Month: October 2021

U.S. President Joe Biden met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Friday, ahead of his meeting with G-20 leaders. Biden said the pope supported his receiving Holy Communion, while some U.S. bishops want to deny him the sacrament over his stance on abortion. With Anita Powell contributing, White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report from Rome. …

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U.S. President Joe Biden launched his whirlwind European diplomatic tour on a conciliatory note, saying Friday that the rollout of a security deal between the United States, Britain and Australia that cut out longtime ally France was “clumsy.” “What happened was, to use an English phrase – what we did was clumsy,” Biden said. “It was not done with a lot of grace,” he acknowledged, next to French President Emanuel Macron in Rome ahead of the G-20 summit. The two spoke to reporters following their meeting which was notably held at Villa Bonaparte, the French Embassy to the Vatican, instead …

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An 18-member group of nations, including the United States and United Kingdom, has expressed “deep concern” over what it calls the Russian government’s “intensifying harassment of independent journalists and media outlets” in the country. In a statement issued on October 28 under the name of the Media Freedom Coalition, was also signed by Ukraine and North Macedonia, along with Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The statement said that “media freedom is vital to the effective functioning of free and open societies and is essential to the …

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Pope Francis issued an urgent appeal Friday to world leaders ahead of the U.N. climate conference to take “radical decisions” to protect the environment and prioritize the common good rather than nationalistic interests. Francis delivered the “Thought for the Day” on the British Broadcasting Corp.’s morning radio program ahead of the Oct. 31-Nov. 13 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland. In the message, Francis urged political leaders not to waste the opportunity created by the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic to change course and chart a future based on a sense of shared responsibility for a common destiny. “It means giving …

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The Belarusian interior ministry on Friday classified three of the country’s most popular opposition social media channels as extremist organizations, meaning that people can face up to seven years in prison for subscribing to them. Social media channels such as Telegram messenger were widely used during mass street protests against President Alexander Lukashenko last year both to coordinate demonstrations and share footage of a violent police crackdown. The NEXTA news outlet, run by a Belarusian exile in Poland, has three channels on Telegram, including NEXTA Live, which has nearly 1 million subscribers in a country of 9.5 million. “The Ministry …

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U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Pope Francis in the Vatican on Friday, in what is branded as a personal and political audience, ahead of the G-20 leaders’ summit in Rome about the global economy, followed by a summit on climate change in Glasgow, Scotland.  The president and first lady Jill Biden were welcomed by the head of Papal Household, Monsignor Leonardo Sapienza. Around noon the first couple had a private audience with the pope before participating in a broader delegate meeting, which on the U.S. side included Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and White …

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Efforts by Chinese diplomats to stop cultural events deemed critical of the government in Beijing have met with mixed results in Europe, succeeding in Germany but being rebuffed by a city government in Italy. The incident in Germany concerned a new book, Xi Jinping — The Most Powerful Man in the World, by two veteran German journalists, Stern magazine’s China correspondent Adrian Geiges, and Die Welt newspaper publisher Stefan Aust. Confucius Institutes at two German universities had planned online events on Oct. 27 to coordinate with the book’s launch. But the book’s publisher, Piper Verlag of Munich, said the events …

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On a sunny afternoon near the hamlet of Bidnija in Malta, a small crowd gathered by the side of a rural road to remember one of the country’s best-known journalists.  It has been four years this October since Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed in a bombing just a short distance from her home.  But despite international attention to the journalist’s death and her work uncovering corruption, little has changed in terms of Malta’s press freedom environment, analysts and local journalists say.  Barriers to access, the use of lawsuits as a form of harassment and an over-reliance on state funding are …

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It is only a matter of time before China’s plan to replace the United States as the world’s preeminent military becomes reality, a top U.S. general warned, calling on the Washington and its allies to speed efforts to counter Beijing’s bid for dominance. General John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Washington’s second-most-senior military officer, called the rapid rise of the Chinese military “stunning.” “The pace they’re moving and the trajectory that they’re on will surpass Russia and the United States if we don’t do something to change it,” he told the Defense Writers Group on …

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