I’m not sure if it is just Boston, but the Church is totally out of control if all of these allegations of pedophilia are true. We’re talking about 5-10% of the priesthood has been alleged to have committed these crimes against children for DECADES!
See MetaFilter discussion as well.
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Reiko-chan’s “Japanese for Anime Lovers” is a fun, educational website. Learn some Japanese and let’s watch some anime.

I’m a big Ogata fan but I don’t think she should take Koizumi’s offer to take over the Foreign Ministry. She’s done her duty, and getting involved in the current politics will only tarnish her platinum reputation….
Koizumi Sacks Tanaka, Nogami; Asks Ogata To Take Over Foreign Ministry
Putting a dramatic end to the quarrel between Foreign Minister Tanaka
and vice foreign minister Yoshiji Nogami, Prime Minister Koizumi called them
in separately Tuesday night and fired them. LDP Dietman Muneo Suzuki, whose
role in barring two NGOs from attending an Afghan relief conference last
week was at the center of the dispute, is also likely to be forced out of
his post as lower house Steering Committee chairman, reports said. Reports
said Koizumi asked former UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata,
currently his special representative on Afghanistan, to take Tanaka’s job.
As of mid-afternoon, Ogata hadn’t answered. Mainichi and Nihon Keizai said
Environment Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi is also under consideration for the
post, though Kawaguchi denied she has been approached. Deputy Foreign
Minister Toshiyuki Takano, is considered likely to replace Nogami, reports
said.
Early End: Koizumi executed the midnight sackings soon after the ruling
coalition pushed a Yen 2.6 trillion second supplementary budget through the
lower house in the face of an opposition boycott over the affair (Digest,
1/29). Because the dispute threatened to disrupt the legislative schedule in
the upper house, “I wanted to put an early end to the situation,” Koizumi
told the upper house Budget Committee when it met this morning. When a
committee members asked who he thought was telling the truth about Suzuki’s
influence at the Foreign Ministry, Koizumi said he didn’t want to get
involved in “an unending argument….In the end, the Foreign Ministry
decided to cooperate (with the barred NGOs), and so that’s fine.” Opposition
politicians, deprived of a juicy target, are still demanding a probe that
would require Tanaka, Nogami and NGO leader Kensuke Onishi to testify before
the upper house committee.
(From Japan Digest)

WP: The Compromise Effect

Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University explored a situation in an oft-cited experiment involving a theater ticket back in 1984. They told one group of subjects to imagine that they have arrived at the theater only to discover that they have lost their ticket. Would you pay another $10 to buy another ticket? they asked. A second group were asked to imagine that they are going to the play but haven’t bought a ticket in advance. Then, when they arrive at the theater, they realize they have lost a $10 bill. Would they still buy a ticket?
In both cases, the subjects were presented with essentially the same simple question: Would you want to spend $10 to see the play? That’s largely the way the cash-losing group thought of it, with 88 percent opting to buy the ticket. But the ticket losers, focusing on sunk costs, tended to frame the question in a different way: Am I willing to spend $20 to see a $10 play? Only 46 percent said yes.
HIGHLY interesting article. I am one who buys expensive car insurance…maybe I should reconsider?
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NYT: In Another Big Bankruptcy, a Fiber Optic Venture Fails
Global Crossing has never reported an annual profit since it was created in an ambitious plan to extend its sole resource Û a fiber optic cable traversing the Atlantic Ocean Û into a 100,000-mile network connecting 27 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The company has $22.4 billion in assets and $12.4 billion in debt, making its filing the largest bankruptcy by a telecommunications company. It is almost half the size of Enron, the largest bankruptcy filing of any kind in United States.
oopsie…

Reuters/Variety: Sony defies gloom with record Q3 sales, profit rise
Sony owed much of its good fortune to the weaker yen.
Sony’s previous earnings forecasts issued in October assumed exchange rates of 115 yen per dollar and 105 yen per euro for the second half of its business year.
The yen has since taken a drubbing, falling to three-year lows of nearly 135 yen per dollar in the gloom shrouding Japan’s debt-burdened financial sector and moribund economy.
Analysts noted, however, that currency hedging and pressure for discounts in overseas markets had kept Sony from reaping the full benefits of recent yen weakness.

Jitters in Japan for Savers and Banks
On Monday, Moody’s Investors Service lowered the deposit ratings for five regional banks and downgraded the outlook for Japan’s biggest banks to negative from stable. Moody’s (news/quote) said it “considers the Japanese banking system to be in a grossly inadequate financial shape to meet the new challenges from a changing systemic support mechanism.”
Starting in April, fixed-term deposits at any single bank will be insured only up to 10 million yen ($75,466) for each saver, a system similar to that of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in the United States. Ordinary savings accounts will be treated the same way beginning in April 2003
O’Neill Ends Trip With Call for Japan to Reform
“The straight fact is this: exchange rates cannot improve productivity or fix non-performing loans,” he said. “The weight of historical evidence shows that those who have tried to fix underlying economic problems with protectionist measures – and I count artificially depreciating the currency as one of those – actually weaken their own economy.”
The US is urging the Koizumi government to move quickly in three areas. First, Mr O’Neill called for an ambitious effort to resolve the problem of bad debt held by Japanese banks by government efforts to sell the loans at whatever they can fetch in the market and absorb the losses. Secondly, he backed further efforts to combat deflation through monetary policy, which he said would be necessary to allow other reforms to take place. Finally he said that a series of adjustments should be made to trade, regulatory and financial policies to introduce price competition into Japan’s domestic economy. He pointed out that Japanese companies that compete in international markets are highly competitive and said the same competitive pressures should be introduced into the domestic economy.
More bad news for Japan. It seems neverending…