Mark Berndt appeared in court today on charges that he committed lewd acts on 23 boys and girls, ages 6 to 10, between 2008 and 2010. The Miramonte third grade school teacher was arrested Monday at his home in Torrance and is being held on $23 million bail.

His alleged crimes include gagging students aged 7 to 10 with tape, putting 3-inch long Madagascar cockroaches on their faces and in their mouths and forcing them to taste semen.Some parents complained yesterday that officials at the South Los Angeles school should have notified them when photos depicting the abuse were found in 2010.

The L.A. Times has reported that the acts Berndt is being charged with happened between 2005 and 2010 but they also said that school officials weren’t notified until January of 2011. Berndt wasn’t removed from classroom soon after but not fired until the following month and the majority of parents were not notified until yesterday.

Gloria Polanco, the mother of two children at the school asks why, if the principal knew this in advance, he didn’t he inform parents. “How long has he been doing this?” asked Polanco. School district officials say they were forced by law enforcement investigators to keep the case quiet so as not to cross-contaminate any evidence.

The probe began after the film processor, who is required by state law to report suspicions of child abuse and molestation, turned over some 40 photographs to authorities in October 2010. About 400 photos were found at Berndt’s home and at the photo lab during subsequent searches. It’s not clear how many different children were pictured.

Source: KPCC

The National Confederation of Disabled People called the action “incomprehensible,” and said pedophiles are now awarded a higher government disability pay than some people who have received organ transplants.The Labor Ministry said categories added to the expanded list — that also includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists — were included for purposes of medical assessment and used as a gauge for allocating financial assistance.

But NCDP leader Yiannis Vardakastanis, who is blind, warned the new list could create new difficulties for disabled Greeks who are already facing benefit cuts due to the country’s financial crisis.

“What’s happened is incomprehensible. I think there is some big mistake. The ministry should have a different policy on disability,” Vardakastanis told the Associated Press. “The list contains major changes to disability quotients, which could effectively remove many people from access to benefits.”

The new list gives pyromaniacs and pedophiles disability pay up to 35 percent, compared to 80 percent for heart transplant recipients.

“It’s really not serious to grant Peeping Toms a 20-30 percent disability rate, and 10 percent to diabetics, who have insulin shots four or five times a day,” said Vardakastanis.

Greece has been fighting to avoid bankruptcy since 2009. Public spending on health and welfare programs has been sharply cut under austerity measures imposed as a condition for receiving emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund and other countries using the euro currency.

Independently run welfare programs that survived on state grants have been the hardest hit, leaving some disabled groups, including the deaf, facing sudden drops in their standard of care.

The government is also battling widespread abuse in the welfare system, forcing tens of thousands of disabled people to be reassessed.

Source: AP

German news agency dapd reported that the state court in Braunschweig on Thursday convicted the priest, who was found guilty of abusing three boys aged 9 to 15 between 2004 and 2011.The 46-year-old priest, who wasn’t identified, was arrested in July after one victim told his mother what had happened. He admitted the abuse when he went on trial Jan. 13.

He also faces church disciplinary proceedings.

Germany, Pope Benedict XVI’s homeland, was shaken in 2010 by revelations of abuse by clergy going back decades.

Source: Boston

In its judgment on a writ petition, the First Bench comprising Chief Justice M.Y.Eqbal and Justice T.S.Sivagnanam, said the victim should not be subjected to any further medical test. Investigation should proceed based on the available medical opinion.The Bench observed, “The repeated insistence by the CB-CID to subject the child to further medical examination creates a serious doubt in the minds of this court as to whether the CB-CID is serious in prosecuting the matter or is it an attempt to shield the accused.

When sufficient medical records were available with the CB-CID, it defies logic as to why the CB-CID insists upon further medical tests to be conducted on the victim girl, which undoubtedly would not only amount to harassment, [but] may leave an indelible mark in the mind of the child which is not healthy for her growth and development.”

The matter relates to a writ petition by Ramalingam, Member, Human Rights Protection Centre. The allegation was that the girl, studying in UKG in a school at Kallakurichi, Villupuram district, was sexually abused by the school principal and an LKG class teacher.

A first information report was registered on August 3 last year.

The Bench said considering the gravity of the situation, it had ordered a CB-CID investigation. After more than three months, it appeared that the unit was “also dragging its feet and the final report submitted by them does not infuse confidence in the mind of this court that the investigation is proceeding in the right direction.”

