This stunning event is, unfortunately, about 40 years overdue. David Yallop documented these kinds of corruption in his amazing book "In God's Name" in 1984.
Italian cardinal among 10 people charged by Vatican in landmark case
involving embezzlement, money laundering & extortion
3 Jul, 2021 12:52
The Vatican will prosecute 10 individuals, including Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, in a case involving embezzlement and extortion. The indictments are seen as a historic crackdown by Pope Francis on Church-linked crime.
The Holy See announced on Saturday that Becciu and nine others have been ordered to stand trial for alleged crimes stemming from the Vatican's purchase of a luxury property in London, as well as speculative investments that resulted in serious financial losses for the Church.
The cardinal was charged with embezzlement, abuse of office, and subordination. An Italian woman who worked for the senior Church official was also charged with embezzlement.
Among their co-defendants are the former heads of the Vatican's financial intelligence unit, as well as two Italian brokers involved in the shady deal. Charges include extortion, fraud, and money laundering.
Charges were also brought against four companies associated with individual defendants. Two of the firms are located in Switzerland, one in the United States, and one in Slovenia.
The trial will begin on July 27, according to a Vatican press release.
Becciu has now become the highest-ranking Vatican-based Church official to be accused of financial crimes. According to Christopher Lamb, Rome correspondent for the Catholic journal The Tablet, the cardinal’s indictment is without precedent.
“This is the first time a cardinal has been prosecuted in this way, and the decision to charge marks a new, and potentially decisive, step in Pope Francis’ reforms of Vatican finances,” he wrote.
Unless, of course, he ends up like John Paul 1.
As per Church law, the pontiff had to personally approve the decision to indict Becciu. The Italian cardinal has always maintained his innocence during the investigation into the affair, which began in 2019. However, he left a top post in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State last September after allegations of embezzlement surfaced.
The move comes less than a month after the Council of Europe’s top financial watchdog called on the Vatican to ensure transparency in procedures to prosecute senior officials accused of money laundering and other crimes. The Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism noted that the procedure for obtaining papal consent in order to bring legal action against senior clerics is “not fully transparent.”
In April, Pope Francis issued a decree allowing bishops and cardinals working in the Vatican to be judged by a lay tribunal. Before this reform, senior clerics were answerable only to a body of high-ranking Church officials, known as the Court of Cassation.
Former South African President Jacob Zuma resists prison sentence
By Clyde Hughes
Zuma, South Africa's president between 2009 and 2018, says the court's sentence is essentially a death sentence
because of his age, 79, and the coronavirus danger in South Africa. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI
July 6 (UPI) -- Former South African President Jacob Zuma found himself in a legal standoff with the country's Constitutional Court Tuesday after he refused to turn himself over to authorities for failing to appear at a previous corruption hearing.
The court sentenced Zuma to prison (4th story on link) last month when he declined to participate in an inquiry focused on his time in power from 2009 to 2018. He was given 15 months in prison on contempt charges for failing to appear at a required hearing.
Zuma said the court's decision was essentially "sentencing [him] to death" because of his age, 79, and the coronavirus danger in South Africa, according to CNBC.
He filed court challenges to the sentence with the Constitutional Court itself and the Pietermaritzburg High Court.
The high court case will be heard on July 12, but the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture said that court does not have jurisdiction to hear it.
"A high court in this country has inherent jurisdiction and national jurisdiction to enforce court orders, even of other courts, of other provinces, even of other tribunals, such as arbitration and even something that is to be done in a foreign jurisdiction," Zuma's attorney Dali Mpofu told The South African, arguing for the high court's intervention.
The Constitutional Court has ordered the minister of police and justice minister to take "legal steps" to arrest Zuma if he does not turn himself in.
UPDATE: 8 July 2021
South Africa's former president Jacob Zuma, who has been in police detention since Wednesday night as he starts a 15-month prison sentence for contempt, will be eligible for parole after around four months, the justice minister said.
Zuma turned himself in to police to begin his jail term for defying a court order to attend an inquiry into corruption while he was in power from 2009 to 2018.
‘Drunk on the power of his platform’: Former CNN regular
Michael Avenatti sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for extortion
8 Jul, 2021 21:35
in New York City © REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Michael Avenatti, a lawyer best known for representing Stormy Daniels and appearing frequently on CNN, has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison after being found guilty of trying to extort Nike.
Avenatti was convicted last year of trying to extort more than $20 million from the sportswear company, but his new sentence presents only the beginning of his legal troubles. Avenatti is also facing a trial in Los Angeles later this year on charges of fraud – and he’s been charged in New York City with cheating his once-star client, Daniels, out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
At his sentencing on Thursday, Avenatti reportedly wept and said, “I and I alone have destroyed my career, my relationships, my life, and there is no doubt that I deserve to pay, have paid, and will pay a further price for what I have done.”
