Pope Francis On Gays: Who Am I To Judge Them?

Pope Francis has had a busy week at World Youth Day in Rio as he visited his slums and prisons, blessed the Olympic flag and brought three million people to Copacabana Beach for a final Mass on Sunday morning.

Now he has made another headline, this time when the pontiff said, "Who am I to judge a gay person?"

While taking questions from reporters on the plane back to Rome, Francis spoke about gays and the reported "gay lobby." According to the Wall Street Journal, thePope's comments about homosexuality came in the context of a question about gay priests.

The pontiff broached the delicate question of how he would respond to learning that a cleric in his ranks was gay, though not sexually active. For decades, the Vatican has regarded homosexuality as a "disorder," and Pope Francis' predecessor Pope Benedict XVI formally barred men with what the Vatican deemed "deep-seated" homosexuality from entering the priesthood.

"Who am I to judge a gay person of goodwill who seeks the Lord?" the pontiff said, speaking in Italian. "You can't marginalize these people."

John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter reported on the meeting as well and said the Pope also addressed the question of the Vatican's reported "gay lobby".
He hasn’t run into significant resistance to reform inside the Vatican, and joked that if there really is a “gay lobby” he hasn’t yet seen it stamped on anyone’s ID cards.

Father James Martin, S.J. who is an admirer of Francis, said that the pontiff's comment about gay people is consistent with the rest of his papacy.
"One of Francis's hallmarks is an emphasis on mercy, which you see in that response. That mercy, of course, comes from Jesus. And we can never have too much of it."

The pope did not offer much hope for those advocating for women Catholic priests, according to Allen at NCR, saying: Pope John Paul II “definitively … closed the door' to women priests.

Huffingtonpost.com

4 IN 5 IN US FACE NEAR-POVERTY

WASHINGTON (AP) — Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.

Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."

"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend, but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."

While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in government data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.

The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.

"It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty.

He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not.

"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.

Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites are generally dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are also numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.

More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.

Still, while census figures provide an official measure of poverty, they're only a temporary snapshot. The numbers don't capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.

In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person's lifetime risk, a much higher number — 4 in 10 adults — falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.

The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.

AP

Sci-Tech devices that can blow your mind

Israel bars European aid staff from entering Gaza, Western diplomat says

Several European aid staff have been barred from entering Gaza as part of Israeli measures in the wake of new EU guidelines barring cooperation with settlements, a western diplomat said Friday.

The diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the humanitarian aid staff had failed to receive permits to enter the Gaza Strip.

On Thursday, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon ordered defense officials to halt cooperation on the ground with EU representatives. This includes any assistance to EU infrastructure projects in Area C, which is under full Israeli civilian and military control. Ya'alon also reportedly planned to make it more difficult for EU officials to pass through the Erez Crossing, to the Gaza Strip or back to Israel.

In Brussels, Maja Kocijancic, spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, said on Friday: "The EU is concerned by reports in the Israeli media that the Israeli Minister of Defense has announced a number of restrictions affecting EU activities supporting the Palestinian people.

"We have not received any official communication from the Israeli authorities. Our delegations on the spot are seeking urgent clarifications," Kocijancic added.

In his decision, Ya'alon adopted a list of recommendations he received from the coordinator of government activities in the territories, Maj. Gen. Eitan Dangot. Israel's security establishment would adopt a cold shoulder policy toward EU activities in the territories, Haaretz learned from security sources Friday morning.

However, they clarified, this would apply only to specifically EU activities and not activities conducted by EU member states.

It seems that Ya'alon's moves are being made in coordination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Following the EU announcement of the new guidelines, Israeli political and defense officials warned that Israel would retaliate to the new policy.

The European Commission published the guidelines barring EU agencies from funding entities connected to settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and residential areas in the Golan Heights on July 19.

Haaretz

French youths hit the road over job crisis

German supermarket chain Aldi bans Israeli goods in Netherlands

The Netherlands branch of the German supermarket chain Aldi has started boycotting products from Israeli settlements in a bid to avoid controversy in its sales.

According to a statement released by a spokesman for the Aldi chain on July 22, the decision to boycott the settler goods is applied to Syria’s occupied Golan Heights, West Bank and East al-Quds (Jerusalem).

Earlier this week, a report published by the Amsterdam-basedTrouw daily revealed that two major supermarkets in the Netherlands, Hoogvliet and Jumbo, decided to boycott products manufactured in Israeli settlements.

In May, the Dutch Foreign Ministry said in a circular that it would be better for retailers to replace “Made in Israel” labels with a label reading as “Product from Israeli settlement."

PressTV

MIT scientists implant a false memory into a mouse’s brain

Sometime soon, a lab mouse could wake up thinking he had snuggled up to a girl mouse the night before. But he hadn’t. The memory would be fake.

Scientists have successfully implanted a false memory into a mouse’s brain — a seemingly far-fetched idea reminiscent of a science fiction film.

“If mice had Hollywood, this would be ‘Inception’ for them,” said one of the lead researchers, MIT neuroscientist Steve Ramirez, whose study was published onlineThursday in the journal Science.

Ramirez and his colleagues tagged brain cells associated with a specific memory and then tweaked that memory to make the mouse believe something had happened when it hadn’t.

Although implanting a memory won’t happen anytime soon in people, in principle, it should be possible to isolate a human memory and activate it at will, scientists said.

“We would have every reason to expect this would happen in humans exactly as it happened in mice,” said Michael J. Kahana, who was not involved in the study but is director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Computational Memory Lab.

Researchers said the ability to implant a false memory was a scientific milestone; Kahana called it a “technical tour de force.” The study’s authors said this type of research could one day help treat some emotional problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, which involves the intrusion of unwanted memories.

The first step in the mouse experiment took place last year when Ramirez and his colleaguesisolated an individual memory in a mouse’s brain by tagging the brain cells associated with it and inducing recall of the memory at will by forcing those neurons to fire with light. In this new study, they artificially stimulated neurons to make associations between events and environments that had no ties in reality and, in essence, implanted a new, false memory.

They used a technique called optogenetics, which uses light to turn on and off activity of individual brain cells in a living animal. An optical fiber feeds light into the mouse’s hippocampus, the area of the brain that plays a prominent role in forming new memories.

False memories in humans often happen when a person swaps out one detail for another. Sometimes these mistakes are trivial, such as swearing that you left your keys on the kitchen table only to find them hanging in the garage. In a courtroom setting, a false eyewitness account can destroy an innocent person’s life.

Ramirez recounts a true story about an Australian psychologist who was arrested for a rape he did not commit. Physically, he fit the bill of the victim’s description, but he had a foolproof alibi. He was speaking on a live television show at the time of the rape — the same show, it turned out, the victim had been watching right before her attack. As a result, she described him as her attacker, even though it wasn’t possible.

Red room equals danger

In their experiment, the scientists implanted memories associated with certain rooms or chambers where they placed the mouse. Similar to a person visiting a friend’s apartment and forming a memory about his ratty couch and cramped bathroom, a mouse explores and takes mental note of a given chamber’s nooks and crannies.

The Washington Post