The turn of events prima facie established that all was not well with the manner in which the probe was proceeding. The Bench observed that the manner and conduct of an investigating agency should infuse confidence in the court’s mind.

“If there is any lack of confidence, this court will not be a silent spectator to the turn of events, but would not hesitate to intervene and restore the rule of law.” The Judges said they were of the view that investigation should be handled by a different agency uninfluenced by the investigation done by the CB-CID and with the available medical records.

The Bench said this was a fit case where investigation should be transferred to the central agency. The CBI should commence investigation immediately and file the final report within 60 days.

Source: The Hindu

AN INTERNATIONAL karate champion from York has been jailed for five years for child abuse against a 13-year-old girl.

Liam O’Grady, was sentenced today at York Crown Court, after being convicted by a jury last month. O’Grady, 30, of Osbaldwick, has taught hundreds of children karate at after-school clubs and won gold at World and European level.

A jury had heard earlier that he sent sexual texts and pictures of himself to the girl and sexually abused her in his house, his car and men’s toilets.O’Grady was found guilty of four charges of sexual activity with a child and one of meeting a child after sexually grooming her. He was acquitted of one of the sexual activity charges and convicted of all other charges.

A spokeswoman for the executive of the Karate Union of Great Britain said that as a result of O’Grady’s conviction and sentencing, he had been expelled from the organisation by its executive committee.

O’Grady wept in the dock as the Recorder of York Judge Stephen Ashurst spelt out the consequences of his prolonged grooming and exploitation of the girl, starting when she was 12. His sentence includes a lifetime ban on working with children again.

“You have brought this upon yourself,” he told O’Grady.

His barrister Jason Macadam said: “He has lost his livelihood, he has lost his position in the sporting world. It is right to say he is a public disgrace following these convictions.”

Outside court, Joe Cocker, manager of City of York Safeguarding Children Board, praised the “incredible courage” of the girl and her friends who all gave evidence at O’Grady’s trial. The girl’s friends went to the authorities because they were alarmed at what she had told them. “What he did was not only abusive in terms of the acts he was found guilty of, but also abusive in his cynical manipulation of this 12-year-old young girl,” said Mr Cocker.

“Her courage stands in stark contrast to his reprehensible pursuit of self-interest and cowardice.”

Det Insp Shaun Page of North Yorkshire Police said: “O’Grady’s arrogance and repeated denials of the offences he committed meant that rather than pleading guilty when he had the chance, he has subjected his victim and her family to the further turmoil of a lengthy court process.

“I hope this sentence makes O’Grady face up to the fact that what he has done is sick and completely unacceptable. I also hope that the end of this case can bring some comfort to the victim and her family and helps them move on with their lives.”

O’Grady, who moved from Osbaldwick to Flintshire in Wales after he was charged, denied one charge of grooming a child for sex and three of sexual activity with a child, but was convicted by a York jury last month..

Mr Macadam said he continues to protest his innocence. In addition to the jail term, O’Grady was put on the sex offenders’ register, made subject to a sexual offences prevention order and banned from working with children, all for life.

The judge said he was a high achieving sportsman. “But success in sport and the adulation it brings doesn’t of course provide immunity from the consequences of criminal behaviour, very serious criminal behaviour as I judge this to be. “It may be your sporting prowess had given you a degree of confidence. It was possible you believed you could get away with it because of your position.”

O’Grady had betrayed the trust the girl’s parents had placed in him to look after their child while training her and “played” his wife and the girl off against each other.

Mr Cocker praised the police for their “determination and tenacity”, the child’s school for supporting the girl and her friends and acting on their information, York social care and the team work between the agencies. O’Grady’s wife Lisa gave evidence for the defence but was not in court to see her husband sentenced. Mr Macadam said the future of his family was “extremely uncertain”. The defence team handed in testimonials from family, friends and work colleagues.

Source: York Press

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s report found Tasmania had the second highest rate of children on protection orders over the past five years.

The report’s statistics estimated that 100 children in every 1,000 needed protection over the survey period.The state also recorded the second highest rate of substantiated child abuse or neglect notifications, again behind the NT.

Rates of children in out of home care are equal highest in New South Wales and the NT, followed by Tasmania.

The report says the national rate of children on protection orders and in out of home care has risen over the past five years.

Source: ABC

The defendants reportedly took sexually explicit photos of a child under age 12.

Two Valrico residents are facing multiple counts of child abuse, possession of pornography, sexual battery and other charges for photographing a child in sexual poses.

