Month: January 2015

A Spanish judge charged 10 Catholic priests with committing or abetting sexual abuse of a teenage altar boy, court papers showed today, in a case Pope Francis helped bring to light.

Judge Antonio Moreno formally accused 10 priests and two lay people in the southern city of Granada of sexual abuse or complicity in the abuse of the boy from 2004 to 2007.

In terms of the number of suspects, it is the biggest ever paedophilia case to hit the Catholic Church in Spain.

The president of Israel urged the world’s nations to wage an all-out war against genocide saying “the Holocaust of the Jews was not the final chapter in the brutal scheme of man against his fellow man.”

Reuven Rivlin told the UN commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp that evil is not limited to any religion, country or ethnic group and warned that it is wrong and misleading to view Islam, Judaism, or Christianity, as “enemies of the world.”

France’s parliament has officially recognised animals as “living, sentient beings” rather than “furniture”.

After more than a year of often passionate debate, a bill updating the legal status of animals in France was adopted aligning the 200-year civil code with current rural and penal law that already recognised animals “as living and sentient beings.”

When the civil code was drawn up by Napoleon in 1804 animals were considered primarily as working farm beasts, and designated as goods or furniture that could be owned.

Iranian nuclear facility explosion hints at active nuclear weapons program, say experts
A naturalized US citizen was jailed for five years for attempting to help Venezuela build a nuclear weapon by passing on secret information, the US Justice Department said.

Scientist Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni, 79, and his wife Marjorie Roxby Mascheroni, 71, had pleaded guilty after they were caught trying to pass on classified information to an FBI agent posing as a Venezuelan government official.

An eight-year-old boy in France was questioned by police for half after he allegedly made comments in school in praise of terrorists, police said.

The child triggered concern when he refused to take part in a minute’s silence at his school in the southern city of Nice after Islamist gunmen shot dead 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on January 7, according to Marcel Authier, in charge of the region’s public security.

The boy’s teacher said the child also expressed “solidarity” with the gunmen.

French President Francois has called on Turkey to take new steps towards the “truth” behind the mass killings of Armenians a century ago, saying “it is time to break the taboos”.

“The effort towards the truth must continue and I am convinced that this centenary year will see new gestures, new steps on the road to recognition,” Hollande said yesterday at a dinner with Armenian groups in Paris.

Armenia says an estimated 1.5 million people were killed by Ottoman forces during World War I in what it calls a genocide.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said today that Tokyo was analysing the authenticity of a fresh message from Islamic militants threatening to kill Japanese and Jordanian hostages unless an imprisoned jihadist is released.

“We are aware of the new message,” Abe said during a parliamentary session.

“Now, we are verifying (its authenticity), but we will do our best to secure the release of the Japanese national as soon as possible,” he added.

Tokyo is pleading to Amman to help rescue Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, who has been taken hostage by the Islamic State group.

Facing a sharp decline in work force, Shanghai authorities have appealed to “qualified young couples” to have second child as 30 per cent population of China’s biggest business hub will be aged 60 or above by this year’s end, official media reported today.

As the world’s most populous nation struggles to grapple with the surging numbers of the old, the demographic crisis were more pronounced in Shanghai, China’s biggest city with over 21 million people struggling to find work force.