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Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State University assistant football coach charged with child sex abuse, said yesterday he is not a paedophile, but admitted he showered with young boys.
In a full-court media press across two television networks, Sandusky and his attorney, Joe Amendola, said they have answers for all 40 charges that Pennsylvania prosecutors have levelled.
“I am innocent of those charges,” Sandusky (picture) told NBC’s Bob Costas in a telephone interview with the television network yesterday.
The priest was transferred to the diocese in 1980 from Essen where he had been reportedly accused of abusing a young boy
A priest housed with the current pope's approval in 1980 while under suspicion of paedophilia and convicted six years later has been suspended from duty, the pontiff's former diocese said.
The priest, named only as Peter H., 62, "was banned from working with children and young people. He broke this restriction," the diocese of Munich and Freising in southern Germany said in a statement late Monday.
There were no further allegations of abuse, the statement added.
Josef Obermaier, a senior priest charged with overseeing Peter H., also resigned.
The priest was transferred to the diocese in 1980 from the western city of Essen where he had been reportedly accused of abusing an 11-year-old boy.
"I was 11 ... He gave me Bacardi and Coke, then he took off his trousers and forced me into oral sex," the Bild mass-circulation daily quoted the alleged victim, Wilfried Fesselmann, now 41, as saying.
The archbishop of Munich and Freising at the time, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, approved giving the priest Church housing for "therapy", the diocese said on Friday.
Two years later, by which time the pope had been transferred to the Vatican, H. was given pastoral duties in a Bavarian town and in 1986 was given a suspended jail sentence for sexually abusing children.
But he remained within the Church.
Pope Benedict has spoken out several times since the start of his papacy in 2005 on child sex abuse, describing it last month as a "heinous crime" and a "grave sin".
But he has come under fire because he has not yet commented directly on his native Germany, critics say.
Since the first revelations of abuse dating back to the 1970s and 1980s at an elite Jesuit school in Berlin emerged in January, former victims have alleged abuse at two-thirds of Germany's 27 dioceses.
In a further revelation, a monastery in St Ottilien in southern Germany acknowledged on Monday that several monks, now dead, had admitted to acts of abuse in the 1960s. It appealed for victims to come forward.
Victims have been "relieved and even healed when their case is finally discussed, even decades after the abuse and decades of painful silence," the monastery said.
Pope Benedict told Rome's Lutheran congregation on Sunday that Protestants and Roman Catholics should be thankful for all the unity achieved among Christians rather than complain about the slow pace of dialogue.
Addressing about 350 Lutherans in their small church, Benedict said both sides had accused each other of slowing down the ecumenical movement, but that only God, not humans, could create true unity.
The movement has brought Christian churches closer together in recent decades but has lost momentum lately.
Some Protestants, especially in Germany, say Benedict has contributed to that by stressing more strongly the Catholic claim to be the only true church.
They say he also seems more interested in improving ties with the theologically conservative Orthodox churches than with more liberal Protestant groups.
In the Vatican's view, several Protestant churches have drifted away from common ground by ordaining women as priests and bishops or blessing same-sex marriages.
"We have divided the one path into many, so the witness we should give has been obscured," Benedict told the German-speaking congregation, which his predecessor John Paul II visited in 1983, in their common native tongue.
"I think we should first be thankful that there is so much unity. It's nice that we can pray together today, sing the same hymns together, hear the same word of God together, that we can interpret and try to understand it together."
Benedict said only God could create more unity among Christians because "a unity we negotiate ourselves would be human-made and as fragile as everything that humans make."
The leader of the Lutheran community, Doris Esch, recalled that Benedict had helped to work out a Catholic-Lutheran statement in 1999 resolving some theological disagreements dating back to the Reformation, the split between Catholicism and Protestantism, in the 16th century.
"Holy Father, may you feel welcome here," she said.
Germany's churches are planning an ecumenical festival in Munich in May. Some Protestants asked for a joint communion service but the Catholics declined because the two sides do not agree on the nature of this central Christian rite.
Bradley Lockhart, father of 5-year-old Shaniya Davis, speaks during a news conference as his sister Carey Lockhart-Davis, right, begins to cry, Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2009, outside his home in Fayetteville, N.C. Shaniya Davis, who was reported missing by her mother Nov. 10, body was found off a rural North Carolina road Monday.