Charged are Elizabeth Wirick, 46, of 3320 Stonebridge Trail, in River Hills, Valrico, and Richard James Piccoli, 58, of the same address.According to the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, on Tuesday, Jan. 17, a witness delivered a USB drive to the sheriff’s office that contained images recovered from Wirick and Piccoli’s laptop.

The USB drive contained 22 images depicting a child under age 12 engaging in sexual conduct and sexually explicit poses. The sheriff’s office said, in four of the images, the defendants induced the victim to engage in a sexual performance.

The sheriff’s office said these incidents occurred on two separate dates.

In three images, the sheriff’s office said Wirick forced or enticed the victim to touch her breast in a lewd manner.

In six images, the victim is posed next to the defendants with an adult sex toy. The images also show the victim using the sex toy on herself. The sheriff’s office said Wirick performed sexual activities with the victim while Piccoli posed in the photos with Wirick and the victim.

The offenses reported took place at the defendants’ home.

Wirick is charged with 22 counts of using a child in sexual performances, two counts of child abuse, three counts of lewd molestation, six counts of attempted capital sexual battery and two counts of lewd exhibition.

Piccoli is charged with 22 counts of possession of child pornography, four counts of using a child in a sexual performance and two counts of child abuse.

This isn’t Wirick’s first run-in with the law. She was arrested in 2006 for possession of cocaine and driving under the influence with property damage. She was arrested again in 2007 for DUI with property damage or injuries.

Piccoli has arrests dating back to 1999 for grand theft and felony petit theft.

Source: Bloomingdale Riverview Patch

Two British soldiers have been arrested and questioned over allegations of “inappropriate behaviour” in Afghanistan, the UK’s Ministry of Defence announced after a newspaper described their alleged abuse of two 10-year-old boys.

Quoting defence sources, The Sun newspaper reported on Wednesday that a sergeant and a private from the Mercian Battle Group had recorded their abuse of the children on video and showed it to other soldiers on laptops.Military police launched an investigation into allegations against the two soldiers, a ministry spokesperson said, but declined to comment on the nature of the allegations.

“Two service personnel have been arrested, interviewed under caution and released,” the spokesperson said, adding that the ministry took any such allegations extremely seriously.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office responded in a written statement, saying that the government in Kabul was “deeply disturbed” by the reports and that the alleged behaviour was “immoral”.

“The government of Afghanistan is immensely disgusted by the rise in recent incidents of immoral nature among foreign soldiers that clearly undermine public confidence and the Afghan people’s co-operation with foreign troops,” Karzai’s office said.

The statement said the government was “deeply disturbed by reports that two British soldiers have encouraged two Afghan children to touch them through their clothes”.

‘Moral standards’

A spokesperson for the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan said they were aware of the allegations.

“We expect members of all ISAF troop-contributing nations to adhere to the highest standards of military service,”
Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson, spokesperson for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, said.

“An investigation has been launched, and if a service member is found to have committed an offence, or behaved in a manner not in keeping with the appropriate moral standards expected of them, they will be dealt with appropriately through the respective nation’s military judicial system.”

The arrests come just a week after a video emerged showing US Marines urinating on corpses, believed to be dead Taliban fighters, in Afghanistan.

The tape of the Marines also prompted reference to earlier scandals involving US soldiers’ treatment of prisoners in Iraq and the killing of unarmed civilians in Afghanistan.

The US military has been prosecuting soldiers from the Army’s 5th Stryker Brigade on charges of murdering unarmed Afghan civilians while deployed in Kandahar province in 2010.

Britain has about 9,500 troops in Afghanistan, mainly based in the country’s Helmand province. Britain says that it intends to pull out all its combat troops by 2015.

Source: Aljazeera

John Smart, 48, preyed on three youngsters he met at the Edinburgh City Mission.

He began abusing one of his victims when the boy was just three years old. Judge Lady Dorrian put Smart on the sex offenders’ register and ordered him to be monitored in the community for three years after his release.

At the High Court in Glasgow, she told Smart: “The social enquiry report points out that these offences were planned, intrusive and involved a significant degree of planning.

“Your victims were vulnerable. “You pose a sufficiently significant risk to children to merit a lengthy sentence.”

Solicitor advocate John Keenan, defending, said that Smart, a first offender, continued to protest his innocence.

Mr Keenan added: “He denies responsibility for these offences.”
Devout Christian

Smart, who stood as a candidate at the 2003 Scottish Parliament elections, persuaded the parents of his victims to let him take the two boys and a girl on trips and also attacked them during overnight visits to his home.

