officers obtain testimony from the alleged victims. "The boys are ashamed to talk and to admit what happened," says one of the investigators. The evidence amounts to at least 50 messages and phone calls. In the tapped phone conversations, the drug dealer contacted the boys and gave their phone numbers to the priest, who paid them with cocaine or 50 euros each time for sexual intercourse.(Read "Controversial Study Links Catholic Abuse to '60s Culture and Church Hierarchy but Offers Few Solutions.")

"[The investigators] made us listen to that man saying terrifying things about our children. Things so terrible that I cannot repeat them," a father of one of the boys said.

Investigators are also examining three confiscated computers: the priest allegedly looked for partners via chat as well.

Seppia is currently being kept in a confinement cell in a Genoa prison. He met the jail's priest and psychologist. "He has read the newspapers, and he is pained by his parishioners' comments," says his lawyer. The investigation is ongoing.

This article was found at:



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30 Oct 2008

Not Without My Sister [book review]

Seven Magazine - UK October 30, 2008

book review by Miranda Marcus

In the late 1960s, hippie-dom took control of the world with its message of flower-power, peace and love. The Christian angle, the ‘Jesus Movement’, soon broke down into various groups, such as The Children of God. Founded in California and lead by their now deceased prophet David Berg, it quickly earned its reputation as a cult. Now called the International Family, it is a global religious movement that boasts full-time and fellow members at just over 11,200 in over 100 countries (around 4,000 adult full-time members and 4,000 children).
Based on a message of salvation, apocolipticism and ‘spiritual revolution’, and organised into communes of up to 200 people, their basic belief structure relies on the premise that it is every Christian’s duty to try and convert the world armed with the ‘spiritual weapons’ such as spirit channelling – using the aid of ‘helpers’ which consist of the dead, demons, and even mythical figures such as Aphrodite – ‘Keys of the Kingdom’ which not only power spiritual spacecraft, but also turn into spiritual swords, from the Gospel of Matthew: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (16:19). And last but not least, we have ‘Jesus Loving’.

The latter weapon concedes that all followers of Christ are his brides and therefore should fulfill all the roles of a wife, showing him their love and adoration through sexual acts. Homosexuality being banned, men are encouraged to envisage themselves as women during intercourse, therefore denying homosexual relationships with Jesus. Jesus Loving also lead to a method called flirty fishing, which uses the sexual appeal of the female members to generate funds and recruits: essentially religious evangelic prostitution.

Central to their beliefs is the ‘law of love’, which claims that providing one’s actions are motivated by unselfish, sacrificial love, and are not intentionally hurtful, the said act it is in accordance with scripture and therefore God’s law. Underage sexual activities were encouraged, and it was only in 1986 that sex between minors and adults was forbidden. Adult members may have sex with other adult members of the opposite sex, and are encouraged to do so, regardless of marital status, as a way to foster unity and combat loneliness of those ‘in need’. This is commonly called ‘sharing’ or ‘sacrificial sex’. However, numerous former members have alleged being coerced to ‘share’, and were cast as selfish or unloving when they did not comply. The cult received considerable media attention following allegations of incest and child sex abuse supposedly encouraged by David Berg.

Liberal sexual attitudes are stereotypically seen as a defining feature of hippie culture, free love for all, but the recently published Not Without My Sister (Harpercollins, 2008), gives the harrowing accounts of three sisters growing up in this cult. This book contains the memories and explicit insights of Kristina and Celeste Jones and Juliana Buhring on their ‘journey to freedom’ from the clutches of the organisation which, in their own words “practised physical and mental abuse, thought control, pornography, prostitution and sexual exploitation of children”, starting with background on Berg and his beliefs, and then on to how their parents became involved, severing their ties with all family and the trappings of their previous lives.

The British-born sisters give their respective stories, detailing the mental, physical and sexual abuse carried out upon them, ranging from accounts of three and four year olds being put together for ‘gypsy naps’ where they would be clothed in transparent scarves, paired up and encouraged to behave sexually to a soundtrack of a the story of Abraham and his gypsies, to witnessing from ages as early as five, their father and others making ‘love-videos’ involving speaking in tongues, masturbation, and strip dancing, along with penetrative sex. These tapes would be circulated to all the communes; not as porn, but as ‘glorifying God’s creation’. Aside from sexual abuse, there are recollections of the sound-proofed ‘spanking room’ where children were given ‘Lashings of Love’ until they stopped begging for mercy, and being used as ‘sexual bait’ on the end of The Family’s ever-dangling financial lines, seducing rich businessmen into large donations.

