Whew!  News was breaking out all over today.  Here are some of the items that caught my eye.  Please add others you saw in “Comments”.

❖Iceland shines.  “While much of Europe wallows in recession, the economy of this volcanic island in the mid Atlantic is growing at a clip that has surprised many people, thanks to a currency fall – in which the crown lost almost half its value to the euro – an export and tourism boom as well as growing consumer confidence.” It’s anticipated Iceland’s GDP will grow at 2.6% this year, better even than Sweden.  Iceland did have to impose some austerity measures, but they were carefully phased in. Huge street protests that rocked Iceland during the crisis no doubt spurred a more rational, less painful approach to resolving the country’s fiscal crisis.

❖Heading into the May 6th elections in Greece, “the young leader [Alexis Tsipras] of the Left Coalition party is urging Greeks to vote out austerity – and the two pro-bailout parties imposing it – arguing Europe cannot afford to kick Greece out of the monetary union.”  “The rise of anti-bailout parties ” . . . is being watched with nervousness by European leaders and the IMF . . ..”  By no means does this indicate smooth sailing ahead, though,  as the Greek far-right has become quite active leading up to the elections  “with blunt promises to ‘clean up’ the country”.

❖Headlines proclaim that Spain entered a recession in the 1st quarter of 2012.  This followed on the heels of Standard & Poor’s downgrade late last week, and a record unemployment rate moving toward 25%.  Experts’ prognostications are gloomy, and  opposition to the Austerity measures is mounting, with large street protests.

❖The International Labour Organization has raised the alarm about global unemployment, citing austerity measures and warning that slow economic growth and expanding numbers of people reaching employment age are major factors in an increasing crisis.

❖Student protests in Quebec over proposed increases in student fees have become so effective that Premier Charest has announced the Liberal Party of Quebec will hold its annual convention in Victoriaville, about 105 miles east of Montreal, where the meeting was originally scheduled to be held.

❖YPF, the Argentine oil firm, intends to “keep delivering liquefied natural gas (LNG) to customers” even though the Spanish firm, Repsol, cancelled such deliveries.  Of course, Repsol no longer owns the controlling interest in YPF, Argentina having expropriated 51% its shares, thus “wiping out Repsol’s 57.4% majority stake.”

❖In Mexico, journalist Regina Martinez, who had covered crime for a weekly news magazine for ten years, “was found in her home in Xalapa on Saturday, apparently beaten and strangled to death.”  She’s one of “more than 40 journalists killed or disappeared since President Felipe Calderon took office.”

❖And the search continues for French journalist Romeo Langlois, who has been missing since Saturday after FARC engaged Colombian soldiers who were  attempting  to destroy a cocaine lab.  Apparently Langlois, who was wounded in the arm from gunfire, was taken prisoner by FARC and disappeared with them back into the jungle.

❖Apologies–that’s it for this?  In 2000,  39 fishermen in Colombia’s Magdalena region were gunned down by 60 far-right paramilitaries.  Colombia’s army delayed entering the towns where the killings occurred for four days after the killings had begun.  Today, a Colombian court ordered the country’s security forces to apologize for failing to halt the executions.  The paramilitary leader held responsible for the murders, btw, was sentenced to 47 years in prison but hasn’t spent a single day there since he was “extradited in 2008 to face drug charges in the U.S.” Ah, yes, the War on Drugs.

❖An aide to ex-President Uribe of Colombia has been ordered to testify in a U.S. courtroom about the murders of unionists allegedly by paramilitaries paid by AL-based Drummond mine company.

❖We will reclaim our rights.  Last year in TX, Republicans passed a law which cut off state funds to organizations  “affiliated with abortion providers”.  In response, eight Planned Parenthood clinics that don’t provide abortions sued.  And today, a federal judge ruled “there is sufficient evidence that [the] law banning Planned Parenthood from the [TX Women's Health Program] is unconstitutional [and he] imposed an injunction against enforcing it until he can hear full arguments.”

