Cardinal Mahony Stripped of Public Church Duties

Cardinal Mahony Stripped of Public Church Duties

Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez  on Thursday announced dramatic actions in response to the priest abuse scandal, saying that Cardinal Roger Mahony would be stripped of public duties in the church and that Santa Barbara Bishop Thomas J. Curry has stepped down.

Gomez said in a statement that Mahony — who led the L.A. archdiocese from 1985 to 2011 — “will no longer have any administrative or public duties.”

Gomez also announced the church has released a trove of confidential church files detailing how the Los Angeles archdiocese dealt with priests accused of molestation.

Gomez wrote in a letter to parishioners that the files would be disturbing to read.

“I find these files to be brutal and painful reading. The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children. The priests involved had the duty to be their spiritual fathers and they failed,” he wrote. “We need to acknowledge that terrible failure today.”

Gomez’s statement came a week after the release of internal Catholic church records. The records showed 15 years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Mahony and Curry discussed ways to conceal the molestation of children from law enforcement. Those records represent just a fraction of the files the church released Thursday. The Times is now reviewing those files.

The records released last week offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation’s largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police. The newly released records, which the archdiocese fought for years to keep secret, reveal in church leaders’ own words a desire to keep authorities from discovering that children were being molested.

The records contain memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Curry, then the archdiocese’s chief advisor on sex abuse cases. In the confidential letters, Curry proposed strategies to prevent police from investigating three priests who had admitted to church officials that they had abused young boys.

Curry suggested to Mahony that they prevent the priests from seeing therapists who might alert authorities and that they give the priests out-of-state assignments to avoid criminal investigators. Mahony, who retired in 2011, has apologized repeatedly for errors in handling abuse allegations.

Gomez’s letter detailed changes in the status of Curry and Mahony in the church.

“Effective immediately, I have informed Cardinal Mahony that he will no longer have any administrative or public duties. Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Curry has also publicly apologized for his decisions while serving as Vicar for Clergy. I have accepted his request to be relieved of his responsibility as the Regional Bishop of Santa Barbara,” Gomez wrote in a letter.

The records were released hours after a judge signed an order requiring the church to do so.

In a written order, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Emilie H. Elias gave the church a Feb. 22 deadline to turn over about 30,000 pages of internal memos, psychiatric reports, Vatican correspondence and other documents.

“Let’s just get it done,” Elias said in court Thursday.

Her order brought to a close five and a half years of legal wrangling and delays and set the stage for a raft of new and almost certainly embarrassing revelations about the church’s handling of pedophile priests.

The files Elias ordered released are the final piece of a landmark 2007 settlement between the archdiocese and about 500 people who said clergy abused them. As part of that $660-million settlement, the archdiocese agreed to hand over the personnel files of accused abusers. Victims said the files would provide accountability for church leaders who let pedophiles remain in the ministry; law enforcement officials said the records would be important investigative tools.

But the release was delayed for years by appeals and the painstaking process of reading and redacting 89 files, some hundreds of pages long. A private mediator in 2011 ordered the church to black out the names of victims and archdiocese employees not accused of abuse, saying he wanted to avoid “guilt by association.”

Earlier this month, at the urging of the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press, Elias ordered the names restored, saying the public had a right to know what Mahony and others in charge did about abuse. The church complained about the cost of restoring the redactions and suggested to the judge earlier this week that generic cover sheets for the files listing top officials and their dates of service should suffice.

After criticism from attorneys for the victims and the media, the church abandoned that plan and its lawyers said in court Thursday “anybody in a supervisory role” would be named in the documents. Elias’ order specified that the names of the archbishop, the vicar who handled clergy abuse, bishops and the heads of Catholic treatment centers for pedophiles be included.

Here is Gomez’s full letter:

My brothers and sisters in Christ,

This week we are releasing the files of priests who sexually abused children while they were serving in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

These files document abuses that happened decades ago. But that does not make them less serious.

I find these files to be brutal and painful reading. The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children. The priests involved had the duty to be their spiritual fathers and they failed.

