Scorned by the left, he is idolised by some, even having his own unofficial “fan club” and merchandise.But Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, said: “Such observations could only have been made by men who have no significant relationships with women and no knowledge of the enormous positive changes the women’s rights movement has meant for both men and women.”Emma Bonino, a former European commissioner and current member of the European parliament, said the Vatican was writing about a world long gone:”To be fair to the Catholic Church, no religion is a great friend of women. A Vatican document blaming feminism for the breakdown of the family and the advent of homosexual marriage pro-mpted a furious debate yesterday as it was lampooned by opponents and welcomed by the Roman Catholic Church’s traditionalists.
The deeply conservative, 37-page document, On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World, was drafted with the full approval of Pope John Paul II by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the department defining church orthodoxy.Cardinal Ratzinger said the “subordination” of women had provoked them to “make themselves the adversaries of men”, with “its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family”. They say that more than 30,000 children and babies are abandoned in Bulgaria every year.. The last Bulgarian mother arrested, Svetla Mihaylova, 32, said the baby she tried to sell was her fourth but the only one she had sold She was charged immediately after giving birth by caesarean. She said she had agreed to sell her baby because she could not afford to feed her other children.Children’s rights groups believe that up to 10,000 Bulgarian children and young people could be involved in trafficking for sex alone. The six arrested included two Bulgarian mothers accused of selling babies, two “fathers” and a middle-man from the gang.Three police officers posing as newly qualified doctors and nurses witnessed the birth of two babies who were taken to Italian orphanages after the arrests of their mothers and would-be fathers. “Newborn babies were bought and sold like puppies,” one policeman told La Stampa newspaper.The babies’ natural mothers were recruited by the mobsters in Bulgaria and driven to a hospital near Milan to give birth.
Fake fathers paid the gang, then officially claimed paternity. Armed with empty mineral water bottles, Mr Ball now makes the 100-mile round trip to the Loch from his home about once a month. So far he has sold almost 200 bottles to buyers in America, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya and Canada, with some bidding as high as £5.50. He at present has 20 bottles up for sale, collected in June and bottled on 22 July.One satisfied customer e-mailed him back: “You have made a dream come true for a Nessie enthusiast. The bottle carries a label with the warning, an image of the monster and a guarantee of its origin. He got the idea for selling the water after an American friend – and Nessie enthusiast – asked him to bring some water from the famous Loch as a souvenir when he went to visit her in New Hampshire.”I went to the visitor centre at the Loch thinking I ought to be able to buy some – but no such thing was available. So I emptied this mineral water bottle I had and filled it with water from the Loch.
I took it over, all her friends went mad for it and I came back with orders for 20 more. So then I started selling it on eBay and it started going like hotcakes.”An article in the magazine Fortean Times – which specialises in stories about myths, legends and phenomena – led to even more customers. Some infants, they say, may have been purchased for sale to paedophiles or for organ transplants. Investigation revealed that “countless” babies have been sold to western European countries, with infertile Italian couples paying €4,000 (£2,640) for a girl and up to €17,000 for a boy.But officers say the arrests of three Bulgarians and three Italians last month may have touched only a small part of baby-trafficking from Bulgaria. Police posing as doctors and nurses have arrested six people on charges of belonging to a Bulgarian gang selling babies “like puppies”, primarily to childless couples but also possibly to paedophiles living in Italy and France.
Officers in the northern Italian city of Trieste stumbled on the trade in newborn babies by accident through a routine phone-tap on a suspected Bulgarian mafia gangster, Stefano “Stevo” Braidich, 44.
They said life in Guantanamo was boring and disorienting but not especially harsh.. He is a second-generation immigrant and speaks no Arabic, so he did not know what was said.The four complained that they had been ill-treated by their US captors in Afghanistan after they were taken prisoner nearly three years ago. One man, Mourad Benchellali, 23, from V?ssieux, near Lyons apparently said he saw Osama bin Laden giving a speech to camp inmates in Afganistan. French judicial sources told reporters the four had been co-operative since being flown back last week.
