LONDON - Government officials denied the Church of Scientology charitable status today, saying it does not provide any public services. Scientologists said they would appeal the decision, announced by the Charity Commission, which regulates charities. The commission said the church did not meet the essential test for charitable status - "that of conferring public benefit." Graeme Wilson, public-affairs director for the Church of Scientology in Britain, called the decision "wrong on the law and wrong on the facts." "If the same ...

Your Nov. 15 article about Scientologists in a case in Marseille, France ("Former Scientology leader guilty of fraud in France," World digest), omits the larger picture, which includes why Scientologists have been targeted. The article also did not mention the disappearance of the court files in this trial. Documents critical to the defense were among the files destroyed, and the president of the Marseille court admitted that court personnel were responsible for it. There is also no question about Scientology's religiosity ...

SEATTLE — Responding to e-mail complaints, Amazon.com says it will restore a book critical of the Scientology movement to its online catalog. The book, "A Piece of Blue Sky," by British writer Jon Atack, was banned by a British court following a successful 1995 defamation lawsuit against Atack. Amazon.com pulled the book in February, but said this week that it would reinstate it. "While the decision in February seemed the right thing to do at the time, we thought we could ...

Yesterday's Supreme Court ruling upholding a more than $1 million award against a national anti-cult group would seem a straightforward victory for a onetime local man. Jason Scott was 18 in 1991 when he was taken from his mother's Bellevue home to an isolated beach house on the Washington coast for five days of religious "deprogramming." He sued the Cult Awareness Network (CAN), and the Supreme Court has now agreed that it must pay up. But in the case of Cult ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Supreme Court today left intact a $1.08 million award against the Cult Awareness Network over the 1991 abduction and attempted deprogramming of a young Kirkland man. The justices, without comment, rejected an appeal that challenged the award as illegal and unconstitutional. Lawyers for the now-defunct, Chicago-based network said that holding the nonprofit group legally accountable for the act of one unpaid volunteer was "unprecedented and unsupportable." The appeal said the award threatens other advocacy groups "across ...

Getting religion has never been easy if you're a member of the media. A few years ago, in response to complaints that journalism was neglecting matters of faith, many newspapers expanded the space and staffing devoted to such topics. Television news also began doing more pieces devoted to Promise Keepers, papal policy, mega-churches and the like. Yet most journalists still have a blind spot when it comes to the spiritual quotient in stories. Perhaps the problem lies in the average reporter's ...

IN THE '70s, Jim Jones moved his Peoples Temple from San Francisco to Guyana to escape what he saw as persecution. In the U.S., the temple had run a free clinic and a drug-rehab program, but reports from Guyana began detailing brutality. Tim Reiterman was there when 913 people died in what we now call "Jonestown." OAKLAND, Calif. - For 20 years now, they have come to a grassy hillside overlooking San Francisco Bay to share tears, hugs and their private ...

The American West, like this country itself, was a refuge for religious movements. The Mormons moved to Utah - or Zion as they preferred to call it - because of its isolation from the rest of the country. But it didn't quite work out as expected. The federal government in 1857 insisted that the Mormons end the practice of polygamy - and sent a military force to occupy Utah and convert the territory and its theocracy into a secular state. The ...

SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals court has reaffirmed $1.09 million in damages against an anti-cult organization for its role in trying to "deprogram" a Washington state teenager, despite a warning from seven judges that free speech was under attack. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied reconsideration Wednesday of a panel's 2-1 decision in April upholding damages against the Cult Awareness Network (CAN). Without announcing the exact vote, the court said a request for a rehearing had failed to ...

SAN FRANCISCO - A $1.09 million damage award against an anti-cult organization for its role in trying to "deprogram" a Washington teenager at his mother's request was upheld Wednesday by a federal appeals court. There was evidence to support a jury's finding that a volunteer was acting on behalf of the Cult Awareness Network when she referred the mother, Kathy Tonkin of Kirkland, to deprogrammer Rick Ross, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in its 2-1 ruling. Tonkin had ...