Kristina left at the age of 12, rescued by her mother, and Juliana shortly after, while Celeste, the eldest, took the longest to extricate herself, only when she herself became a mother. Each sister describes post-Family life and adjusting to the outside world, with complete ignorance of the systems of western society, having no proof of existence other than a passport, no formal education and completely different social boundaries. The book also details their reactions and emotions – extreme insomnia, anorexia and depression.

The authors state that the purpose of their memoirs is to raise awareness and garner support for those whose lives have been affected and damaged by the secrecy and mass manipulation of cults. Ex-Family members have established a website in support of those who have left – MovingOn.org. As of 1990, the International Family has been deemed a legally safe environment for children, and all the official policies which regard child abuse have been withdrawn. However, they have admitted to a certain amount of abuse between 1976-1978, whilst those who claim any further abuse are deemed mentally unstable by the organization.

Not Without My Sister is essentially the crystalline capturing of three women’s mass emotional trauma. It could be written off as typical American hyperbole but that is just what it is; the affect of David Berg’s magnification that extended to all areas of the sisters’ life, and stands as a testament and warning against it.

This article was found at:

http://www.sevenglobal.org/
index.php/culture/57-global/
204-not-without-my-sister.html



RELATED ARTICLES


Links to news and blog articles concerning The Family International, formerly known as the Children of God.   


For insider information on The Family International from former members visit these two websites:


http://www.exfamily.org/index.htm


http://www.xfamily.org/index.php/Main_Page


******************

A RESPONSE TO JAMES D. CHANCELLOR'S LIFE IN THE FAMILY: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE CHILDREN OF GOD


Secret letter claims Family International leader caused deadliest air crash in history


Who is the Real Anti-Christian: the Atheist or the Fundamentalist Christian?



Family International a.k.a. Children of God: Once dismissed as 'sex cult,' tiny church launches image makeover


Denied an education in The Family International abuse survivor explains how she wrote her first novel


Novelist describes how she survived childhood of abuse and neglect growing up in The Family International, aka, Children of God


Author's debut novel draws on personal experiences growing up in abusive Children of God cult, a.k.a. The Family International


UK survivor confirms mother's fears about abusive cult The Family International that tried to recruit her teen daughter


Folie a deux: the insane prophets of the Seventh-day Adventists and The Family International
































3 Feb 2008

Family of teen Muslim invited men to rape her

The Sunday Times - UK

February 3, 2008


by Abul Taher

A GIRL of 15 was tricked into a "telephone marriage" ceremony to a Sheffield man with a mental age of five in a ceremony recognised by sharia (Islamic law).

When the girl arrived from Pakistan expecting to meet the handsome man she had been shown in a photograph, she found that he was 40 years old, unemployed and disabled.

To make matters worse, her mother-in-law decided to exploit her attractive looks by forcing her into prostitution.

The family invited men to the family home to rape her before she managed to escape to the police by bolting through the front door. She was taken into care and now lives in a refuge.

The case is highlighted in a report by the Centre for Social Cohesion, which has found that policemen, councillors and taxi drivers are turning a blind eye or even conniving in enforcing the Asian community's strict "moral code" on young women.

The girl's marriage last April was not recognised by the Home Office but was approved by the Islamic Sharia Council in Britain. She is typical of the runaway brides at risk of an "honour killing". According to official figures, 10 to 12 women are murdered in Britain in honour killings each year, but the government has been warned by MPs that this is a serious underestimate. Police often record the deaths as cases of domestic violence, while other girls are driven to suicide or taken away to their family's country of origin and never seen again. Many Asian parents would rather resort to violence against their children than see their reputation tarnished by the perceived dishonour of allowing them to become "westernised".

The report, Crimes of the Community, claims the problem is no longer an issue of first-generation migrants importing attitudes from "back home" but is "indigenous and self-perpetuating" because it is sustained by third and fourth-generation immigrants.

The study reveals the case of Saamiya, a 16-year-old girl from Birmingham, whose parents were so angry when they discovered she had a boyfriend that they flew her to Pakistan and told her they had arranged a marriage two hours before the ceremony.

"During the Islamic ceremony my dad was standing behind me with one hand on my shoulder and with his other hand he had a gun which was pointed at my back so that I didn't say 'no'," Saamiya said.