❖And it’s happening in OK, too!  Today the OK Supreme Court “ruled that an inititiative petition that would grant ‘personhood’ rights to human embryos is unconstitutional.”

❖This is a goody. After he accused the Girl Scouts of being a radical organization promoting teh “homosexual lifestyle” back in February, Indiana state Rep. Bob Morris (Republican–as though anyone couldn’t guess) has received one–count ‘em 1–campaign donation.  Way to go, Bob; please keep up the good work.

❖Imagine: electricity and clean water too–both from a single source!  Eole Water of France is currently testing turbines that not only produce electricity, but also “up to 1,000 liters of clean drinking water per day” as well.  The company is first targeting areas in  Africa, Latin America and Indonesia where water is scarce.

❖A study of Emergency Room treatment of children with abdominal pain has yielded disturbing results.  Not only were black and Hispanic children in the ER for longer periods of time than white children, but  “Black children were 39 percent less likely to receive pain medications than white children”. More research is needed to discover the causes of these discrepancies–including whether black children don’t complain as much because their parents don’t (as documented in various earlier studies).

❖Wisconsin’s beleaguered Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign headquarters is in an undisclosed location.  Not only that, but his schedule is not posted, fundraisers not announced,  his appearances at out-of-state events not published and his main campaign office is a PO box.  All this secrecy is necessary, you see, because of “some of the ridiculousness of the absurd protestors.”  The article didn’t mention whether Walker also has a man-sized safe.

❖Oh, those teasin’ tea-partiers!  “[S]wept into Congress on a wave of anger over government-funded bailouts of banks”, Tea-Partiers have since collected mucho bucks from those same bailed-out banks.  JP Morgan, BofA, Citi, Wells Fargo and, of course, Goldman Sachs “have distributed $169,499 through March 31 to the campaign coffers of the 10 freshman Tea Party-backed lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee . . ..”

❖At last, one of our oldest (and most distant) relatives has been recognized and properly enshrined on the Tree of Life.

Archbishop J. Peter Sartain, ordered to put nuns in their place

A lot of Americans, Catholic or otherwise, were offended, even outraged when the Vatican presumed to lecture America’s nuns about being too devoted to helping the poor and insufficiently obedient in spreading blatantly discriminatory Vatican doctrines against gays, contraception, and the whole question of women’s place in the church.

Catholics were especially shocked at the overtly male attack on the respected nuns and appalled when the Vatican assigned an out-of-touch American Archbishop to start an inquisition attempting to force doctrinal uniformity and silence the organization representing 80 percent of American nuns.

As Lisa’s Dad says in the Eddie Murphy comedy, “this is America, Jack,” and folks here are not fond of foreign rulers, let alone religious potentates, telling us what to believe. It just struck a lot of folks as being not just out of touch but unAmerican.

It’s more than a little hypocritical at a time when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and a prominent American Cardinal have been whining that rules requiring insurance companies to offer coverage for contraception violate their consciences and principles of religious freedom. But here’s the Vatican’s exclusively male hierarchy, led by the group assigned to impose doctrinal uniformity, ordered by the Vatican to start an Inquisition to tell America’s respected symbols of the Catholic faith that they have no right to even discuss, let alone question, the male hierarchy’s discriminatory dogma.

This weekend, two prominent New York columnists used their Sunday columns to send a united message to New York’s Cardinal Timonthy Dolan and the Catholic hierarchy: lay off the nuns unless you want to read a lot of stories about pedophile priests and the massive coverup scandal involving the Bishops and Vatican.

In a column entitled, We Are All Nuns, Nicholas Kristof starts with “nuns rock” but then tells the Vatican to back off:

They were the first feminists, earning Ph.D.’s or working as surgeons long before it was fashionable for women to hold jobs. As managers of hospitals, schools and complex bureaucracies, they were the first female C.E.O.’s.

They are also among the bravest, toughest and most admirable people in the world. In my travels, I’ve seen heroic nuns defy warlords, pimps and bandits. Even as bishops have disgraced the church by covering up the rape of children, nuns have redeemed it with their humble work on behalf of the neediest.