His misfortune represents quite a fall from grace, as the celebrity lawyer was once a regular on left-leaning networks including CNN in 2018 and 2019, where he would often talk about Daniels’ suit against Trump – she claimed the ex-president once paid her hush money to cover up an affair, which he denies. Hosts would at times talk up the amateur pundit’s potential chances in 2020 running against Trump for Democrats. He appeared on CNN and MSNBC no less than 229 times across a two-year period, according to a Media Research Center analysis.
CNN’s Brian Stelter even called him a “serious” contender against Trump in 2020, long before the lawyer faced his current legal troubles.
Critics were all too happy to celebrate Avenatti’s downfall, and many used the news of his sentencing as an excuse to remind the world just how glowing and fawning Avenatti’s media appearances really were at the height of his anti-Trump fame.
One mashup clip of Avenatti media appearances especially made the rounds following his sentencing. Among the bits in the footage, former ‘The View’ co-star and liberal activist Ava Navarro compares Avenatti to “the Holy Spirit.”
“It was around this time 3 years ago there were serious think-pieces arguing that Avenatti should run for president, on top of the glowing profiles and glossy magazine spreads,” Business Insider’s Grace Panetta tweeted.
Though he reportedly acknowledged through tears that he would never practice law again, Avenatti did leave his future fairly open.
“I still feel positive. I know I can do better. I can be the person I dreamed of being,” he said.
Avenatti was originally charged last year for the attempted Nike extortion. He was retained by a youth basketball league organizer who claimed the company was corruptly paying players. Avenatti took his client’s complaints and accusations and tried threatening Nike with bad publicity in exchange for a massive payout.
US District Judge Paul G. Gardephe called Avenatti’s behavior “outrageous” at the Thursday sentencing, telling Avenatti he had become “drunk on the power of his own platform.”
Rudy Giuliani's DC law license suspended pending outcome
of New York case over his election-fraud claims
8 Jul, 2021 01:44
Fresh from his New York law license being suspended for allegedly false election-fraud claims in support of former President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani has also lost his rights, at least temporarily, to practice in Washington.
A District of Columbia court on Wednesday suspended Giuliani's law license in the nation's capital, pending the outcome of disciplinary proceedings against him in New York. Such suspensions are required in DC when a lawyer faces disciplinary sanctions by another jurisdiction.
A New York court last month suspended the former mayor's license there on accusations that he made “demonstrably false and misleading” claims to “courts, lawmakers and the public at large” while he helped Trump challenge Joe Biden's victory in last November's presidential election.
Giuliani was among the lead lawyers who represented Trump in trying to prove that Biden won the election through massive fraud. The legal challenges were thrown out in federal and state courts, in many cases based on technicalities.
Democrat politicians, such as US Representative Ted Lieu (D-California), were among the lawyers who lobbied for Giuliani to be disbarred and celebrated his New York suspension. The court rebuked him for allegedly inflaming “tensions that bubbled over into the events of January 6, 2021, in this nation's Capitol.”
Giuliani reportedly wasn't permitted to present a case in his defense in the New York proceedings, but he may appeal the ruling. He has said that there was no reason for disciplinary action because the election battle has ended and “he has and will continue to exercise personal discipline to forbear from discussing these matters in public anymore.”
Giuliani also faces defamation lawsuits by voting-system firms Smartmatic and Dominion, which claimed they were damaged by his false claims.
More than half of scientists admit to research misconduct,
landmark survey with 6,800+ participants reveals
8 Jul, 2021 11:11
A major survey conducted across academia in the Netherlands has found that more than a half of scientists admitted to engaging in some type of questionable research practice in their work.
The landmark study was conducted through the Dutch National Survey on Research Integrity, funded by the Dutch government.
The scientists sent out anonymized questionnaires to nearly 63,780 academics working in 22 universities and research centers across the Netherlands. The survey asked about various questionable research practices, ranging from insufficient attention to equipment and the use of unsuitable measurement instruments to improper citations and unfair reviews of manuscripts.
A total of 6,813 respondents fully completed the survey, the results of which were published as a preprint on MetaArXiv this week. The study, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, has found that 51.3% of participants admitted to having often engaged in at least one questionable research practice.
“We find that, across disciplinary fields, one in two researchers engaged frequently in at least one [questionable research practice] over the last three years,” the authors wrote. They added that one in 12 had reported having falsified or fabricated their research at least once during that time.
“Being a PhD candidate or junior researcher increases the odds of any frequent [questionable research practice], as does identifying as male and doing empirical research,” the authors wrote.
Gowri Gopalakrishna, the survey’s leader and an epidemiologist at the Amsterdam University Medical Center, told Science magazine that the guarantee of anonymity to respondents had helped to receive more truthful data.
“That method increases the honesty of the answers,” she said. “So, we have good reason to believe that our outcome is closer to reality than that of previous studies.”
It is, unfortunately, only about 11% of the total number of scientists queried. We can speculate as to the reasons why the remaining 89% did not.
The question I would really like to see answered is whether or not a scientist had the luxury of finding a result that was not in keeping with those who funded the research.
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