Employment Confidence Survey Picks Up But Still... | Stuff.co.nz

Employment confidence is picking up as people feel more secure in their jobs, but the latest Westpac McDermott Miller survey shows confidence remains weak.

The employment confidence index rose to 98.9 in the September 2012 quarter, up from 96.2 in the June 2012 quarter.

Westpac Chief Economist Dominick Stephens said: "On the plus side, people feel a lot more secure in their jobs than three months ago.

"There may be a sense that the storm clouds around the economy have lifted a little."

But perceptions of overall job opportunities continue to be very downbeat, he said.

Recent news around jobs has been poor, including another disappointing June quarter employment report, said Stephens.

In the June quarter, the unemployment rate rose slightly to 6.8 per cent.

"People also speak from experience, and their continued pessimism about job opportunities suggests that unemployment remained high through the September quarter."

"Employment confidence in Canterbury has bounced back and once again clearly leads the rest of the country, with Cantabrians notably more upbeat about future job opportunities," said Stephens.

"This is another sign that the economy is becoming increasingly 'two-speed'. "

However, despite growing demand for reconstruction-related work, today's survey suggests that wage pressures remain fairly subdued.

- ? Fairfax NZ News

Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/7751931/Employment-confidence-remains-weak

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Sometimes It's Just a Way to Die | GeriPal - Geriatrics and Palliative ...

During my senior year of residency, I brought an elderly gentleman to the operating room with peritonitis and a benign-appearing CT scan only to find a belly full of black, necrotic bowel. We closed him up, told his family, and he died peacefully several hours later.

When I presented the case at Mortality and Morbidity conference, one of the attending surgeons asked me why this patient had dead bowel. I ran off a long list of pathophysiologic possibilities, and he replied, "You know, Gretchen, sometimes it?s just a way to die."

At the time I thought this was strange, but since then I have come to understand what he meant.

Patients often come to the hospital when they are dying. Fear of the unknown and pain typically bring them in, and it?s not uncommon for their primary complaint to manifest as a surgical problem ? a gangrenous toe, a dead gallbladder. As surgeons, we often step in and operate right before they die. After a string of poor outcomes, a close friend from residency called to commiserate about the next paper he was writing: "The Premorbid Gastrectomy: How I Do It." Although I have angst about gallows humor as a robust coping mechanism, the content here is telling; for many elderly or otherwise frail patients, surgery is not the answer.

Clearly this is not the case for all surgical problems in elderly patients, and for those patients who appear to be on death?s door because of their surgical problem, some cold hard steel is probably just what they need. But we must be mindful of the patient whose surgical problem is the final paver on his pathway out; the pneumonia that is the "old man?s friend" may instead present as cecal volvulus with perforation.

Recently, I cared for an 88-year-old man with severe multi-infarct dementia, third-degree heart block, and an ejection fraction of 10% who was on hemodialysis. He was nonambulatory, nursing home?bound, and admitted to our medicine service with wet gangrene of his left first toe. (The history has been adjusted slightly to protect patient privacy.)

I told his family that the only treatment to resolve his ischemic necrosis and impending sepsis was an above-the-knee amputation, which I would not recommend because it was unlikely to prolong his life or improve its quality. They were taken aback, and I spent more than an hour explaining to his wife and daughter why cutting off the leg of this once-distinguished World War II veteran right before he died was not a good idea.

Families ask, "You mean you aren?t going to fix it?" because they fail to recognize that the surgical problem is a sign of a much larger and inexorable journey toward death. Although the "fix it" metaphor may be a simple way to explain to a young healthy person the need for a complicated operation, it fails to convey the context here where surgery could win the battle but lose the war.

I have colleagues who see this as a failure of primary care. They wonder why patients and families are unprepared for the inevitable terminal event and have not considered how frail health predicts a poor long-term prognosis. I suspect there are many reasons for this, not the least of which is unwillingness on the part of the patient or family to tackle these issues before crisis sets in.

Nonetheless, at 2 a.m. when an 85-year-old woman with Alzheimer?s dementia, COPD, and acute kidney injury is brought in from her nursing home with toxic megacolon, it is the surgeon who must help the patient?s family understand that she is dying, which is the context for making a surgical decision.

