Senior Women Web

Author: SeniorWomenWeb

  • Vatican’s Guide to Understanding Basic CDF Procedures concerning Sexual Abuse Allegations

    The Vatican Website has posted a Guide to Understanding Basic CDF Procedures Concerning Sexual Abuse Allegations; the Guide is found under Abuse of Minors; the Church’s Response. (CDF is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith).

    The applicable law is the Motu Proprio Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela (MP SST) of 30 April 2001 together with the 1983 Code of Canon Law. This is an introductory guide which may be helpful to lay persons and non-canonists.

    A:  Preliminary Procedures

    The local diocese investigates every allegation of sexual abuse of a minor by a cleric.

    If the allegation has a semblance of truth the case is referred to the CDF.  The local bishop transmits all the necessary information to the CDF and expresses his opinion on the procedures to be followed and the measures to be adopted in the short and long term.

    Civil law concerning reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed.

    During the preliminary stage and until the case is concluded, the bishop may impose precautionary measures to safeguard the community, including the victims. Indeed, the local bishop always retains power to protect children by restricting the activities of any priest in his diocese.  This is part of his ordinary authority, which he is encouraged to exercise to whatever extent is necessary to assure that children do not come to harm, and this power can be exercised at the bishop’s discretion before, during and after any canonical proceeding.

    B: Procedures authorized by the CDF

    The CDF studies the case presented by the local bishop and also asks for supplementary information where necessary.

    The CDF has a number of options:

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  • Gary Winograd Photographs: Women Are Beautiful

    Sometimes it is difficult to find an expansive collection of any photographer’s work available for viewing on the Web. In this case we found an extensive digital collection of 131 of Gary Winograd’s (1928-1984) photographic prints at New York’s Museum of Modern Art website, a museum well known for its photography department.* The photos online also include another portfolio entitled Big Shots. Perhaps one of the best known of his photos is that of Marilyn Monroe ‘over the grating’ with her skirt billowing during the shooting of The Seven Year Itch.

    Women are Beautiful, a separate exhibit based on his 1975 book of the same name is being shown at Tampa Museum in Florida, which owns the collection of prints and provide the biographical introduction that follows:

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  • An Excerpt From Digging Up The Dead; A History of Notable American Reburials

    Michael Kammen’s new book from the University of Chicago Press explores the grave sites, among others, of Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis (below)  and  Abraham Lincoln.

    “Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America from February 1861 until its collapse in April 1865, died in New Orleans on December 6, 1889, at the age of eighty-one. Five days later, following a frenzy of local and regional arrangements, Confederate veterans and many others packed an immense procession that accompanied the body to Metairie Cemetery for what turned out to be temporary burial in a vault guarded round the clock, awaiting a decision about the erstwhile CSA president’s permanent interment. Bells tolled from every church tower in New Orleans to accompany the long and solemn parade to Metairie. The issue of his final resting place, however, had actually begun on the very day that Davis died and swiftly became what we now call a’hot button issue.’ Although his reputation revived during the 1880s, he had been reviled by white Southerners after the Confederacy fell and he fled from Richmond only to be apprehended by Federal troops in Georgia. During his lingering last illness he wisely said to his wife, Varina, ‘You must take the responsibility of deciding this question, I cannot — I foresee [that] a great deal of feeling about it will arise when I am dead.’ “

    “Davis understood the delicate situation all too well. Southern press coverage of his death signaled swelling admiration and pride in the former leader — utterly inconceivable less than a generation earlier, at the time of unbearable defeat. Six Southern cities each hoped to ‘host’ the body into eternity, above all Montgomery, Alabama, where Davis had reluctantly assumed the presidency, and they all intensively lobbied the quickly created Jefferson Davis Memorial Association (JDMA). The decision belonged entirely to Varina and her children, however, and they waited more than eighteen months before choosing a prime site at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, where the Davises had lived for four years and where a great many honored Southern dead already lay buried. The civic leaders of New Orleans, feeling bitter disappointment at surrendering a prized symbol of states’ rights and resistance to Northern aggression, decided to build a monumental memorial to Davis that would equal in scale the ones already erected to Abraham Lincoln in Springfield and just recently conceived for Ulysses S. Grant in New York City. Their ambition, however, wildly exceeded their collective or potential purse.”

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  • Too Good to Miss: Ruffino Lumina Pinot Grigio 2009

    Sharon Kapnick writes:  Delicious Pinot Grigios do exist, and I’m always surprised and delighted when I happen upon one, which I did recently. Pair it with soft shell crabs, grilled fish, pasta primavera, grilled chicken, and ethnic dishes including Mexican enchiladas, Greek dolmas and Thai green curries.

