http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2010/07/exclusive-audio-another-mel-gibson-slur-caught-tape-crazed-rage-listen-it-here

Church leaders are vowing to rebuild the iconic “King of Kings” statue — also dubbed “Touchdown Jesus” — which alone was valued at $300,000.

Monroe Fire Capt. Richard Mascarella said the other $400,000 in damage was to the amphitheater when flames from the sculpture spread to the back wall and roof.

“The heat coming off the statue singed the entire back wall of the amphitheater and burned through it,” Mascarella said. “Portions of the roof are destroyed, so they will have to replace a large part of it.”

A pond surrounding the statue that used to be full of fish is now filled with remnants of the structure, made of fiber glass and foam. All the fish are either dead or dying, Mascarella said.

Church leaders also plan to repair the amphitheater and the pond and the structures were all insured. Insurance adjusters were expected at the site Tuesday afternoon.

The fire is not suspicious. It was ignited about 11:15 p.m. Monday during a severe thunderstorm that spawned lightning across the Greater Cincinnati region, Mascarella said.

John Centers, a Monroe assistant fire chief who lives about a mile from the church, said he was outside on his deck watching Monday night’s storm when he saw a very bright flash of lightning accompanied by loud thunderclap. At first, he didn’t think much of it, “because there had already been so many ground strikes that night,” Centers said. But he could tell that the lightning had struck fairly close by and “it was a very significant ground strike.”

“The pattern of light flashed all the way to the ground,” and was in the general direction of the church, Centers said.

He soon realized that must have been the lightning that struck the statue because within four minutes of his witnessing the strike, firefighters were being called to the blazing statue.

And it burned quickly: “It burned to the ground. The whole statue is gone,” said Kim Peace, a police dispatcher.

Authorities on Tuesday were urging motorists to resist the temptation to stop on Interstate 75 and snap photos, fearing that drivers pulling on and off the berm could cause crashes.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol is issuing warnings to those who stop — and will soon start writing citations, a dispatcher for the patrol’s Lebanon post said.

The number of warnings written so far was not immediately available.

The large “King of Kings” statue was a Butler County landmark since it was erected in 2004 outside Solid Rock Church, 904 N. Union Rd., along northbound Interstate 75 in Monroe just north of the Ohio 63 exit.

Fire crews were called to the church at 11:15 p.m. after several people phoned 911 to report the blaze as a severe thunderstorm swept through Greater Cincinnati, producing a spectacular lightning show, Peace said.

“The lightning was just amazing,” she said, wryly adding: “It was a lot of fun in here last night.”

When fire crews arrived, they found the statue fully involved and an adjacent amphitheater burning. The fire extended into the attic of the amphitheater, destroyed equipment, before fire crews contained it, Peace said.

No one was injured.

There were grounding devices built into the structure, Neu said.

“Everything around the structure and even the structure itself has lightning resistors and grounding rods,” but he added that the unpredictable nature of lightning doesn’t make those devices entirely effective.

The sculpture stretches 40 feet wide at the base. It was made of plastic form and fiberglass over a steel frame. The frame is the only thing visible this morning.

According to the evangelical church’s website, there are about 4,000 members. The church was founded by former horse trader Lawrence and Darlene Bishop of Middletown.

(Reuters) – Pope Benedict on Saturday accepted the resignation of a German bishop who has been accused of sexually abusing minors, the latest in a string of Roman Catholic prelates forced to resign over an abuse scandal.

A Vatican statement said the pope agreed Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg in Bavaria should step down. He became the first bishop to quit in the pontiff’s native Germany over the child abuse scandal that has rocked the Church in several European countries and the United States.

In recent weeks, a Belgian bishop resigned after admitting he had sexually abused a boy and three Irish bishops quit over their handling of sexual abuse cases.

German prosecutors and church officials said on Friday authorities were investigating accusations of sexual abuse by Mixa, who had already offered to step down after being accused of hitting children.