How can we do this? First, it is important to be clear with the patient and/or family that you would not recommend surgery. While it would be overly paternalistic to say that surgery is not an option, we can explain that there is a real choice to be made and that palliative care is an excellent plan. Too often, including surgery as an option is interpreted as a recommendation, so it is important to clarify where you stand.

Second, for families who insist that the patient would want "everything" done, it helps to clarify what they mean by "everything." Everything can mean anything from "everything that might provide maximal relief of suffering even if it might shorten life" to "everything that has any possible chance to prolong life even a small amount, regardless of its effect on patient suffering" (Ann. Intern. Med. 2009;151:345-9).

Third, we can borrow some helpful phrases from our colleagues in palliative care. For example, "Sometimes by prolonging dying, we prolong suffering."

And finally, if all else fails, you might try, "You know, sometimes this is just a way to die."

by: Gretchen Schwarze, Assistant Professor of Surgery, University of Wisconsin

This commentary is used with permission from Surgery News Digital Network (www.acssurgerynews.com).

Source: http://www.geripal.org/2012/09/sometimes-its-just-way-to-die.html

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Video: Tourist plane crashes on way to Mount Everest

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Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/49213089/

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Realogy Announces Launch Of $1 Billion Initial ... - Franchising.com

September 28, 2012 // Franchising.com // Parsippany, N.J. -?Realogy Holdings Corp. (formerly known as Domus Holdings Corp.) (the "Company") today announced that it plans to conduct an initial public offering of 40,000,000 shares of its common stock. The underwriters of the offering will have a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 6,000,000 shares of common stock from the Company at the initial public offering price. The Company's shares of common stock have been approved for listing on The New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "RLGY."

The Company intends to use the net proceeds of the offering, along with cash on hand, primarily to repay outstanding indebtedness.

Goldman, Sachs & Co., J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Barclays Capital Inc. and Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC are acting as the joint book runners for the proposed offering. Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Wells Fargo Securities and BofA Merrill Lynch are acting as lead co-managers and Credit Agricole Securities (USA) Inc., Comerica Securities, Inc., CRT Capital Group LLC, Houlihan Lokey Capital, Inc., Lebenthal & Co., LLC, Loop Capital Markets LLC and Apollo Global Securities, LLC are acting as co-managers.

The offering will be made only by means of a prospectus which, when available, may be obtained by contacting: Goldman, Sachs & Co., Prospectus Department, 200 West Street, New York, NY, 10282, by calling (866) 471-2526, or by e-mailing prospectus-ny@ny.email.gs.com or J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, or by calling (866) 803-9204.

A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC, but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

About Realogy Holdings Corp.

Realogy Holdings Corp., a global provider of real estate and relocation services, has a diversified business model that includes real estate franchising, brokerage, relocation and title services. Realogy's brands and business units include Better Homes and Gardens? Real Estate, CENTURY 21?, Coldwell Banker?, Coldwell Banker Commercial?, The Corcoran Group?, ERA?, Sotheby's International Realty?, NRT LLC, Cartus and Title Resource Group. Collectively, Realogy's franchise system members operate approximately 13,500 offices with 238,500 sales associates doing business in 103 countries and territories around the world. Headquartered in Parsippany, N.J., Realogy is owned by affiliates of Apollo Management, L.P., a subsidiary of Apollo Global Management, LLC, a leading global alternative asset manager.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information

The information in this release contains forward-looking information that involves substantial risks and uncertainties regarding the proposed initial public offering by Realogy Holdings Corp. Such risks and uncertainties include, among other things, the possibility that the initial public offering will not be completed within a particular time frame or at a particular offering amount, or at all, including as a result of regulatory, market or other factors, or that the anticipated conversion of the Convertible Notes and/or any reduction of indebtedness will occur. Realogy Holdings Corp. assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements contained in this release as the result of new information or future events or developments.

