Month: February 2019

The day began with an African woman telling an extraordinary gathering of Catholic leaders that her priestly rapist forced her to have three abortions over a dozen years after he started violating her at age 15. It ended with a Colombian cardinal warning them they could all face prison if they let such crimes go unpunished. In between, Pope Francis began charting a new course for the Catholic Church to confront clergy sexual abuse and cover-up, a scandal that has consumed his papacy and threatens the credibility of the Catholic hierarchy at large. Opening a first-ever Vatican summit on preventing …

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Thousands of Slovaks rallied to mark the first anniversary of the killing of an investigative reporter and his fiancee on Thursday and to protest what they see as a lack of government action against the sleaze he wrote about. Crowds gathered in the capital and in dozens of towns at rallies organized by “For a Decent Slovakia” — a group of students and NGOs, who said in a statement that they demanded a proper investigation of the murders and a trustworthy government. “If we want to move forward, we have to know the names of those who ordered this monstrous …

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Balloting has started for next month’s general election in Estonia, an online voting pioneer, amid tight protective measures a day after Microsoft warned that hackers linked to Russia had allegedly targeted democratic institutions in Europe. Kristi Kirsberg, media adviser to Estonia’s electoral committee, said Thursday that the Baltic country — the first in the world to use online balloting for a national election in 2005 — has trained candidates to properly secure their homepages and was closely tracking fake news and disinformation. Apart from educating candidates on cyberthreats, special attention has been given to protecting political parties’ websites, she said. …

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The US military is conducting a surveillance flight over Russia as part of an international agreement, the Pentagon said Thursday. The flight falls under the Open Skies Treaty, an international accord aimed at promoting military transparency through reciprocal, unarmed observation flights over each of the 34 signatory countries’ terrains.   Due to tensions with Russia, this is the first Open Skies flight there since November 2017, Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jamie Davis said. “Russia is aware of the flight,” he said.  “Six Russian Federation observers are on board the US aircraft to monitor all phases of the flight.” The flight, …

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The U.S. Embassy in Moscow on Thursday confirmed that its diplomats have not been granted access to detained U.S. national Michael Calvey a week after the founder of the Baring Vostok investment fund group was detained in the Russian capital. Just hours before the embassy announcement, Russian state prosecutors formally indicted the investor. The U.S. Embassy said in a statement it had asked multiple times to visit Calvey but had not received permission, which it said flouted consular rules between the two countries. “We insist on access now,” the statement said. On Wednesday, the head of a U.S.-Russian trade organization …

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Protesters backing Catalonia’s secession from Spain clashed with police and blocked major roads and train tracks across the northeastern region on Thursday during a strike called to protest the trial of a dozen separatist leaders. Regional police say they made four arrests when they met resistance trying to clear groups of protesters who had stopped traffic. The regional emergency service said that 22 people had been treated for minor injuries.   Twelve officers were also injured in the clashes, according to police. Protesters threw rocks at police lines and burned tires on some highways.   Regional transportation authorities said the …

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Pope Francis’s groundbreaking sex abuse summit coincides with an explosive movie and separate book released in France this week — one on a pedophilia scandal roiling the French church; the other on homosexuality in the priesthood. Francois Ozon’s “Grace à Dieu” — or “By the Grace of God” — got the go-ahead just hours before its release on Wednesday, despite efforts to block it in court. The movie is based on a real scandal still rocking the French Catholic church. It involves priest Bernard Preynat, accused of molesting dozens of boys during the 1980s and ‘90s. The archbishop of Lyon, …

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The British government’s effort to revoke the citizenship of a British-born Islamic State bride, currently held in a refugee camp in northeast Syria, risks being overturned on appeal, say some legal experts. A former top British prosecutor, Nazir Afzal, told VOA he thinks it “likely that this decision will be held to be unlawful.” He says 19-year-old Shamima Begum should be repatriated and placed in a de-radicalization program. “We have excellent experience of de-radicalizing people and often they go on to work in preventing others from being radicalized armed with the unique knowledge of the journey of a radicalized person. …

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Ukraine’s State Security Service SBU accused Russia on Thursday of meddling in the electoral process in Ukraine by creating illegal structures to help guarantee victory for a certain candidate. Ukraine holds a presidential election in late March. Its relations with Russia have been very poor since Moscow annexed the Crimea peninsula in 2014 and started backing armed separatists in eastern Ukraine. SBU deputy head Viktor Kononenko told a news briefing that a group of Russian citizens and their Ukrainian collaborators had used financial bribes to set up a network of people ready to vote for a certain candidate and to …

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The French government will adopt an international organization’s definition of anti-Semitism and propose a law to reduce hate speech from being circulated online, French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday. Macron, speaking at the annual dinner of a Jewish organization, said France and other parts of Europe have seen in recent years “a resurgence of anti-Semitism that is probably unprecedented since World War II.” Macron said applying the working definition of anti-Semitism drawn up by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance would help guide police forces, magistrates and teachers in their daily work. Since the intergovernmental organization approved the wording in 2016, …

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