We need to acknowledge that terrible failure today. We need to pray for everyone who has ever been hurt by members of the Church. And we need to continue to support the long and painful process of healing their wounds and restoring the trust that was broken.

I cannot undo the failings of the past that we find in these pages. Reading these files, reflecting on the wounds that were caused, has been the saddest experience I’ve had since becoming your Archbishop in 2011.

My predecessor, retired Cardinal Roger Mahony, has expressed his sorrow for his failure to fully protect young people entrusted to his care. Effective immediately, I have informed Cardinal Mahony that he will no longer have any administrative or public duties. Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Curry has also publicly apologized for his decisions while serving as Vicar for Clergy. I have accepted his request to be relieved of his responsibility as the Regional Bishop of Santa Barbara.

To every victim of child sexual abuse by a member of our Church: I want to help you in your healing. I am profoundly sorry for these sins against you.

To every Catholic in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, I want you to know: We will continue, as we have for many years now, to immediately report every credible allegation of abuse to law enforcement authorities and to remove those credibly accused from ministry. We will continue to work, every day, to make sure that our children are safe and loved and cared for in our parishes, schools and in every ministry in the Archdiocese.

In the weeks ahead, I will address all of these matters in greater detail. Today is a time for prayer and reflection and deep compassion for the victims of child sexual abuse.

I entrust all of us and our children and families to the tender care and protection of our Blessed Mother Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of the Angels.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

–  Harriet Ryan, Hector Becerra, Ashley Powers and Victoria Kim

January 31, 2013

Focus on Mental Health Laws to Curb Violence Is Unfair, Some Say

By ERICA GOODE and JACK HEALY

In their fervor to take action against gun violence after the shooting in Newtown, Conn., a growing number of state and national politicians are promoting a focus on mental illness as a way to help prevent further killings.

Legislation to revise existing mental health laws is under consideration in at least a half-dozen states, including Colorado, Oregon and Ohio. A New York bill requiring mental health practitioners to warn the authorities about potentially dangerous patients was signed into law on Jan. 15. In Washington, President Obama has ordered “a national dialogue” on mental health, and a variety of bills addressing mental health issues are percolating on Capitol Hill.

But critics say that this focus unfairly singles out people with serious mental illness, who studies indicate are involved in only about 4 percent of violent crimes and are 11 or more times as likely than the general population to be the victims of violent crime.

And many proposals — they include strengthening mental health services, lowering the threshold for involuntary commitment and increasing requirements for reporting worrisome patients to the authorities — are rushed in execution and unlikely to repair a broken mental health system, some experts say.

“Good intentions without thought make for bad laws, and I think we have a risk of that,” said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and clinical professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied rampage killers.

Moreover, the push for additional mental health laws is often driven by political expediency, some critics say. Mental health proposals draw support from both Democrats and Republicans, in part because, unlike bans on semiautomatic weapons or high-capacity magazines — like the one proposed in the Senate last week — they do not involve confrontation with gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association.

“The N.R.A. is far more formidable as a political foe than the advocacy groups for the mentally ill,” said Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association.

Indeed, the N.R.A. itself, in response to the massacre in Newtown, argued that mental illness, and not the guns themselves, was at the root of recent shooting sprees. The group called for a national registry of people with mental illness — an alternative that legal experts agree would raise at least as many constitutional alarms as the banning of gun ownership.

For mental health groups, the proposals under consideration are tantalizing: By increasing services for those with mental illness, they raise the possibility of restoring some of the billions of dollars cut from mental health programs in recent years as budgets tightened in the financial downturn. The measures also hold out hope for improvement of a mental health system that many experts say is fragmented and drastically inadequate. And some proposals — those to revise commitment laws, for example — have the support of some mental health organizations.

But some mental health and legal experts say that politicians’ efforts might be better spent making the process of involuntary psychiatric commitment — and the criteria for restricting firearms access once someone has been forcibly committed — consistent from state to state. And some proposals have caused concern, raising questions about doctor-patient confidentiality, the rights of people with psychiatric disabilities and the integrity of clinical judgment.