Contacts:

Investors
Alicia Swift
(973) 407-4669
alicia.swift@realogy.com

Media?
Mark Panus
(973) 407-7215
mark.panus@realogy.com

###

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Source: http://www.franchising.com/news/20120928_realogy_announces_launch_of_1_billion_initial_publ.html

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Mars Water Mystery: NASA Rover's Ancient Streambed Discovery Is the Latest Clue

A NASA rover's discovery of an ancient streambed on Mars is exciting, but it?s far from the first solid evidence that the Red Planet was once a warmer and wetter place.

On Thursday (Sept. 27), scientists announced that the Curiosity rover had found rocky outcrops containing large and rounded stones cemented in a conglomerate matrix. The discovery suggests that water had flowed fast and relatively deep ? perhaps hip-deep, in fact ? through the area billions of years ago.

"This is the first time we're actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars," Curiosity co-investigator William Dietrich, of the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.

But Curiosity's find didn't exactly surprise mission scientists. They chose to set the $2.5 billion robot down in the Red Planet's huge Gale Crater, after all, because Mars-orbiting spacecraft have spotted signs there of long-ago water activity ? from channels and alluvial fans to minerals that form in the presence of liquid water.

And these more recent observations build on evidence for a wet ancient Mars that goes back four decades and has been accumulating ever since. [The Search for Water on Mars (Photos)]

Eyes in the sky

Perhaps the first compelling signs that the Red Planet's surface ? a frigid and dry place today ? once harbored liquid water came from NASA's Mariner 9 spacecraft.

Mariner 9 launched toward Mars in May 1971 and later that year became the first probe ever to orbit another planet. Mariner 9's images showed canyons ? including the enormous Valles Marineris, which is named after the spacecraft ? and what appeared to be riverbeds.

A succession of other NASA orbiters ? from the twin Vikings in the mid-1970s to Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which remain active today ? have spotted many more landforms that speak of long-ago erosion by liquid water.

MRO has observed streaks in the Red Planet's Newton Crater that shift over the course of a few months, suggesting that water might even be flowing seasonally on Mars today.

The evidence is also mineralogic as well as topographic. Instruments aboard MRO and other craft have detected water-associated minerals such as clays and sulfates in numerous locations across the Red Planet.

Ground-truthing

Over the past decade, rovers have ground-truthed some of the observations made from orbit, strengthening the case for a wet ancient Mars.

For example, NASA's Opportunity rover found multiple deposits of odd, iron-rich spherules after landing on the Red Planet in January 2004. These so-called "blueberries" are concretions created by the action of mineral-rich water inside rocks, scientists say.

Opportunity's twin, Spirit, discovered strong evidence of an ancient hydrothermal system near its landing site back in 2007. And last December, researchers announced that Opportunity had found a thin vein of gypsum while poking along the rim of Mars' Endeavour Crater.

"There was a fracture in the rock, water flowed through it, gypsum was precipitated from the water. End of story," Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Opportunity's principal investigator, told reporters at the time. "There's no ambiguity about this, and this is what makes it so cool."

Searching for habitable environments

Here on Earth, life thrives pretty much anywhere liquid water is found, which explains the intense interest in searching for signs of the stuff on Mars.

Indeed, the past decade or so of NASA's activities at the Red Planet have been geared toward "following the water." Curiosity's mission marks a transition to the next phase in the hunt for past or present Mars life: searching for habitable environments.

Curiosity is about 50 days into a two-year mission to determine if the Gale area can, or ever could, support microbial life. This is a long and involved process that requires more than the confirmation of an ancient streambed, researchers said.

"The question about habitability goes just beyond the simple observation of water on Mars to recreating the environments in greater detail, with an understanding of the chemistry that was going on at that time, to ask if this is the kind of place that micro-organisms could've lived," Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told reporters Thursday.

"That's still to be determined, and that's the research the team is working on," he added.

Curiosity's mission may also shed light on when and why Mars dried out long ago. Scientists plan to drive the 1-ton robot partway up Mount Sharp, which rises 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) into the Red Planet sky from Gale's center.

