DURHAM, North Carolina — A grandmother who authorities say committed sexual acts with her grandson because she believed she needed to get a demon off him insisted she understood rejecting a plea offer could mean more than a decade in prison.

The woman made it clear she’d allow jurors to give thumbs up or down on what she did and didn’t do with her own child’s child. Toni Stowers-Moore wants a trial.

Addressing concern about the defendant’s sanity, Superior Court Judge Donald Stephens on Thursday ruled Stowers-Moore is competent to stand trial based on the findings of a certified forensic examiner. That trial is expected to start Monday.

Stowers-Moore, 52, is charged with statutory rape/sex offense in which the defendant is six years older than the victim, incest with a child and sexual battery. The crimes allegedly occurred between July 28, 2008 and Aug. 1, 2008, Durham Police Department spokeswoman Kammie Michael said. Stowers-Moore was arrested Aug. 28, 2008 for allegedly committing sexual acts on her grandson, who at the time was 15.

But the defendant, a former Durham Public Schools teacher assistant, said she was carrying out her religious duty by both having sex with and masturbating her grandson, Durham County District Attorney Tracey Cline said. According to Stowers-Moore, her grandson had a sexual demon on him, so, by having sexual relations with him, she sacrificed her own body in order to save innocent people from his potential advances, the prosecutor told the judge.

Read More in the Herald-Sun

Some 1,200 elementary school children in Anyang City, south of Seoul, will receive the beepers in a test run from October.

Authorities will then consider adopting the system nationwide, the Ministry of Public Administration and Security said.

Each child will be able to use their matchbox-sized beeper, fitted with GPS (global positioning device) technology, to activate any nearby cameras and alert parents and police via mobile phone.

The government has strengthened monitoring of elementary schools after several crimes against children.

Police last month arrested a 44-year-old habitual sex offender for kidnapping an eight-year-old girl at her school in southern Seoul and raping her.

The National Police Agency has announced a plan to launch investigative units nationwide to tackle such crimes and declared “war” on child molesters.

Pinheiros, Brazil — Law enforcement agents in Brazil’s northeastern town of Pinheiros trekked and canoed for nearly two hours through rugged terrain to arrest a 54-year-old man accused of fathering eight children with his two eldest daughters, a top regional investigator said.

Pinheiros Regional Police Chief Laura Amelia Barbosa told CNN that Jose Agostinho Bispo Pereira — who was arrested Thursday after complaints that he sexually abused his 29-year-old daughter, whom he held captive — fathered yet another child with his eldest daughter.

“He fathered seven children with his 29-year-old daughter and one with his 31-year-old,” Barbosa said.

The seven children born from his 29-year-old daughter range in age from 2 months old to 12 years, she said.

“We just learned that he fathered a child with his 31-year-old daughter. … The 14-year-old is right here beside me,” Barbosa said in a phone interview with CNN.

“We also confirmed that two other of his children/grandchildren were sexually abused,” she said.

Pereira was arrested “in flagrante,” Barbosa said, in the remote village of Experimento. There, police interrogated Pereira and his 29-year-old daughter, with whom he has had sex since she was 12, police said.

“She is still very fond of him,” Barbosa said of the 29-year-old. The 31-year-old managed to escape, she said.

During an interview with CNN affiliate Record TV on Thursday, Pereira said he knew he was committing a crime by molesting his daughters.

“It is a crime. I know that it is a crime,” Pereira said. “But she was committing the crime as well, wasn’t she? Then, I had to do it.”

“A farmer only does things because the other consents, because if the other doesn’t consent, the person doesn’t do (it),” he added…

[continues at CNN]

COLOGNE, Germany — A German cartoon mocking the Catholic Church has sparked holy outrage among believers here who say it incites hatred against the Pope and the Catholic faith.

The caricature, published in the Good Friday edition of satire magazine Titanic, shows a priest apparently having oral sex with a crucifix of Jesus on the cross.