  • The Wellcome Collection; A Destination for the Incurably Curious

    “Henry Wellcome had an early interest in medicine and marketing. The first product he advertised was ‘invisible ink’ (just lemon juice in fact). In 1880, he joined his college friend Silas Burroughs in setting up a pharmaceutical company, Burroughs Wellcome & Co. They were one of the first to introduce medicine in tablet form under the 1884 trademark ‘Tabloid’; previously medicines had been sold as powders or liquids.”

    “When Burroughs died in 1895, the company flourished under Sir Henry’s leadership. He went on to establish world-class medical research laboratories and amassed the world’s most impressive collections relating to medicine and health through the ages.”

    One of the Wellcome Collection exhibits is Madness and Modernity:

    Vienna at the turn of the 20th century was one of Europe’s leading centres for modernism. This was a tumultuous period of transition in which the arts, literature, architecture and philosophy blossomed. A time when Sigmund Freud, among others, pioneered new ideas about the self and psychiatry.

    Vienna in 1900 was a city obsessed with the mind. Political unrest had left the Viennese with an overwhelming sense that they were living in ‘nervous times’. Anxieties about mental health were allied to fears about the modern city; this context helped to foster progress in psychiatric care and innovation.

    This multidisciplinary exhibition presented the range of ways madness and art interacted in Vienna, from designs for utopian psychiatric spaces to the drawings of patients confined in them. It explored the influence of psychiatry on early modernism and encouraged us to reflect on how we deal with mental illness 100 years on.

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  • Stop the Harassment

    Rose Mula writes:  My mailbox isn’t the only victim of these extortionists; they have hijacked my telephone. Even though I enrolled in a “Do Not Call” registry, I get telemarketing offers for no-obligation goodies … The calls stopped only when I threatened a harassment suit.

  • Exploded City, From the Future

    exploded cityWe attended an exhibit at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, an installation by artist Ahmet Öğüt.

    This city is from the future. It’s called The Exploded City. Those who live there have emigrated from faraway lands, with dreams of traveling to the future. When they realized that there was no finding the future, they decided to build this city. It is said that hundreds of different languages, such as Otesian, Bosnian, Albanian, Kurdish, Castilian, Irish, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Anglo-Frisian, and other Saami, Altaic, and Slavic languages are spoken in this city. These people who don’t speak each other’s language, instead of creating a lingua franca, have learned to communicate through looking into one another’s eyes. Not before long, they taught me this eye language as well. In this city, all the other remaining languages are like a constant background noise. They actually resemble the besieging of the city by various types of birds. — Ahmet Öğüt

    Exploded City’s Buildings and Vehicles:
    Madimak Hotel, Sivas, July 2 1993 
    Europa Hotel, Belfast, 1972-1994 
    HSBC Bank, Istanbul, November 20 2003 
    Ferhadija Mosque, Banja Luca, May 7 1993 
    Mostar Bridge, Mostar, November 9 1993 
    Water Tower, Vukovar, August-November 1991 
    Future TV station building, Beirut, May10 2008 
    National Library, Sarajevo, August 25-26 1992 
    Post office, Prishtina, April 8 1999 
    Tikrit Museum, Tikrit, March 27 2003 
    Beslan School, North Osetya-Alania, September 1-2-3 2004 
    Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma, April 19 1995 
    Paddy’s Pub, Bali, October 12 2002 
    Maxim Restaurant, Hayfa, September 4 2003 
    Palestine Authority Foreign Ministry, Gaza, July 16 2006 
    Al Mamoon Exchange and Telecommunications Center, Baghdad, July 2006 
    Club El Nogal, Bogota, February 7 2003 
    Trident-Oberoi Hotel, Mumbai, November 27 2008 
    United Nations Building, Algiers, December 11 2007 
    Wedding house, Kakaral July 1st 2002; Kandahar, November 6 2008 
    Islamic University of Gaza, December 29 2008 
    Clinic Center Dragisa Misovic, Belgrade, May 20 1999 
    Stagecoach Bus 30, London, July 7 2005 
    Commuter Train, Madrid, March 11 2004 
    Renault 19, Semdinli, November 9 2005 
    Truck Ford D1210, Susurluk, November 3 1996

    Ahmet Ög˘üt’s Exploded City (2009) envisions an imaginary metropolis comprising real buildings, monuments, and vehicles from across the world. Plucked from their original contexts in Turkey or Ireland, Yugoslavia or Great Britain, India or the United States, Lebanon or Spain, they coalesce as a single urban center in an installation of scale models and in a text that weaves each site together through experiential description.