Especially troublesome to some mental health advocates are provisions like New York’s, which expand the duty of practitioners to report worrisome patients — a model likely to be emulated by other states. New York’s law, part of a comprehensive package to address gun violence, requires reporting to the local authorities any patient “likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others.” Law enforcement officials would then be authorized to confiscate any firearm owned by such a patient.

John Monahan, a psychologist and professor of law at the University of Virginia, said that such laws are often superfluous.

Although many mental health practitioners mistakenly believe that federal laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act forbid them to disclose information about patients, such statutes already include exceptions that permit clinicians to give information to the authorities when a patient presents a threat to others, Dr. Monahan said.

Most states also have laws requiring mental health professionals to notify the authorities and any intended victim when a patient makes a direct threat.

New York’s provision, Dr. Monahan said, differs from virtually every other state’s laws in allowing guns to be taken not only from those committed against their will but also from patients who enter treatment voluntarily.

“The devil is in the details,” he said of New York’s new law. “The two fears are that people will be deterred from seeking treatment that they need or that, once they are in treatment, they will clam up and not talk about violence.”

Most mental health experts agree that the link between mental illness and violence is not imaginary. Studies suggest that people with an untreated severe mental illness are more likely to be violent, especially when drug or alcohol abuse is involved. And many rampage killers have some type of serious mental disorder: James E. Holmes, accused of opening fire in a movie theater in Colorado in July, was seeing a psychiatrist who became alarmed about his behavior; Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people and injured 13 others in Arizona, including former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was severely mentally ill.

But such killings account for only a tiny fraction of gun homicides in the United States, mental health experts point out. Besides the research indicating that little violent crime can be linked to perpetrators who are mentally ill, studies show that those crimes are far more likely to involve battery — punching another person, for example — than weapons, which account for only 2 percent of violent crimes committed by the mentally ill.

Because of this, some criminal justice experts say it makes more sense to pass laws addressing behavior, rather than a diagnosis of mental illness. In Indiana, for example, firearms can be confiscated from people deemed a potential threat, whether or not they have a mental illness.

Proposals in a number of states seek to redefine the threshold for involuntary commitment to psychiatric treatment. But in doing so, they have reignited a longstanding debate about the role of forced treatment.

In Ohio, lawmakers are expected to consider a proposal to increase access to outpatient commitment instead of hospitalization, while also doing away with language requiring people with mental illness to show a “grave and imminent risk to substantial rights” of themselves or others before they can be committed.

In Colorado, where legislators are undertaking a broad overhaul of the state’s mental health system proposed by Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, a Democrat, the proposal also includes changing the criteria for involuntary commitment.

Under the state’s current laws, caregivers can place patients on 72-hour mental health holds only if they are believed to pose an “imminent danger” to themselves or others. The governor’s plan would allow caregivers to commit people if they believe there is a “substantial probability” of harm. Virginia and some other states already have standards based on “substantial probability.”

But some mental health advocates are wary about lowering the threshold. “The evidence that we have tells us that that’s not an appropriate solution, it’s not an effective solution to this problem,” said Jennifer Mathis, deputy legal director at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, an advocacy group for people with psychiatric disabilities.

But Cheryl Miller — whose 21-year-old son, Kyle, was shot by the police last June after he pointed a toy gun at them — believes that a revised law might have saved her child.

Two weeks before Kyle was killed she took him to an emergency mental health clinic to get him hospitalized. But the staff refused to commit him.

“I said, ‘I don’t want to take him home; he needs to go to the hospital,’ ” Ms. Miller said. “They didn’t think so. It goes back to, was he an imminent danger to himself? And it was ‘No.’ ”

January 31, 2013

Closing Arguments Given in Shaken-Baby Murder Case

By COREY KILGANNON

After three weeks of disturbing testimony in the trial of a man accused of fatally shaking his 2-month-old daughter in 2007, the defendant’s lawyer stood before the jury and began his summation with an oddly sentimental recollection about his own childhood.

The lawyer, Cedric Ashley, told jurors on Thursday that his favorite childhood book was “The Little Engine That Could,” and then proceeded to use that steam engine as a metaphor to defend Li Hangbin, who according to the prosecutor in the case, Leigh Bishop, murdered his daughter Annie.