"To everyone else it looked natural — he was just standing there stroking my shoulder — but just before he had told me that he would shoot me if I didn't go through with it."

She was rescued from Pakistan by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's forced marriage unit and now lives in a refuge in the Midlands, but has been told that she will be murdered by her brothers. The girl told investigators: "I haven't been back home since then. My brothers say that they want to take me back to Pakistan so they can kill me basically. They'll just pay the police there to keep quiet... I don't want to be killed. I'm only 16. I want to live my life."

The think-tank's report comes after Gordon Brown, the prime minister, said last week that he was extremely concerned that too little was being done to prevent honour crimes.

The study criticises the police and schools for failing to take action in a misguided attempt to avoid offending cultural sensibilities.

Karma Nirvana, a support group in Derby, claims it asked local schools last year to display warning posters produced by the forced marriage unit. It said the schools refused.

Derby council last week denied that the group had made the requests, but the prime minister has pledged to investigate reports that the government unit cannot get its advice posters into schools for fear of upsetting local opinion.

According to the report, women who go to the authorities to seek protection have been tracked down through their mobile phones or even by leaks of confidential information from government databases.

Jasvinder Sanghera, director of Karma Nirvana, said that police who find girls who have escaped from their families often simply return them to their parents where they face further abuse, with some Asian officers actually colluding in crimes. Sanghera is taking a case to the Independent Police Complaints Commission of a girl who fled her family but was kidnapped by relatives and held prisoner. She claims that a police officer tipped off the family where the girl was staying.

"Police have a long way to go before they get on top of honour crime. There is a lingering fear among officers of being dubbed racist for probing cultural issues. We've got to shake off that myth," she said.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
tol/news/uk/article3295487.ece

30 Dec 2007

Lessons to be learned when cults make news

LA Daily News - December 29, 2007

By Tina Dupuy, Columnist


I was born into the group the Children of God - or as they are called now, the Family International - a Christian cult that started in the late '60s made up of dropout hippies in Huntington Beach. They went international after the leader was sought for kidnapping and tax evasion. I'm in denial that anyone has heard of them. I pretend like they're obscure. Many will remember the 2005 suicide of their heir apparent, Ricky Rodriguez, right after he killed his childhood nanny, Angela Smith. That was sensational enough to make headlines and inspire a "Law and Order" episode. Recently author Don Lattin released a book about the cult's history titled "Jesus Freaks."

My parents left the sect when I was 5, while my uncle and cousins remained members for the next 20 years. I obsessively follow any press that the group gets. While watching CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" report detailing Rodriguez's death and the group's well-known child sex practices, Cooper said, "Well, that has nothing to do with Jesus!"

This is how the public has always reacted to the COG. It's upsetting and so it's dismissed outright as not actually Christian. It's a quick effort to make sense of it.

That is how we deal with things we don't like in religion. We reject all unpleasant elements as being frauds. Calling for the death of a teacher because she agreed to name a teddy bear Muhammad? That isn't actually Islam. The widespread molestation of boys by priests? That isn't actually Catholicism. The institutionalized and systematic abuse of lower and lowest classes? That isn't actually Hinduism. We even go so far as to tout pre-Columbian religions as being peaceful and passive. If we sidestep all the human sacrificing and war-making, they were.

So if the COG has "nothing to do with Jesus," then what does? The Crusades? The Inquisition? The Conquistadors? The witch hunts? The slave trade? Manifest destiny? The Holocaust? Miscegenation laws? Fred Phelps? Crimes against women of questionable virtue? The entire presidency of George W. Bush?

All have to do with Jesus because they were all justified by Christianity. Just like the COG's prostitution and child abuse was justified.

When you say you are a Christian, you become everything that is or was Christianity. Good, bad or indifferent - it's all Christianity. A drop of water doesn't get to claim autonomy while swimming in the ocean, even if that drop of water happens to be Mormon and running for president.

The alternative is a skewed and inaccurate, albeit a more comfortable, belief in one's faith. It's the new iTestament, where you can customize your beliefs so you can stand out among your friends.

And why is that so bad? What could go wrong if we forget history under the guise of glossing over what's objectionable?

The first answer is that we can repeat it. We can have another pre-emptive invasion in the Middle East just like in the First Crusade. Shudder. If we wear rose-colored glasses and refuse to see the problems, then we will never solve them.