The crucifix cartoon is a barbed commentary on recent revelations that 250 people in Germany were sexual abused at Church-run schools in the past decades. The scandal has shaken the German Church. A recent poll said Germans’ trust in the Catholic Church had fallen to 17% from 29% in late January and approval ratings for Pope Benedict have dropped from 38% to 24%.

The German Press Council reported that some 100 formal complaints have been filed since the magazine came out, a level of protest not seen since 2006, when German newspaper Die Welt reprinted the infamous Danish Mohammed cartoons.

Two criminal complaints have also been filed against the cartoonist and the editors of Titanic, claiming the picture slanders their religion. The state prosecutors office in Frankfurt, where Titanic is based, said it would decide next week whether to begin an investigation against the magazine.

Read More in the Hollywood Reporter

LOS ANGELES — Four years after a California priest and convicted child molester asked to be defrocked, his bishop pleaded with the future Pope Benedict XVI to remove the man from the priesthood. Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger replied, urging caution.”

Consider the good of the Universal Church,” Ratzinger wrote in a 1985 letter to Oakland Bishop John Cummins. “It is necessary for this Congregation to submit incidents of this sort to very careful consideration, which necessitates a longer period of time.”

Two more years would pass before the Vatican acted on the Rev. Stephen Kiesle’s request to leave.

A copy of the letter, typewritten in Latin and signed by Ratzinger, was obtained by The Associated Press. It constitutes the strongest challenge yet to the Vatican’s insistence that Benedict played no role in blocking the removal of pedophile priests during his years as head of the Catholic Church’s doctrinal watchdog office.

Read More on the AP

Well may the pope defy “the petty gossip of dominant opinion”. But the Holy See can no longer ignore international law, which now counts the widespread or systematic sexual abuse of children as a crime against humanity. The anomalous claim of the Vatican to be a state — and of the pope to be a head of state and hence immune from legal action — cannot stand up to scrutiny.

The truly shocking finding of Judge Murphy’s commission in Ireland was not merely that sexual abuse was “endemic” in boys’ institutions but that the church hierarchy protected the perpetrators and, despite knowledge of their propensity to reoffend, allowed them to take up new positions teaching other children after their victims had been sworn to secrecy.

This conduct, of course, amounted to the criminal offence of aiding and abetting sex with minors. In legal actions against Catholic archdioceses in the US it has been alleged that the same conduct reflected Vatican policy as approved by Cardinal Ratzinger (as the pope then was) as late as November 2002. Sexual assaults were regarded as sins that were subject to church tribunals, and guilty priests were sent on a “pious pilgrimage” while oaths of confidentiality were extracted from their victims.

Read More in the Guardian

The Catholic Church in Germany has been shaken in recent days by revelations of a series of sexual abuse cases. Close to 100 priests and members of the laity have been suspected of abuse in recent years. After years of suppression, the wall of silence appears to be crumbling.

This is what it looks like, the document of a conspiracy: 24 pages, with appendix, in Latin, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican. A “norma interna,” or confidential set of guidelines for all bishops, who were required to keep it a secret for all eternity, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

The guidelines, issued in the year of our Lord 1962, address a sensitive subject: sex in the confessional. The Vatican doesn’t put it quite that directly, preferring to use more guarded terminology to describe what happens when a priest leads a member of his flock astray before, during or after the confession — in other words, when he provokes a penitent “toward impure and obscene matters” through “words or signs or nods of the head (or) by touch.”

Read More: SPIEGEL ONLINE

Reuters report:

WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland on Friday approved a law making chemical castration mandatory for pedophiles in some cases, sparking criticism from human rights groups.

Under the law, sponsored by Poland’s center-right government, pedophiles convicted of raping children under the age of 15 years or a close relative would have to undergo chemical therapy on their release from prison.

“The purpose of this action is to improve the mental health of the convict, to lower his libido and thereby to reduce the risk of another crime being committed by the same person,” the government said in a statement.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said late last year he wanted obligatory castration for pedophiles, whom he branded ‘degenerates’. Tusk said he did not believe “one can use the term ‘human’ for such individuals, such creatures.”

“Therefore I don’t think protection of human rights should refer to these kind of events,” Tusk also said.