Mr. Ashley told jurors that Ms. Bishop was driving the “Prosecution Express” with Mr. Li, 28, as the “sole passenger.”

Mr. Li, he said, “needs protection as they try to drive him to the City of Guilt — not over the mountain of reasonable doubt, but through the dark tunnel” where “the light of justice cannot shine.”

Ms. Bishop began her summation by flipping Mr. Ashley’s device, telling the jury, “We’re not here to read a bedtime story.”

“We’re here because Annie Li will never read a bedtime story. She’ll never read ‘The Little Engine That Could.’ We’re here because Hangbin Li killed Annie Li.”

And so the proceeding in State Supreme Court, in Queens, became a showdown between two lawyers specializing in so-called shaken-baby cases, dueling it out in a closely watched trial. Each skimmed from days of tedious medical testimony — including hospital records, autopsy reports and varying doctors’ opinions — to sway the jury in two separate directions.

Ms. Bishop used the testimony to try to prove that Mr. Li, a Chinese immigrant who was raising Annie with his companion, Li Ying, 27, was guilty of second-degree murder, among other charges.

On Oct. 22, 2007, Annie fell gravely ill and went into cardiac arrest. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where she died five days later, after having sustained what Ms. Bishop called traumatic brain injury.

With his “Little Engine” motif, Mr. Ashley seized upon the storybook train’s mantra and told jurors that Ms. Bishop’s mantra throughout the trial “was not ‘I think I can,’ but ‘I wish we could.’ ”

Throughout his summation, Mr. Ashley kept repeating the “I wish” line, mimicking a steam engine as he tried to shoot down Ms. Bishop’s explanation that Annie died from “shaking and blunt force trauma.”

Mr. Ashley told jurors that for a just verdict, “you can’t take the express through the tunnel.” He added, “You got to take the local over the mountain of reasonable doubt, to get to the City of Guilt.”

He called the jury “12 train inspectors,” and said the only way to save Mr. Li from conviction was to scrutinize the evidence.

The problem, he maintained, was that the proper experts and evidence necessary to rightfully convict Mr. Li were “not on board” and that Ms. Bishop built her case on the testimony of “rock star” experts flown in like hired guns, and that their testimony was crafty and deceptive.

He urged the jurors to “hold your hand high and say, ‘Stop this train.’ ”

Even after dismissing Mr. Ashley’s train story, Ms. Bishop took the jury on a narrative ride of her own, starting from the time Annie was alone with Mr. Li on Oct. 22, through her death five days later, and afterward as the medical evidence overwhelmingly showed, she said, that Annie had symptoms consistent with traumatic brain injury.

She was “viciously and brutally extinguished at the hands of her own father,” Ms. Bishop said. She told jurors that Mr. Li first told doctors at the hospital that the baby suffered a bump, but then after a CT scan revealed serious injuries, he later revised his description as a “heavy bump.”

“Does a loving father really need 36 hours and a CT scan to prompt his memory?” Ms. Bishop said.

Children, she said, “don’t just wind up in a pediatric care unit, dying from a bump on the head.”

Ms. Bishop called Mr. Li a man who “chose his own well-being — he chose himself — over his daughter,” and she reminded jurors that Mr. Li held Annie as she died. “He stared down at his little girl as she leaves our world, and even that could not pierce the defendant’s desire to protect himself,” she said.

Mr. Li watched both summations intently, a court official at his elbow translating the proceedings into his ear. If convicted, Mr. Li would face a maximum sentence of 25 years to life.

Mr. Ashley maintains that Annie, whose health was already fragile because of a genetic condition, was bumped against a night table during a chaotic revival process after her heart attack. All of these factors contributed to her falling unconscious and eventually dying, Mr. Ashley said.

Ms. Bishop mocked this as “a perfect storm for a number of rare medical conditions” and “a preposterous chain of events.”

Three weeks ago, Ms. Bishop opened her case by asking the jury, “What happened to baby Annie Li?” Just before Justice Richard L. Buchter charged the jury on Thursday, Ms. Bishop said one final thing to the jurors.