They're keen to explore Mount Sharp's base, which harbors clays and sulfates, orbital observations have shown. About 2,300 feet (700 meters) up, however, these deposits peter out. If Curiosity climbs high enough to cross this threshold, it could help scientists piece together a history of wet Mars, dry Mars and the transition between the two, researchers have said.

Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and?Google+.

Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mars-water-mystery-nasa-rovers-ancient-streambed-discovery-140438772.html

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Evolutionary psychologists study the purpose of punishment and reputation

ScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2012) ? For two decades, evolutionary scientists have been locked in a debate over the evolved functions of three distinctive human behaviors: the great readiness we show for cooperating with new people, the strong interest we have in tracking others' reputations regarding how well they treat others, and the occasional interest we have in punishing people for selfishly mistreating others.

In an article published September 27 in the journal PLoS ONE, researchers at UC Santa Barbara's Center for Evolutionary Psychology report new findings that may help settle the debate and provide answers to the behavioral puzzle.

As they go about their daily lives, people usually don't know the names of the people they encounter and -- in cities, at least -- typically expect never to see them again, noted Max M. Krasnow, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at UCSB and the paper's lead author. Despite the fact that these encounters are brief, anonymous, and unlikely to be repeated, however, people often behave as if they are interested in the ongoing well-being and behavior of the strangers they meet.

"Imagine that, while grocery shopping, you see someone help a wheelchair-bound person he or she doesn't know get her bags across the parking lot to her car. For many people, witnessing the action would elicit feelings of kindness toward the helper," Krasnow explained. "Equally, if people see someone driven off the road by a reckless driver, they might become angry enough to pursue and even confront the driver. Evolutionary scientists are interested in why humans have impulses to help the kind stranger or to punish the callous one. At first glance, these sometimes costly impulses seem like they would subtract from the welfare of the individual who exhibited them, and so should be evolutionarily disfavored."

Other contributors to the paper include Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, professors of psychology and anthropology, respectively, and co-directors of UCSB's Center for Evolutionary Psychology; and Eric J. Pedersen, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Miami.

Scientists have struggled for decades to explain these behaviors in evolutionary terms, with two alternative theories gaining prominence. The first proposes that these social inclinations emerged because our ancestors lived in small populations, where every encounter -- even one with a stranger -- had a chance to develop into an ongoing relationship that yielded mutual gains from cooperation. In such a world, paying attention to how those around you treat others could help zero in on the partners most likely to cooperate with you. In addition, letting it be known that you wouldn't allow yourself to be treated poorly would increase the likelihood that you'd be treated well.

The second theory suggests that these behaviors emerged because our ancestors lived in groups that often fought with other groups -- interactions where groups with high levels of internal cooperation would have the advantage over groups in which the members were divisive and exploitative of each other. This theory proposes that these other-oriented social inclinations were designed to cultivate a group-wide culture of cooperation.

"The reason why the debate has dragged on so long is that previous studies unfortunately focused on situations where the two theories made very similar predictions," said Tooby. "We wanted to design studies involving situations where the theories made sharply contrasting predictions, so the results would falsify one theory or the other."

In the studies reported in this paper, over 200 participants were tested in a series of structured social interactions designed to capture the essence of real-world situations like the supermarket mentioned above. "We wanted to know exactly what kinds of information people actually use in deciding who to trust -- that is, who to cooperate with, and who to avoid," said Krasnow. "If our minds are designed to seek out the benefits of cooperative relationships with others, then participants should have preferred to trust those likely to cooperate with them in particular. On the other hand, if our reputational psychology is designed to support group-wide cohesion and cooperation, the participants should have resisted cooperating with those who defected on other group members."

The findings supported the individual cooperation account, not the group cooperation account. "Participants ceased responding to information about whether their partners cheated others when they had good information that their partners would not cheat them," Tooby emphasized.

The researchers were also interested in testing the diverging predictions about what situations should trigger the inclination to punish cheating. "We all recognize that punishing others is costly and unpleasant," said Cosmides. "So what benefits led it to evolve?"