People pray during a candle light vigil for 5-year-old Shaniya Nicole Davis whose body was found near Sanford, N.C., Monday, Nov. 16, 2009. For a week, authorities feverishly searched for a 5-year-old girl across central North Carolina, only to find her body Monday off a rural road following accusations the girl's mother offered her for sex.
Antoinette Davis, right, listens to her charges on Monday near Sanford, North Carolina
Mario McNeill, 29, was charged with first-degree kidnapping
Antoinette Davis, right, listens to her charges on Monday near Sanford, North Carolina
Shaniya Davis, five, was discovered dead at the side of a road
O'Neil carries the little girl towards a lift in a hotel
A missing five-year-old girl allegedly sold into prostitution by her mother has been found dead, it was revealed this morning.
Shaniya Davis had been missing since November 10 after she was last seen being carried into a hotel room by a man.
FBI agents and U.S. Marshalls joined the nationwide search for the toddler amid fears she had been sold to a paedophile ring.
Police have charged the girl's mother, Antoinette Davis, with human trafficking and prostitution offences.
An arrest warrant issued for the 25-year-old said she allowed her daughter to be taken 'with the intent that she be held in sexual servitude.'
Davis, who is pregnant, first reported her daughter missing last Tuesday.
Police were suspicious of her story after reviewing a timeline of the events leading up to her disappearance from a trailer park in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
They later found CCTV footage from a hotel 40 miles from Fayetteville showing the five year old girl being carried into a hotel room by Mario McNeill.
She had not been seen since and her mother has refused to cooperate with police.
The girl had only been living with Davis for three weeks, according to her father Bradley Lockhart.
He had primary custody of the girl, but had agreed to let her stay with her mother after she found a place to live and held a job for six months.
Lockhart broke down in tears at a press conference last night when he sobbed: 'Everybody makes it a point not to ignore, to look past a situation where a person, a child, or anybody might be in danger ... so that we don't have another tragedy like Shaniya.’
He said authorities have given him limited information, but he was to meet with them later.
‘It's not the result I wanted, it's not the result any father or family would want for their children,’ he said.
‘But God has a greater calling for all of us.’
Police have not charged anyone with molesting Shaniya, but said the investigation is ongoing.
The man accused of taking her, Mario Andrette McNeill, turned himself in on Friday. Police said he admitted to kidnapping the child and has been charged.
CCTV footage shows Shaniya in the company of McNeill near a hotel on the day she was kidnapped.
According to arrest documents, Davis 'knowingly provided Shaniya Davis with the intent that she be held in sexual servitude' and she 'permitted an act of prostitution’.
Shaniya's half-sister, Cheyenne Lockhart, spoke on the U.S. talkshow Nancy Grace on Monday.
She said that she found it difficult to believe Davis had treated her daughter so poorly.
‘She seemed like the sweetest woman. She didn't come from much, but ... she had the sweetest voice, she had the sweetest personality, and especially toward me,’ said Ms Lockhart, who shared a father with Shaniya.
‘I would never think that she would do anything like that.’
Their father said Shaniya went to her mother's home on October 9.
Tough justice: The man lost his appeal at a court in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
A man in Saudi Arabia is to be beheaded and crucified after he raped five children and left one of them, a three-year-old boy, to die in the desert.
An appeal court in the capital Riyadh approved the death sentence handed down in June by judges in the northwestern oasis city of Hail where the convicted 22-year-old man carried out his crimes.
The rapist - who was not named - was arrested several weeks ago as he tried to seize another boy after offering him a ride home from school.
The seven-year-old - who escaped unharmed - helped identify the culprit.
The man’s victims were aged between three and seven. He was said to have lured them into his car as they left school at midday and then drove them to remote desert locations to rape them.
An investigation was launched after a 25-year-old father reported that his three-year-old son was missing and that he suspected the kidnapper to be a male driver of a white four-wheel drive vehicle.
The infant was later found under a scorching sun in the desert where he had died of thirst.
A panel of three judges in Hail sentenced the rapist to death for “abhorrent” crimes which they said had terrorised the community.
Crucifixion in the conservative desert Kingdom means tying the convict’s body to wooden beams to be displayed to the public after he is decapitated by a professional swordsman.
Saudi Arabia has executed 56 people this year under laws that allow the death penalty for rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking.
In extreme cases, the convict is executed and his body crucified in public. ----------- RELATED POSTS:-