During his trial last year he denied the offences and claimed he could not have carried out the assaults because of a medical problem which meant he was a virgin.

However, a jury at the High Court in Perth found him guilty of five charges of abuse between 1987 and 2002 in Edinburgh, Leith, Peebles and Perth.

The parents of his victims believed he was a devout Christian and let him take the youngsters to play parks and swimming pools.

Instead Smart, of Christian Crescent, Edinburgh, used the time alone with them to carry out the abuse.

He had denied attacking the three children and claimed that he had “no sex drive whatsoever” and was impotent.

He insisted he had suffered from the problem for a long time and he had been forced to break off his engagement to a woman because of the condition.

Source: BBC

As reported by the Associated Press, disability groups in the country were especially outraged over the government’s decision to add pedophiles to its list of those the state recognizes as disabled individuals.

Among the other “disabled” categories added to the list were exhibitionists, kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists, and sadomasochists.Greece’s Labor Ministry explained that the new “disabilities” were added for medical assessment and to determine who would receive financial assistance from the government.

But Greece’s National Confederation of Disabled People (NCDP) “called the action ‘incomprehensible,’” reported the AP, “and said pedophiles are now awarded a higher government disability pay than some people who have received organ transplants.”

The additions to the government dole come as Greece is drowning in debt and attempting to stay afloat in an imploding economy. “Public spending on health and welfare programs has been sharply cut under austerity measures imposed as a condition for receiving emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund and other countries using the euro currency,” reported the AP.

The updated listing left the NCDP’s head, Yiannis Vardakastanis, wondering if the Greek government could be serious in its intention to grant “peeping toms a 20 to 30 percent disability rate, and 10 percent to diabetics, who have insulin shots four or five times a day.” She noted that the new listing “gives pyromaniacs and pedophiles disability pay up to 35 percent, compared to 80 percent for heart transplant recipients.”

The fact that a socialist nation such as Greece would expand entitlements to whole new “victim” classes is not surprising. But that it would consider “disabled” those individuals whom society has heretofore considered merely criminal is noteworthy.

Becket Adams of TheBlaze.com suggested that instead of trying to do any more to salvage the sinking ship that is Greece, the other nations of the European Union should simply jump ship and try to save their own skins. “When it gets to the point where child molesters, pyromaniacs, and sadomasochists are all standing in the same line waiting to collect disability checks, it’s already over,” wrote Becket. “It’s going to take a lot more than austerity measures to save Greece; its problems are much deeper than that.”

Currently Greece’s national debt hovers at more than $445 billion, and in order to receive its next $165-billion bailout check from the EU and the International Monetary Fund, it has had to promise to cut spending to a bare minimum. That bare-bones budget will apparently now include a monthly disability check to pedophiles and other erstwhile Greek criminals.

Writing on FrontPageMag.com, Arnold Alhert noted that the United States is the largest contributor to the IMF, kicking in 17 percent of its budget. And, wrote Alhert, “while bills to defund our $100 billion contribution are working their way through both houses of Congress, it is more likely that only additional funding in 2012 will be prevented.”

With the United States so inextricably committed to bailing out insolvent EU nations like Greece, Alhert wonders if “American taxpayers might someday be underwriting Greek pedophiles.”

For those Americans prone to cluck their tongues over the reprobate depths to which Greece has apparently plunged, America is not far behind. As reported by The New American, at an August 17, 2011 conference in Baltimore sponsored by the pedophile-friendly organization B4U-ACT, a group of mental health professionals and sympathetic activists discussed what might be done to remove pedophilia from the mental illnesses listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

As reported by LifeSite News, on its own website “B4U-ACT classifies pedophilia as simply another sexual orientation and decries the ‘stigma’ attached to pedophilia, observing: ‘No one chooses to be emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents. The cause is unknown; in fact, the development of attraction to adults is not understood.’ The group says that it does not advocate treatment to change feelings of attraction to children or adolescents.”

Might pedophilia make it on to the list defining Americans With Disabilities? Don’t be too quick to dismiss such a possibility. Alhert charted the line of thinking that turns a mental illness — or criminal inclination — into a justification for entitlement, noting that “for progressives, the term ‘lifestyle choice’ becomes a viable substitute for moral depravity. And once ‘criminals’ become ‘victims,’ we are well along the path to where such victims eventually become ‘disabled.’”

Source: The New American