Month: February 2019

The Vatican said Saturday that Pope Francis has defrocked disgraced former U.S. cardinal Theodore McCarrick. In July of last year, Francis accepted McCarrick’s resignation from the College of Cardinals following allegations he had sexually abused minor and adult seminarians over a period of decades. The Vatican said in a statement that in January 2019 it had found McCarrick guilty of “. . . solicitation in the Sacrament of Confession and sins against the Sixth Commandment with minors and with adults, with the aggravating factor of the abuse of power.” (The Sixth Commandment says ‘Thou shall not commit adultery’ and is …

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A Russian court has decided to prolong the detention of American investor Michael Calvey, founder of Baring Vostok Capital Partners, a Moscow-based private equity group. Late Friday the court moved to extend Calvey’s arrest for at least 72 hours and called for a second hearing Saturday. Four other defendants in the case have been ordered to remain in pretrial custody for two months. A spokeswoman for the Moscow district court Friday announced that Calvey had been detained along with other members of the firm Thursday on suspicion of stealing $37.5 million (2.5 billion rubles), a charge that carries of a …

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Disgraced former U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been expelled from the Roman Catholic priesthood following allegations against him, including sexual abuse of minors, the Vatican said Saturday. McCarrick, who in July became the first Roman Catholic prelate in nearly 100 years to lose the title of cardinal, has now become the highest profile church figure to be dismissed from the priesthood in modern times. The defrocking was announced ahead of next week’s meeting at the Vatican between the heads of national Catholic churches to discuss the global sexual abuse crisis. McCarrick had appealed the decision, but it was upheld and …

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A gay French writer has lifted the lid on what he calls one of the world’s largest gay communities — the Vatican, estimating that most of its prelates are homosexually inclined and attributing much of the current crisis in the Catholic Church to an internecine war among them. In the explosive book, In the Closet of the Vatican, author Frederic Martel describes a gay subculture at the Vatican and calls out the hypocrisy of Catholic bishops and cardinals who in public denounce homosexuality but in private lead double lives. Aside from the subject matter, the book is astonishing for the …

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Spain will elect its third government in less than four years after Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s fragile socialist government acknowledged Friday its support had evaporated and called an early general election. Sanchez’s eight-month-old administration met its end after failing to get parliament’s approval for its 2019 budget proposal earlier this week, adding to the political uncertainty that has dogged Spain in recent years. “Between doing nothing and continuing without a budget, or giving the chance for Spaniards to speak, Spain should continue looking ahead,” Sanchez said in a televised appearance from the Moncloa Palace, the seat of government, after an …

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Sitting in her living room, 65-year-old Tatyana Rybalchenko goes through a stack of black-and-white photos from more than 30 years ago. In one of them, she is dressed in a nurse’s coat and smiles sheepishly at the camera; in another, she shares a laugh with soldiers on a road with a mountain ridge behind them. The pictures don’t show the hardships that Rybalchenko and 20,000 Soviet women like her went through as civilian support staff during the Soviet Union’s 1979-1989 invasion of Afghanistan. Although they did not serve in combat roles, they still experienced the horrors of war. As Russia …

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Pressure is mounting on the British government to decide whether it will repatriate — and prosecute when possible — dozens of the Islamic State group’s surviving British-born recruits, currently held by U.S.-led Kurdish forces in northeast Syria. Britain, like other European countries, has been reluctant to take back IS recruits, whether male fighters or so-called jihadi brides as well as their children. A small number have been repatriated to their countries of origin, but hundreds are awaiting political or legal resolution of their cases as their appeals for help have largely been ignored. The discovery this week in a refugee …

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A prominent figure of the French yellow vests has gone on trial in Paris for allegedly organizing illegal demonstrations, as the movement prepares for a 14th consecutive weekend of protests. Eric Drouet was arrested for organizing demonstrations on Dec. 22 and Jan. 2 in Paris without declaring them to authorities. He acknowledged he didn’t follow the rule, saying Friday he doesn’t consider himself a protest organizer. The Paris prosecutor requested a 500-euro ($563) fine and a one-month suspended prison sentence. The court’s decision will be announced on March 29. Drouet is a known figure of the movement, repeatedly calling for …

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Russia has detained American investor Michael Calvey, the U.S. founder of the Moscow-based Baring Vostok private equity group, on suspicion of fraud. A spokeswoman for Moscow’s Basmanny district court says Calvey was detained along with other members of the firm on Thursday. The court will rule later Friday afternoon on whether to keep them in custody. According to Baring Vostok’s web site, the private equity group holds more than $3.5 billion in committed capital. Prosecutors allege that Calvey, a senior partner who set the fund up in 1994, worked in concert with his colleagues to steal $37.5 million (2.5 billion …

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