A spokesman for the diocese of Eichstaett said the accusations referred to a time between 1996 and 2000 when Mixa was bishop of Eichstaett, which like Augsburg is in predominantly Catholic Bavaria.

The Augsburg diocese said it had provided information to prosecutors after a meticulous examination of the accusations.

The Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper reported, without naming its sources, that Mixa was accused of abusing a boy while bishop of Eichstaett.

Mixa’s lawyer, Gerhard Decker, has denied the accusations against the 69-year old bishop, who also faces allegations of financial misconduct, and said Mixa would work with prosecutors to clear up the matter.

Mixa wrote to the pope in April to offer his resignation, after denying for weeks that he had hit children in the 1970s and 1980s before later admitting he had slapped them. Some victims say he hit them with full force in the face.

The accusations against Mixa revealed on Friday were the first made of sexual abuse. He had previously asked for forgiveness from those he says he may have slighted.

A survey published last month found a quarter of Germany’s Catholics were considering leaving the church over the abuse allegations, the greatest crisis in Benedict’s five-year pontificate.

Belgian bishops concluded a week-long visit to the Vatican on Saturday with a rare press conference in which they spoke of the pain caused by the scandal which led to the resignation last month of the bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe.

He stepped down after admitting he had sexually abused a boy when in charge of the diocese of Bruges, the first such case to be made public in Belgium — although a church commission said it was investigating about 20 other allegations of sex abuse.

The Pope briefly referred to the case in his speech to the Belgian bishops, saying their church had been “tested by sin.”

A radical Islamic website is warning the creators of “South Park” that they could face violent retribution for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit during an episode broadcast on Comedy Central last week.

Pope Benedict XVI briefly nodded off in front of tens of thousands of people during an outdoor mass in Malta’s capital, Valletta.

The Pope slumped forward around halfway through the mass, which was held just outside the historic stone walls encircling the city.

He had to be roused by the Vatican’s master of ceremonies, Bishop Guido Marini, who was sitting next to him and gently nudged him.

“It was just for a few seconds,” said an onlooker. “He slumped forward onto his chest.”

Although the pontiff spent only 26 hours in Malta after flying in from Rome on Saturday, he had a busy and tiring schedule of events – meeting dignitaries and Malta’s president, waving to crowds from his “Pope-mobile” and expressing his sorrow to a group of sex abuse victims.

But his apparent exhaustion is also a reflection of his age – he turned 83 on Friday.

The Vatican announced recently that the Pope will not take his usual holiday in northern Italy this summer because officials do not want to over-tax him.

His health is generally good but he takes medication for a cardiovascular condition and last summer slipped and fell in his bedroom.

The Vatican had to allay fears over the his health in December after it was announced that he would celebrate Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve two hours earlier than normal.

The decision was taken in order to “alleviate a little the Pope’s tiredness”, said the Vatican’s official spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi.

VATICAN CITY – Gay groups and politicians condemned Pope Benedict’s number two on Wednesday for calling homosexuality a “pathology” and linking it directly to sexual abuse of children.

The comments made by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone during a visit to Chile, and the controversy they caused, were splashed on mainstream Italian newspapers on Wednesday.

The French foreign ministry and some Catholic blogs that support the pope also condemned the cardinal’s remarks.

As the scandal over sexual abuse of children by priests has spread, some in the Catholic Church have called for a review of the Church’s rule that prohibits priests from marrying, saying marriage would allow priests to enjoy a healthy sex life.

Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, who is sometimes called the “deputy pope,” told a news conference in Santiago on Monday:

“Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and paedophilia, but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia.”

“This pathology is one that touches all categories of people, and priests to a lesser degree in percentage terms,” he said. “The behaviour of the priests in this case, the negative behaviour, is very serious, is scandalous.”

Gay rights activists reacted with derision and outrage.