The authors reasoned that tracking the triggers of punishment should illuminate which benefits favored its evolution. "If the impulse to punish evolved as a bargaining tool to defend the individual by deterring against future instances of being cheated, then participants should be inclined to punish others' defections when they themselves would be vulnerable to being cheated by that person in the future," said Kasnow. "On the other hand, if our punitive psychology is designed to defend the group against cheating, then participants should have punished those who mistreated others, regardless of their own personal exposure to continuing mistreatment by that person."

The researchers found that participants strongly conditioned their punishment of their partners' cheating on their own vulnerability to continued bad treatment from their partner. As Krasnow pointed out, people in these experiments systematically avoided expending effort to reform those who only posed a risk to others. Cosmides noted, "It's very hard to reconcile these findings with the group cooperation theory."

These results have significant implications for the science of cooperation. "The current research findings suggest that the human readiness to cooperate, our selectivity in who we cooperate with, and our tendency to respond negatively when we are cheated form an efficient package to forge and maintain strongly cooperative relationships," said Krasnow. "The human tendencies to care about how a person treats others and to protest bad treatment are not simply a thin veneer of cultural norms atop a cold and calculating core. Rather, they represent fundamental features of a universal human social nature."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - Santa Barbara.

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Journal Reference:

1. Krasnow MM, Cosmides L, Pedersen EJ, Tooby J. What Are Punishment and Reputation for? PLoS ONE, 2012; 7(9): e45662 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0045662

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/Es--gt6RInQ/120927092126.htm

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Did the butler do it? A Q&A on the Vatican trial

FILE - In this file photo taken Wednesday, May 2, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI arrives in St. Peter's square at the Vatican for a general audience as his then-butler Paolo Gabriele, bottom, and his personal secretary Georg Gaenswein sit in the car with him. Pope Benedict XVI's ex-butler Paolo Gabriele and another Vatican lay employee, Claudio Sciarpelletti, are scheduled to go on trial Saturday, Sept. 29, 2012, in the embarrassing theft of papal documents that exposed alleged corruption at the Holy See's highest levels. Gabriele was arrested May 24 after Vatican police found what prosecutors called an "enormous'' stash of documents from the pope's desk in his Vatican City apartment. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)

FILE - In this file photo taken Wednesday, May 2, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI arrives in St. Peter's square at the Vatican for a general audience as his then-butler Paolo Gabriele, bottom, and his personal secretary Georg Gaenswein sit in the car with him. Pope Benedict XVI's ex-butler Paolo Gabriele and another Vatican lay employee, Claudio Sciarpelletti, are scheduled to go on trial Saturday, Sept. 29, 2012, in the embarrassing theft of papal documents that exposed alleged corruption at the Holy See's highest levels. Gabriele was arrested May 24 after Vatican police found what prosecutors called an "enormous'' stash of documents from the pope's desk in his Vatican City apartment. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, File)

VATICAN CITY (AP) ? The Vatican has never seen anything like it.

Pope Benedict XVI's trusted butler, who dressed the pontiff each morning, attended his daily Mass and helped serve him his meals, stands accused of stealing the pope's private correspondence and giving it to a journalist who wrote a blockbuster book about the secrets of one of the most secretive institutions in the world.

Paolo Gabriele, a 46-year-old father of three, goes on trial Saturday in the most sensational crime committed on Vatican territory since the 1998 double murder of the Swiss Guard commander and his wife. That case never came to trial because the suspect killed himself.

Gabriele, who was replaced after the scandal broke in May, is scheduled to face the three-judge Vatican tribunal, charged with aggravated theft and facing up to four years in prison if convicted. He has already confessed and asked to be pardoned by the pope ? something most Vatican watchers say is a given if he is convicted.

WHAT PAPERS WERE STOLEN?

According to prosecutors, Gabriele had an "enormous" stash of papal documents at his Vatican City apartment. After his May 24 arrest, he admitted he photocopied documents and gave them to Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, whose "His Holiness: The secret papers of Pope Benedict XVI" was published in May. The most damaging letter reproduced in the book was written by the former No. 2 Vatican administrator to the pope, in which he begged not to be transferred as punishment for exposing alleged corruption. The prelate, Monsignor Carlo Maria Vigano, is now the Vatican's U.S. ambassador.

WHY WAS IT LEAKED?