BERLIN — A day after thousands of Scientologists demanded religious freedom in Germany, the Church of Scientology was trying to convince a German court today that it is a religion. A favorable decision by Germany's highest administrative court would entitle the group to benefits such as tax-exempt status and the freedom to recruit followers. The Los Angeles-based Church of Scientology won a legal battle in July when a court in the Baden-Wuerttemberg state capital, Stuttgart, ruled that Scientology was a religious ...

THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE make a living designing Web sites. And for spreading ideology, creating a Web page is `easier than standing at airports ... handing out brochures.' —————————————————————– SAN FRANCISCO - Like most weird postings on the Internet, rambling statements by members of the Heaven's Gate cult about UFOs, comets and religion were largely ignored - until now. After 39 members of the cult committed suicide, Internet surfers nearly crashed servers trying to find out more information about the group whose ...

BARRINGTON, Ill. - Hostile takeovers are nothing new in the corporate world, but what happened to the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) is an exceptional tale of the hostile takeover of a nonprofit organization. The anti-cult advocacy group is being dismembered and absorbed by its adversaries, who attorneys say have deftly outmaneuvered CAN in the courts. CAN's fate highlights the crippled state of what was once a prominent movement that for years kept America's unorthodox religious groups on the defensive. The modern ...

BARRINGTON, Ill. - For 20 years, the Cult Awareness Network ran the nation's best-known hotline for parents who grew distraught when unconventional religious groups they neither trusted nor understood suddenly won the allegiance of their children. From its offices in a Chicago suburb, the network (known as CAN) answered more than 350 telephone inquiries a week, counseled relatives at conferences attended by thousands and gave news interviews to everyone from small-town daily newspapers to "Nightline." As CAN's influence rose, so did ...

PORTLAND — The man accused of shooting four people in a Church of Scientology branch pleaded not guilty today to 13 criminal counts arising from the Sept. 25 incident. Along with the shootings, Jarius Godeka is accused of taking a hostage and setting a fire at the church's Celebrity Centre. No trial date was set. Godeka, who was jailed briefly early this year for threatening to kill church members and demanding money, had blamed the church for business problems.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - The Church of Scientology has settled a copyright dispute with an Internet provider that many in the computer industry worried would restrict freedom of expression in cyberspace. The church and Netcom On-Line Communication Services, one of the nation's largest Internet-access providers, agreed not to discuss details of the out-of-court settlement. They did say, however, that the online service has posted a warning to its subscribers telling them not to use Netcom to "unlawfully distribute the intellectual property ...

[Shorter version of Are searches in civil cases also violating rights? | Los Angeles Times (California) | 23 October 1995.] IT'S AN issue of copyright against constitutional rights. Some copyright holders, particularly software makers, are using a special court order to send their employees legally into one's home. At 6:30 a.m. on July 26, off-duty U.S. marshals and officials from software maker Novell Inc. rang the doorbell at Joseph and Miki Casalino's home outside Salt Lake City. They were there, ...

A 23-year-old Seattle-area man was awarded nearly $5 million yesterday for civil-rights violations that occurred when religious "deprogrammers" took him from his home and tried to persuade him to leave the United Pentecostal Church. Federal-court jurors delivered their verdict yesterday after deliberating eight hours, ending a trial that began when Jason Scott sued deprogrammer Rick Ross, Ross' associates and Cult Awareness Network (CAN), a Chicago-based group that monitors cults. Scott's mother, Kathy Tonkin, contacted CAN in 1991 when she became worried ...

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Alexandria, Va., yesterday permitted The Washington Post to retain a copy of Church of Scientology texts and to use the texts in its news reporting, saying the paper's news-gathering rights far outweigh claims that the documents are protected by copyright and trade secrecy laws. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema refused to issue a preliminary injunction against The Post, saying its excerpts of the church's texts in an Aug. 19 Style section article were brief and ...

As the Church of Scientology battles a band of cyberspace dissidents - seizing computers and papers from the homes of vocal online critics in the past two weeks - local defectors charge they are being harassed for speaking out against the church. Robert Vaughn Young and Stacy Young, longtime staff members who left the Church of Scientology in 1989, complained to police that Scientologists have picketed their house in West Seattle at least five times in the past two weeks. They ...