A SPECTER is haunting Newt Gingrich — the specter of socialism.
Gingrich was Trumpy before Trump when he was the Republican Speaker of the House in the late 1990s, and he’s never met a tax break for the rich he didn’t love.
With a new Gallup poll showing that 57 percent of Democrats view socialism favorably, against only 47 percent who put capitalism in the plus column, Gingrich was driven a little (more) bonkers by the shock of it....

What Is Socialism?
And the answer is...not that simple, as you might have guessed. The new socialist movement in the U.S. that so frightens Gingrich consists of various schools of thought, which is only natural.

It is hard to know what to think of the bombshell dropped by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who released a scalding letter on Sunday (Aug. 26) calling on Pope Francis to resign. Viganò, the former Vatican ambassador to the United States, claims in the letter that Pope Francis knew that recently resigned Cardinal Theodore McCarrick abused seminarians when he was a bishop in New Jersey but nonetheless didn’t punish the cardinal....

Just as every diocese in the United States needs to do a full and transparent account of clerical sex abuse and each diocese’s response, so too the Vatican must disclose what it knew, when it knew and what it did or did not do. Nothing less will begin the restoration of credibility to the Catholic Church.

A study commissioned by the Puerto Rican government has found that an estimated 2,975 people died after Hurricane Maria devastated the U.S. territory last year, corroborating previous analyses that have long challenged the official death toll of 64 and bolstering calls that the American government provide substantially more aid to help with rebuilding efforts.
Acknowledging the new findings from George Washington University on Tuesday, progressive New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turned to Twitter to demand a "Marshall Plan" for Puerto Rico and a "just transition" to a renewable energy system that would replace the existing "unstable and unreliable power grid," which faced operational and financial issues even before the storm struck.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber, the attorney said that his team has a hearing scheduled on Sept. 10 to ask the court to rule on whether Trump and Cohen will be forced to sit down for a deposition.
“We’re going to ask that the stay be lifted and the court rule immediately on our application to depose Michael Cohen and Donald Trump forthwith,” Avenatti said.

Escaping accountability
The 1983 revision put forward by Pope John Paul II to the entire code made it impossible for bishops to dismiss priests. Authority for doing so became centralized in the Vatican.....


The 1983 code also reduced the maximum time within which proceedings could be initiated against priests having sex with a child to five years.
With victims often, understandably, not coming forward for years, that meant many priests escaped internal punishment by the Vatican.
Canonical trials also require the cooperation of the victim as a witness and are another obstacle to holding priests accountable. The code has encouraged the very inaction by bishops that the pope condemns.....

Since 2001, in a further centralizing move, the Vatican has required that bishops send all cases of substantiated allegations of child sex abuse to its Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is located at the Vatican, and is usually headed by a powerful Cardinal.

Faith is on the rise and 84% of the global population identifies with a religious group. what does it mean for the future?

Throughout his career — as he has built a global real estate and branding empire — Donald Trump has had one guiding principle: keep it private.
He has succeeded in doing this for four decades, through multiple bankruptcies and while borrowing literally billions of dollars. He has never had to disclose his personal or business financial information to the public because he has never offered publicly traded stock or debt for investors to purchase.

A range of challenges to family life in the 21st century — from poor communication and alienation to sexual misconduct and the treatment of LGBT persons — dominated conversation at the Catholic Church’s World Meeting of Families this week.
Participants in the four-day pastoral congress heard talks by church leaders in the United States and beyond as they sought encouragement in the wake of ongoing abuse scandals and shifting societal attitudes about sexuality.

As its progressive wing and a groundswell of new and energetic candidates continues to move the Democratic Party to the left, a new Reuters poll out Thursday shows that support for a key plank of this insurgency—Medicare for All—has hit an all-time high with 70 percent of all Americans now in favor of a such program, including nearly 85 percent of Democrats and a full 52 percent of Republicans.