Nuzzi has said his source, code-named "Maria" in the book, wanted to shed light on the secrets of the church that were damaging it. Taken as a whole, the documents seemed aimed at discrediting Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state and Benedict's longtime trusted deputy. Bertone, 77, a canon lawyer and soccer enthusiast, has frequently been criticized for perceived shortcomings in running the Vatican.

DID THE BUTLER DO IT?

Prosecutors quoted Gabriele as saying he knew taking the documents was wrong, but that he felt the Holy Spirit was inspiring him to shed light on the problems he saw around him. "Seeing evil and corruption everywhere in the church ... I was sure that a shock, even a media one, would have been healthy to bring the Church back on the right track," Gabriele was quoted by prosecutors as saying during a June 5 interrogation. They quoted him as saying he never intended to hurt the church or Benedict.

IF HE CONFESSED, WHY BOTHER WITH A TRIAL?

In the U.S. legal system, a case such as this might result in a plea bargain. But the Vatican legal system doesn't provide for plea bargains, according to Giovanni Giacobbe, the prosecutor in the Vatican appeals court. He noted that confessions can be coerced or given up to protect someone else. Gabriele's confession must be corroborated by other evidence uncovered during the investigation in order for him to be convicted, he said. A co-defendant, Vatican computer expert Claudio Sciarpelletti, is charged with aiding and abetting Gabriele.

HOW DOES A VATICAN TRIAL WORK?

The hearing opens Saturday at 9:30 a.m. No oaths are taken ? as the Vatican legal system, like the Italian one on which it is based, assumes a suspect may lie for self-protection. The hearing is declared open and one of the judges reads the charges aloud against Gabriele. He doesn't enter a plea. The defense can make objections to the indictment. Both sides may enter their witness lists. Eventually, the presiding judge ? Giuseppe Dalla Torre, president of the Vatican City State tribunal ? questions Gabriele. Unlike the U.S. system, prosecutors don't question suspects directly and there is no cross-examination; the judge conducts the interrogations on behalf of both sides. Eventually, after all witnesses are heard, objections dealt with and evidence examined, the judges convene in their chambers and issue a ruling.

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?

There has never been a trial like this before in the Vatican tribunal, so there's no way to know how long it will take. Much depends on what, if any, objections are raised and how many witnesses are called. Hearings are usually only held on Saturdays, since the judges on the Vatican tribunal hold full-time jobs elsewhere.

WHAT'S THE TRIBUNAL LIKE?

The trial takes place in the small, austere courtroom inside a four-story, peach-colored palazzo inside Vatican City. A plaque near the entrance reads "Judicial Offices" and a carved stone papal seal frames the doorway. A metal detector greets visitors. The courtroom features rich wood paneling and gilded molding on the ceiling, and a small crucifix is centered behind the chairs of the three lay judges. Gabriele, assuming he attends, can sit at one of the tables facing the judges with his lawyer. The prosecutor has his own place at the other table. There is a small section for the public.

WHO CAN ATTEND A VATICAN TRIAL?

On paper, Vatican court proceedings are open to the public. But Giacobbe said those wishing to attend must petition the court, which then decides whether to grant permission. Gabriele, who was granted house arrest in July after spending nearly two months in a Vatican police unit, doesn't have to attend. For the media, eight journalists attend each session and report back to the Vatican press corps. No television, still cameras or audio recording is allowed and court transcripts aren't public.

HOW HAS THE POPE AND THE VATICAN REACTED?

The Vatican took the betrayal very seriously: Benedict appointed a commission of three cardinals to investigate alongside Vatican magistrates; they delivered their confidential report to the pope over the summer. Benedict addressed the scandal for the first time a week after Gabriele was arrested, saying "The events of recent days about the Curia and my collaborators have brought sadness in my heart." But in a nod to his confidence in Bertone, he added: "I want to renew my trust in and encouragement of my closest collaborators and all those who every day, with loyalty and a spirit of sacrifice and in silence, help me fulfill my ministry."

___

Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-09-28-Vatican-Scandal/id-628e037d8462413c8f4cfaa2f79d4c1a

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