When the faithful aren't aware of the true, unflatteringly lit, warts-and-all history of their religion, its past follies and its vulnerability to mistakes, it leads to the insistence that America is and should be a Christian nation. Our Constitution is a product of the era of The Enlightenment, where the foundation was reason. But we are told that our Constitution "rests on a foundation of faith."

This type of revisionist history causes the line of church and state to be blurred, which is precisely what our Constitution tries to guard against. And there is plenty of evidence that when that happens, it isn't beneficial to the church or to the state.

So when stories of cults and abuse in the name of religion make national news, let's look at the similarities instead of dismissing them because they don't apply to us. See what they can teach us. And be open to the answers.

Tina Dupuy is a stand-up comic and a writer living in Los Angeles. She blogs at insidesocal.com/friendlyfire and sardonicsideshow.com.

http://www.dailynews.com/
editorial/ci_7837464

19 Sept 2007

Should People Be Free To Be Enslaved?: Polygamy, Prostitution, and the "Consenting Adults" Argument

FindLaw - September 19, 2007

by Sherry F. Colb


Recently, Warren S. Jeffs was charged with two felony counts of rape, as an accomplice. Prosecutors allege that Jeff forced a 14-year-old girl to marry her older cousin, who subsequently forced the girl to have intercourse with him.

As the spiritual leader or "prophet" of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ("FLDS"), Jeffs has allegedly been involved in facilitating many more marriages involving underage women, including plural marriages, than the charges against him reflect. As FindLaw columnist Marci Hamilton suggested in her persuasive essay on the subject, Jeffs's arrest could signal a new willingness on the part of our public institutions to prioritize children's rights over absolute religious prerogative. It could also, I would suggest, highlight a dark side to polygamy - one that belies the claims of those who defend it as a "private" matter between consenting adults.

At the same time, as Bob Herbert suggested in a heartbreaking and compelling New York Times column, the practice of prostitution, in Nevada and elsewhere poses a threat to the safety, wellbeing, and freedom of women and young girls who find themselves caught within its web. Such stories likewise call into question the suggestion by prostitution's defenders that the oldest profession ought to be treated as a private affair between consenting adults, inappropriate for criminal sanction.

Polygamy and prostitution are, of course, distinct from each other in an important respect. Fundamentalist Mormons today (and Mormons as a group between 1852 and 1890) have practiced polygamy as a spiritual commandment, one that co-exists with other commandments that prohibit prostitution among the many sexual indulgences that constitute sinful behavior.

Yet polygamy and prostitution also share something in common: Both involve sexual interactions in which adult women (as well as minors) can, at least in theory, give consent. As such, both of these practices have defenders not only among those indifferent to women's rights, but also among people who care deeply about freedom and autonomy for women.

A Right to Be A Plural Wife or a Prostitute?

Those who view plural marriage or polygyny (polygamy involving multiple wives, but never multiple husbands) as a religiously-mandated behavior would likely find insulting the comparison to prostitution. They might point out that prostitution represents the absolute commodification and debasement of sexuality, while plural marriage is a spiritual mission directed by God. In both cases, though, we have a widely condemned and criminalized behavior in which sex is an important component and which proponents claim causes harm to no one because everyone involved has given consent.

Those who favor the legalization of prostitution argue that, like consensual sexual relations between adults of the same sex or of different racial groups, consensual sex between a prostitute and a client is fundamentally private and should not be criminally banned. People go to prostitutes for a variety of reasons, some of which overlap with the motives of those who seek non-compensated sexual congress, and it is not, on this approach, the business of government to interrogate or punish people for voluntarily pursuing their sexual preferences in private.

Those who support the legalization of polygamy make some of the same arguments. Though one could invoke religious freedom on behalf of the FLDS, the U.S. Supreme Court has long approved of prohibitions against marrying more than one person, even in a past era when the constitutional standard for evaluating incursions on religious freedom was more exacting than it is today. Defenders of polygyny thus tend to rely, in addition, on the argument that a woman who wishes to marry a man who already has a wife should have the freedom to do so, as a matter of personal, sexual autonomy.


Some plural wives have even spoken out publicly to say that their lives are, in many respects, better than those of women married to monogamous men, because the burden of caring for a man and his children can be distributed among what amounts to an extended family network of women. Prostitutes sometimes say similar things about their profession - that providing sex for money, for example, frees them from many of the ordinary (and sexist) obligations that a wife might have to her husband. As I outlined in a column several years ago, the two institutions, of marriage and of prostitution, share exist some uncomfortable similarities.