So, Pope Benedict, all I can say is: You are crazy to mess with nuns. . . .

In effect, the Vatican accused the nuns of worrying too much about the poor and not enough about abortion and gay marriage.

What Bible did that come from? Jesus in the Gospels repeatedly talks about poverty and social justice, yet never explicitly mentions either abortion or homosexuality. If you look at who has more closely emulated Jesus’s life, Pope Benedict or your average nun, it’s the nun hands down.

And then he fires this shot across the altar:

At least four petition drives are under way to support the nuns. One on Change.org has gathered 15,000 signatures. The headline for this column comes from an essay by Mary E. Hunt, a Catholic theologian who is developing a proposal for Catholics to redirect some contributions from local parishes to nuns.

“How dare they go after 57,000 dedicated women whose median age is well over 70 and who work tirelessly for a more just world?” Hunt wrote. “How dare the very men who preside over a church in utter disgrace due to sexual misconduct and cover-ups by bishops try to distract from their own problems by creating new ones for women religious?”

We get the same message from Maureen Dowd:

Who thinks it’s cool to bully nuns? While continuing to heal and educate, the community of sisters is aging and dying out because few younger women are willing to make such sacrifices for a church determined to bring women to heel.

Yet the nuns must be yanked into line by the crepuscular, medieval men who run the Catholic Church.

“It’s not terribly unlike the days of yore when they singled out people in the rough days of the Inquisition,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”

How can the church hierarchy be more offended by the nuns’ impassioned advocacy for the poor than by priests’ sordid pedophilia?

Looks like American’s Catholic/media elites are signalling they’ve had enough bullying from the boys. Dowd’s final shot:

Church leaders behave like adolescent boys, blinded by sex. That’s the problem with inquisitors and censors: They become fascinated by what they deplore.

The pope needs what the rest of us got from nuns: a good rap across the knuckles.

Ouch! Your move, Cardinal Dolan.

Last Wednesday was Denim Day, an international campaign to raise awareness of sexual assault and rape.  The campaign was in reaction to the Italian Supreme Court’s ruling overturning a rape conviction based on the fact that the victim of the rape was wearing tight denim jeans.

In his usual vainglorious, hypocritical way, Scott Walker pretended to commemorate the day and National Victims Rights Week by signing into law a bill called the Wisconsin Crime Victim Rights Preservation Act.  The law is designed to protect victims who were maltreated by public officials and stems from the behaviors of Republican Calumet District Attorney Kenneth Kratz, who was sexting a victim of domestic violence and trying to seduce her.

But there was one problem for Walker though.  He forgot to pay for it:

One prosecutor, though, accuses the Walker administration of posturing on the topic. Sheboygan County District Attorney Joe DeCecco says it comes at the same time the state has cut funding for the victim/witness advocate programs around the state.

“This critical program, mandated by state statute to be provided by county government, and which provides safety, security and services to victims and witnesses of crimes, has had its state reimbursement fund cut by some $400,000, leaving counties holding the bag without the means to obtain the necessary funds to cover that gap,” DeCecco stated, referring to the ACT 10 prohibition against any county’s raising property taxes.

“Once again,” DeCecco said, “county budgets providing state-mandated essential services are nothing but pawns in an administration’s game of hypocrisy.”

DeCecco noted that when the state’s victim/witness law took effect in 1979, counties were reimbursed 90% of their costs. Now, he said, the rate has dropped to about 40% even while the size and costs of the programs have grown.

The hypocrisy gets worse when one takes into account that Walker also started a legalized cronyism program, spending more than three quarters of a million dollars, almost twice what he took from the victim witness programs, to reward cronies and lackeys.

But Walker’s hypocrisy grows even more due to the fact that as Milwaukee County Executive he was constantly blaming his budget woes on unfunded mandates and even promised to end such things when he was running for governor.

And for the added twist of the knife, Walker also cut funding to sexual assault programs by 42.5%, a trick I’m sure he learned from Sarah Palin.