These are taken from when he was an Archbishop and Cardinal, and that's not to say he will go against the flow of what's been happening in the Church, but this is a breath of fresh air and leads one to hope that some changes may be coming (even if minor):

On the sex abuse cases:

"You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person," Bergoglio told Rabbi Abraham Skorka, rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary. Their conversation was held in 2012 while Bergoglio was archbishop of Buenos Aires.

He told Skorka that when a bishop once asked him what he should do with priests suspected to molesting children: "I told him to take away the priests' licenses, not to allow them to exercise the priesthood any more, and to begin a canonical trial in that diocese's court."

"I think that's the attitude to have. I do not believe in taking positions that uphold a certain corporative spirit in order to avoid damaging the image of the institution."

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Priests and family relations:

The future pope said that if a seminarian -- or a priest -- falls in love or has a child with a woman, he counsels them to leave and support his family, to "go in peace to be a good Christian and not a bad priest."

Bergoglio also said that if a priest got a woman pregnant, he advises the man to leave the priesthood so he can take care of the mother and child, even if the couple do not marry. "For just as that child has the right to have a mother, he has a right to the face of a father," he said. He added that if it is a one-time affair with no children, then he tries to help the priest do penance and "get on track again."

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Celibacy:

Still, the future pope said, "For now, the discipline of celibacy stands firm." He added, however, that while he favors maintain celibacy for priests, "with all its pros and cons," celibacy is "a matter of discipline, not of faith. It can change."

Roe v. Wade

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Sequel

LAST week, scientists sequenced the genome of cells taken without consent from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. She was a black tobacco farmer and mother of five, and though she died in 1951, her cells, code-named HeLa, live on. They were used to help develop our most important vaccines and cancer medications, in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, cloning. Now they may finally help create laws to protect her family's privacy -- and yours.

The family has been through a lot with HeLa: they didn't learn of the cells until 20 years after Lacks's death, when scientists began using her children in research without their knowledge. Later their medical records were released to the press and published without consent. Because I wrote a book about Henrietta Lacks and her family, my in-box exploded when news of the genome broke. People wanted to know: did scientists get the family's permission to publish her genetic information? The answer is no.

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On its own, the HeLa genome doesn't say anything specific about Lacks: it's a string of billions of letters that detail the genetic information that makes up a HeLa cell, which is useful for science. A news release from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, where the HeLa genome was sequenced, said, "We cannot infer anything about Henrietta Lacks's genome, or of her descendants, from the data generated in this study."

But that's not true. And a few scientists decided to prove it. One uploaded HeLa's genome to a public Web site called SNPedia, a Wikipedia-like site for translating genetic information. Minutes later, it produced a report full of personal information about Henrietta Lacks, and her family. (The scientist kept that report confidential, sharing it only with me.) Until recently, few people had the ability to process raw genome data like this. Now anyone who can send an e-mail can do it. No one knows what we may someday learn about Lacks's great-grandchildren from her genome, but we know this: the view we have today of genomes is like a world map, but Google Street View is coming very soon.

The decision will drastically shrink the Cypriot economy, and likely puts an end to the country's business model as a low-tax business haven.

The Cyprus experiment in big bankng fails and the country of just about a million probably returns to the land of tourism and beaches.

The statistical difference is dramatic, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A white person is five times as likely to commit suicide with a gun as to be shot with a gun; for each African American who uses a gun to commit suicide, five are killed by other people with guns.

Where a person lives matters, too. Gun deaths in urban areas are much more likely to be homicides, while suicide is far and away the dominant form of gun death in rural areas. States with the most guns per capita, such as Montana and Wyoming, have the highest suicide rates; states with low gun ownership rates, such as Massachusetts and New York, have far fewer suicides per capita.

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Scholars say it is no coincidence that the places in the United States with high suicide rates also have high gun ownership rates. By contrast, states with the lowest gun ownership rates tend to have the lowest suicide rates.

Saw "Spring Breakers"...brilliant film, though I'd definitely call it a "love it or hate it", with most of the theater hating it.  I thought it was an excellent pervy art film portrayal of sex & violence youth culture, with notable cinematography.  Especially poignant with gun violence on everybody's brain.  One of the best films I've seen in a while.

Won our rec-league touch football championship game Sunday...27-14.  The fellas and I take it far too seriously...we're #1!;)