One response to these autonomy-based arguments is to say that prostitution and polygyny are both inherently degrading to women, because they treat women as commodities for sale or for collection. Regardless of what might happen in an individual case, this response contends, the deep meaning of these practices is destructive to women's status, and their criminalization and ultimate abolition is desirable for that reason. In other words, an individual woman should not have the right to consent to exchanges that more broadly damage the ways in which women and girls, as classes, are viewed in society. On this view, moreover, if an individual woman thinks she is benefiting from polygyny or prostitution, she is simply fooling herself and falling prey to misogynist thinking.

This sort of response plainly has a paternalistic flavor to it. It suggests that the adult women who agree to be prostitutes or plural wives have "false consciousness" and do not realize that they are actually being humiliated as women (and accordingly humiliating other women too). Such an argument can be dangerous, because similar arguments can be mobilized against almost anyone who seeks the right to do or say unpopular things. For example, it was not that long ago that women were excluded from professions far more prestigious than prostitution on the ground that - regardless of what women thought or even insisted they wanted to do - such professions were destructive to the natural inclinations and needs of the "fairer sex."

Reality Is Coercive; Freedom Is Illusory

A more potent argument against the legalization of prostitution and polygyny relies on the reality of what takes place, respectively, within these two institutions. As Jon Krakauer powerfully demonstrates in Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, polygyny within the FLDS faith is not just symbolically misogynistic. It is regularly, in practice, a zone of violence and persecution of women, many of whom are quite young and lack the maturity and/or legal capacity to consent to sexual conduct and to marriage.

In a similar vein, Bob Herbert's column, mentioned above, makes and supports the claim that in reality, women in prostitution are not free. Herbert says that "[r]eal-world prostitution, in whatever guise, bears no resemblance at all to the empowerment fantasies of prostitution proponents. I have never seen such vulnerable, powerless women as those in the sex trade, legal or illegal." Herbert had also written an earlier column calling our attention to the harms of prostitution in Las Vegas, and taking issue with Mayor Oscar Goodman for enthusiastically supporting the proliferation of brothels in his city. Mayor Goodman's response to Bob Herbert's exercise of free speech is telling: He said "I'll take a baseball bat and break his head if he ever comes here."

The Slavery Analogy

To draw an (admittedly imperfect) analogy to both prostitution and polygyny, consider slavery. The dominant mythology in the South, during and after the Civil War, included the notion that slaves actually liked being slaves, as the condition supposedly fulfilled their natural destiny. D.W. Griffith's famously controversial film, The Birth of a Nation, displayed this mythology when it depicted a slave woman angrily resisting abolitionists' efforts to terminate her desired (and, implicitly, desirable) status as a slave.

Slavery in this country was not, of course, even nominally consensual. The coercion involved in the practice was legally enshrined and unambiguous. Prostitution and polygyny are quite different in that respect: Neither existing laws nor proponents of legalization seek to protect a man's right to force multiple women into marriage or to sell unwilling women to violent customers.

However, numerous books on the subject, including Doctor Alexa Albert's fascinating story, Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women, attest to the reality that "freedom" within the world of prostitution exists, if at all, mainly at its threshold, that is, when one enters the profession. For many, moreover, the threshold is crossed prior to the age of consent. And once a prostitute, a woman may not be able to exit without facing great obstacles and potential danger to her life. Many ex-plural-wives have had similar things to say about plural marriage within the FLDS faith: they could not leave without facing formidable opposition and obstacles, including the possibility of physical violence.

A Compromise Solution: Criminal Immunity for Prostitutes and Plural Wives

I examined, in a different column, the claim that abortion and euthanasia are only apparently "freedoms" but in fact represent coercive options that, once available, can easily become mandatory. In that column, I rejected this claim, concluding that the evidence does not support it in connection with either abortion or euthanasia. To the extent, however, that the claim has greater resonance in the context of polygyny and prostitution, I would suggest an approach to these practices that mirrors the approach taken by much of the pro-life movement to abortion.

As I discussed in another recent column, many of those who condemn abortion as murder nonetheless support an exemption from criminal penalties for the woman having the abortion. I would propose such a regime, not for abortion, but for prostitution and polygyny: The practices should continue to be unlawful, on this approach. However, prostitutes and plural wives should themselves enjoy an exemption from criminal consequences. As the victims of these practices whose "choice" is (and whose legal responsibility therefore ought to be) absent, prostitutes and plural wives would then have the power to blow the whistle without fear of legal repercussions.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/colb/20070919.html