“This is a scientific absurdity. The World Health Organization calls homosexuality a variation of human behaviour. It is paedopholia that is a pathology, a crime, not homosexuality,” said Franco Grillini, a former parliamentarian who was at the vanguard of Italy’s gay rights movement.

“Because they have their own problems with the abuse crisis and don’t know how to handle it, they are trying to pass their ‘cross’ from their shoulders on to ours,” Grillini told Reuters.

CATHOLIC BLOG CRITICISES

The French foreign ministry called it an “unacceptable linkage that we condemn”.

Some pro-Vatican Catholic blogs said more controversy was the last thing the Vatican needed.

“Paedophilia and homosexuality: Bertone trips up — again — on gays,” read a post in the Italian-language “Blog of the Friends of Pope Ratzinger.”

It said the pope might now have to “clean up the mess made by his right-hand man”.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi issued a statement in which he tried to douse the fire caused by the latest mishap.

He said Church leaders were not trying to make “general affirmations of a specific psychological nature” and offered Church statistics that showed that two-thirds of incidents of abuse of adolescents by priests involved homosexual priests.

A front-page editorial in Rome’s left-leaning La Repubblica newspaper titled “The Confusion in the Church” said Bertone’s comments would end up causing the Church more “harm to itself, not homosexuals”.

Bertone was also criticized by Alessandra Mussolini, a right-wing parliamentarian whose grandfather, wartime Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, sent gays into internal exile.

“You can’t link sexual orientation to paedophilia . . . this link risks becoming dangerously misleading for the protection of children,” Mussolini said.

ArciLesbica, Italy’s main lesbian rights group, accused the Vatican of using “violent and deceptive statements” to divert attention from its abuse scandal and said Italian parents should consider removing their children from Church-run institutions.

The pope did not make any direct reference to the crisis facing the Church during his weekly general audience.

He may address the issue when he visits Malta this weekend. Ten Maltese men who are suing three priests for alleged child abuse have requested a private meeting with the pope.

ST. LOUIS (AP) – Two prayer services will be held at St. Louis gas stations to thank God for lower fuel prices and to ask that they continue to drop. Darrell Alexander, Midwest co-chair of the Pray at the Pump movement, says prayer gatherings will be held Monday afternoon and evening at a Mobil station west of downtown St. Louis.

Participants say they plan to buy gas, pray and then sing “We Shall Overcome” with a new verse, “We’ll have lower gas prices.”

An activist from the Washington D.C. area, Rocky Twyman, started the effort, saying if politicians couldn’t lower gas prices, it was time to ask God to intervene.

The group thinks the prayer is helping, saying prices are starting to fall below $4 a gallon.

Posted on: 2008-07-29 00:53:41

Any time Australia’s biggest city hosts a major event — from the 2003 Rugby World Cup to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit last year — it is boomtime for the sex industry, insiders say.

And with 225,000 foreign and Australian pilgrims expected in Sydney for six-days of events celebrating the Catholic faith from July 15-20, they expect World Youth Day to be no different.

Sydney brothel Xclusive is putting on extra workers to provide sexual favours to lonely tourists and Sydneysiders during event.

“We will get a lot of tourists, pilgrims and we will still get the curious,” a spokeswoman for the Bondi Junction bordello told AFP.

“The World Council of Churches, when they had their congress in Canberra back in the 1990s, that was the best business period ever.

“Obviously we’re not promoting it at your traditional Catholic community and it’s unlikely we will get priests through. But there’ll be lots of tourists in town and there’ll be lots of people in town.”

Posted on: 2008-07-29 00:52:40

Posted on: 2008-01-20 00:08:38

Besides writing to the US embassy in New Delhi, the state authorities also wrote to the federal Home Minister Shivraj Patil urging him to take up the issue with the US government, the Times of India daily reported.

“I, on the behalf of the government of Orissa, request you to take up the issue with the American governemnt for taking action against the website owner to refrain the company from such unholy activities,” Orissa’s law minister BB Harichandan said in his letter.

Posted on: 2007-12-22 14:31:36