“What happened to Annie Li?” she said. “Hangbin Li killed her. Find him guilty.”

Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.

Missouri Bill Would Require All First Graders To Take NRA-Sponsored Gun Class

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jan 30, 2013 at 11:50 am

Students in Missouri have no sexual education requirement, so there’s a good chance they don’t know how to properly protect themselves from STIs or unintended pregnancy. Soon, though, they may be able to protect themselves from guns.

Missouri state Senate is considering a bill that would require all first graders in the state to take a gun safety training course. Using a grant provided by the National Rifle Association, it would put a “National Rifle Association’s Eddie Eagle Gunsafe Program” instructor in every first grade classroom.

The irony that there’s no requirement for students to learn about their bodies — but that there is one for deadly weapons — seems lost on the legislators proposing the measure, one of whom lamented, “I hate mandates as much as anyone, but some concerns and conditions rise to the level of needing a mandate”:pushing for its passage:

Sen. Dan Brown, R-Rolla, told the Senate General Laws Committee Tuesday that his bill was an effort to teach young children what to do if they come across an unsecured weapon.[...]

“I hate mandates as much as anyone, but some concerns and conditions rise to the level of needing a mandate,” Brown said.

Senators watched a brief segment of the training video during the hearing. The segment featured a cartoon eagle telling children to step away from an unsecured gun and immediately report it to an adult.

The measure would also require teachers to spend eight hours in a training course for how to respond to an armed assailant in the school. But the NRA will not foot the bill for the cost of substitute teachers on those days — despite the organizations stated focus on protecting the classroom.

And if the legislature is truly worried about protecting their students, sex education is a good place to start. Missouri’s young people suffer some of the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases in the country. Many of the schools run abstinence-only education, which is proven ineffective and likely to lead to more STIs and unintended pregnancies. It may not be as terrifying to a parent to imagine their child pregnant instead of shot, but it’s a much more likely possibility: In Missouri, 51 out of every 1,000 women have an unintended pregnancy, while there are 12.3 gun deaths per 100,00 people.

Look at Rihanna - you can’t tell the difference now between pop and porn

Mama is a #RollingStone baby.... Again!!

How could you be so #hood , but you so phuckin #pop

I worry that I come from the last generation to even recognise the sexualisation of mainstream culture

When she’s not touching herself up publicly, Rihanna likes to pose for pictures smoking fags while wearing thigh-high leather boots and see-through fishnet vests. Doesn’t it trouble her? Photo: REX

By Bryony Gordon

7:57PM GMT 21 Nov 2012

255 Comments

My eyes! My poor burning corneas! There I am, perusing some celebrity tittle-tattle of a lunch break, when I am confronted with a picture of professional pop strumpet Rihanna, caressing her breasts and her crotch. On stage.

Rihanna, in case you prefer the more elevated strains of, say, Rachmaninoff, is so famous that she has just chartered a Boeing 777 so she can promote her new album around the world. So vast is her popularity that she seems to release a new single every other week – and she even appeared at the Paralympic closing ceremony. When she’s not touching herself up publicly, she likes to pose for pictures smoking fags while wearing thigh-high leather boots and see-through fishnet vests emblazoned with cannabis leaves. Stay classy!

Rihanna is every teenage girl’s favourite pop star. As Suzi Quatro said this week, “It’s not that the women in today’s pop and rock world are being treated like sex objects; it’s that they are choosing to do it to themselves. Now they seem to be nearly nude, and I think that the videos are borderline pornography.” Quatro, who was no stranger to leather herself, has been backed up by Kiki Dee, whose lack of clothes on the cover of her 1995 album Almost Naked now seems quaint. “I watch the music channels occasionally,” said Dee, “and those kind of performances leave me cold. That whole gyrating sexual bit I find dull.”

As dull and routine as doing the dishes, these days. When I was a wee lass the world got its collective knickers in a twist when Madonna posed without any in her Sex book. The Pope would stage an intervention every time she frolicked in front of a crucifix. Today the sight of Rihanna being tied up, while the words “SLUT” and “WHORE” are flashed up on the screen, would barely be cause for His Holiness to reach for the smelling salts. But never mind him. Why doesn’t it trouble her?