    In this, the work directly channels Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a book of fantastical descriptions of cities visited by the explorer Marco Polo. Polo’s narrations are barters of the imagination given to the emperor Kublai Khan, of invisible cities, seen only by Polo during his travels, and willed into existence for Khan through narration. In great detail, language allows Polo to supersede the logic and limitations of architecture and physics and to imagine cities whose logic is borne not through function but through imagination. Similarly, Ög˘üt’s Exploded City is an impossibility —buildings separated by distance and time made into a whole that defies reality — placeless and timeless.

    8;üt’s description the city is a vibrant metropolis, full of life, with one of everything and three hotels. There is a mosque and a library, a bar and a club, a museum and a university, a federal building and a bank; there is music and drinking and dancing and a wedding. But as these mundane activities unfold, they do so in and around projections into the future of more unusual circumstances — a hotel that will burn to the ground, a wedding that will be bombed, a school that will be raided, a bus that will explode. And the logic of this city becomes apparent, where these sites of terrorism and violence have been reconstructed together in the moments before their devastation.

    These questions of visibility and connection, of what and where in the world becomes visible to us and how, which sites across the world can be linked together, is also implied in Exploded City’s conjuring of buildings in their pristine state. When we speak of the whole world, as Exploded City does, we cannot speak of collective consciousness without some self-consciousness. But acts of terrorism and violence are episodes in which the connections between places, between politics and daily life, between the individual and the larger world, nationality and war, are thrown into sharp relief. And we are made to see these places that for most of us never existed in our consciousness, and how they connect to ourselves, in concrete terms of war or policy and in abstract terms of fear and empathy. In these moments, the variables of distance, speed, and time that keep us from knowing these places through our own experience collapse.

    Resource:  Enjoy diversity and travel; hotel coupons are available.

  • The Older Unemployed Worker and The Job Market

    The Employee Benefit Research Institute produced a new report written by Emily Sok about those over 55 who are looking for jobs:

    The unemployment rate for persons aged 55 years and older has increased sharply since the beginning of the recession in December 2007. The jobless rate among older workers was 7.1 percent (seasonally adjusted) in February 2010, just shy of the record-high level of 7.2 percent in December 2009.  At the same time, the labor force participation rate — the proportion of the population that is either employed or looking for work — for this group rose during much of the recession, before leveling off in recent months.

    Although the rate of unemployment among older workers is lower than that for their younger counterparts, older persons who do become unemployed spend more time searching for work. In February 2010, workers aged 55 years and older had an average duration of joblessness of 35.5 weeks (not seasonally adjusted), compared with 23.3 weeks for those aged 16 to 24 years and 30.3 weeks for those aged 25 to 54 years. The longer duration of unemployment among older workers also is reflected in a higher proportion of the unemployed who have been jobless for extended periods. For example, nearly half (49.1 percent) of older jobseekers had been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer in February 2010, compared with 28.5 percent of workers aged 16 to 24 years and 41.3 percent of workers aged 25 to 54 years.

    Still, rising unemployment rates have not kept older workers from participating in the job market. In fact, the labor force participation rate for persons aged 55 years and older rose during much of the recession, before flattening out recently. This pattern of rising labor force participation for older workers has occurred for both men and women. In contrast, labor force participation rates for other age groups — especially youths — have declined since the recession began.

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  • Shopping in the UK; The Carrier Company

    With a  motto of  “Made To Be Used and Built to Last”,  this North Norfolk English company makes smocks, raincapes and sleeveless vests (jerkins), canvas bags, fire blowers and log carriers.  Owner Tina Guillory works from her 17th century house making such products as the traditional Norfolk Slop, a windproof sailcloth smock; popular with painters, gardeners and woodworkers. The clothing items are for both men and women such as  a ladies and man’s Norfolk jacket style and various hat choices. Children’s smocks come in sizes 2-4.

    Rain capes are light, comfortable and waterproof; they’re also breathable and would keep you cool in the summer but protect from cold winter winds, too. Hoods are lined in lightweight wool tartan or check.

    Some of the garden items the Carrier Company stocks include a flower arranger carrier, garden kneelers, tool belts, aprons, vegetable storage sacks, canvas bags for keeping caught fish and garden cushions. There are also unstuffed dog beds.

    The  order will usually be dispatched within a week and you have the option to pay in Pounds, US Dollars or Euros.

     

  • Facebook Famine Ends with Celebration of Empty Calories

    Nichola Gutgold writes, After a few months of steady Facebook communication you plan to meet face to face, only to discover that the connection that Facebook facilitated doesn’t translate to your in person relationship. You’ve seen the tee-shirt: “You were more fun on Facebook”