I worry that I come from the last generation of people who even recognise the sexualisation of mainstream culture. Do we get to a stage where people of Rihanna’s age (24) and under think it is just the done thing to thrust their hips and lick their lips in public? Do we become enraged by the news that thousands of children on social networking sites are at risk of being abused by paedophiles, while failing to address the fact that Grammy-winning pop stars are making like porn stars on TV in our living rooms? You know it’s a funny, mixed-up old world when Suzi Quatro has to come over all Mary Whitehouse, really you do.

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In his new biography of Jesus Christ (presumably it will sit on shop shelves next to tomes by Katie Price and Jeremy Clarkson) Pope Benedict XVI claims that nativity donkeys and cattle are a myth, and that we should be cautious about popular claims that angels sang to the shepherds to proclaim the birth of Christ. They spoke the words instead, apparently, this simple misunderstanding leading to the craze for carol singing. But back to the asses. “There is no mention of animals in the Gospels,” writes the Pope, thus breaking the hearts of children across the country who have been cast as donkeys in their school play. Bah humbug! Just who in God’s name does he think he is?

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According to research, Facebook makes us less able to fib. We are so keen to upload photos and post status updates that nobody bothers to lie any more because it is far easier to be caught out. Yet when I trawl through my friend “feed”, and see how desperate some Facebook acquaintances are to detail every cough and spit of their existence (“eating chocolate!!!”, “I have an ulcer!”), I do wonder if honesty is always the best policy.

Teenager Who Performed At Obama’s Inauguration Ceremony Is The Latest Victim Of Chicago Gun Violence

By Adam Peck on Jan 30, 2013 at 10:20 am

Hadiya Pendleton, 15 years old, was killed in Chicago on Tuesday.

Less than two weeks ago, Hadiya Pendleton was leading her classmates in the King College Prep School Marching Band down Pennsylvania Avenue on the afternoon of President Obama’s second inauguration. It would be an opportunity of a lifetime for any 15 year old, but for Pendleton, it was her last. On Tuesday, she was gunned down in a park a few blocks from school on the South Side of Chicago, less than a mile from the first family’s home.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Pendleton and another classmate, a 16 year old boy, were both caught in the middle of a gang war. The boy was still in serious condition on Tuesday evening, but Pendleton did not survive:

Friends of the slain girl said King was dismissed early today because of exams, and students went to the park on Oakenwald–something they don’t usually do.

Friends said the girl was a majorette and a volleyball player, a friendly and sweet presence at King, one of the top 10 CPS selective enrollment schools. Pendleton performed with other King College students at President Barack Obama’s inaugural events.

In the last year, Chicago has endured a surge of gun-related murders, more than quadruple the number of homicides in New York City and58 percent more than the number of U.S. soldiers shot and killed in Afghanistan. During the recent debate over gun control, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has sought to place his city at the front of the push for reform, instructing the city’s pension funds to divest from any gun manufacturer and supporting more gun buyback programs.

Justice Department's criminal division chief to step down

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WASHINGTON | Wed Jan 30, 2013 9:37am EST

(Reuters) - Lanny Breuer, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division, plans to step down on March 1, according to an internal memo.

"As I wrote to the President, and want to tell you, serving as the head of this remarkable Division has been the greatest privilege of my professional life," Breuer said in a memo to criminal division employees dated Tuesday.

Breuer, who previously worked as a defense lawyer and in the Clinton White House, has led the division since 2009.

He faced much criticism for the department's failure to bring major prosecutions against companies and individuals who played a role in the 2007-2009 financial crisis, but also led the division in several record-breaking settlements.

BP Plc agreed in November to pay $4 billion in criminal fines and penalties, the largest in history, on charges related to the 2010 Gulf oil spill.

The London-based bank HSBC Holdings plc also agreed to the largest forfeiture ever in December - $1.25 billion - to resolve charges that it failed to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program and let itself be used by major Mexican drug cartels.

(Reporting By Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Neil Stempleman)